However that link points to Github taking $350M, and they had been around for a few years before they took their first VC $. Until September, Gitlab had been pretty light on the funding, relatively speaking. (about $150M total, and that's after a $100M round in September)

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com#section-f...

That's an odd thing to say. Most companies that take investment aren't profitable- that's kind of the point of taking VC: you want the cash in order to greatly grow the business more than if you were sitting within profitability the entire time. There's a difference between "unprofitable" and "choosing not to be profitable".

What's more, GitHub wasn't profitable the last ~5 years or so, from the day they took VC. But they sold for $7.5B, so it doesn't seem that Microsoft has a problem with their "unprofitability". That's how many solid, foundational companies are created.

We now know what GitHub was worth, and it puts the lie to inflated valuations in this space. When $8Bn is a huge deal for your industry, it gets hard to sell higher valuations with a straight face.

GitHub makes most of its revenue from the self-hosted market. GitLab is burning this market to the ground.

GL Ultimate pricing is $99 /user/mo [2]

[1] https://github.com/pricing/enterprise [2] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed

To your broader point, I expect both extreme butt-in-seats and extreme remote are one of those characteristics you can map to successful and unsuccessful companies and you can probably find just about any pattern you want to find. (And of course most companies are some sort of blended model depending on company and function.)

    > Also, what is "success"? Taking $350MM in investment and not showing profitability