Yeah, having a way to rapidly say no to a lot of otherwise-interesting opportunities is probably valuable to him. And honestly -- getting a 'no' and a clear reason for it is awesome investor behavior compared to the norm. :)
Indeed I was grateful that he passed fast and with a clear explanation. We asked him again when we raised our D-round but that came together to fast to make it work.
In the one conversation I had with him he coined 'the emergent benefits' of a single application https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/single-application... and he said we should call it a Development Operating System (OS). What do other people think of calling it that?
So, full disclosure, I helped create and ran the developer tools group at a large, well-known tech company. This is a space I'm intimately familiar with.
The idea seems pretty straightforward to me and not particularly insightful. Calling it an OS is different from calling it a platform, but effectively it's the same thing. Perhaps more interesting are the implications of that analogy -- do you ship APIs and have a lot of third party people building on top of you like in the Github model or do you go more in the direction of Atlassian? I know that's a bit of a false dichotomy, Atlassian has APIs and Github is clearly trying to extend their toolchain, but in general you have one with a rich ecosystem and the other where you mostly ship what they provide.
For myself, I see GitLab trying to be more of a Github alternative than an Atlassian alternative. I don't know if that's your strategic intent, but that's how it comes across to me. In either case, I think the industry in this space is pretty unexciting in terms of the kinds of innovation that are happening right now. Google still has a toolchain that is a decade ahead of most of us, and I don't see anyone really tackling that head on.
In my view everyone has open APIs and the difference is:
1. GitHub focusses on a marketplace ecosystem (although I hear they will be adding CI soon)
2. Atlassian has a suite of applications that work well together and you can buy as a bundle
3. GitLab is a single application for the whole DevOps lifecycle, one codebase with everything from planning to monitoring, one UI, reliable upgrades, everyone on the same page
You could try on Linux for size, but I don't think it fits.
So either as an analogy it doesn't work, or this idea doesn't scale. :) BeOS is the only OS I've used that I both liked and that had a single design vision behind it. I think that this is most likely an artifact of it not being successful, though. If it had been widely adopted, it would have gone the way of MacOS or Windows.
For me, it’s an interesting thought. Would your audience understand what it means? Are you trying to position GitLab into something more than what it is today.
It would also be equally interesting to test what the term would mean to different people.
For me, I still find it difficult to wrap my head around the original concept of what an OS is. And Development Operating System would mean an OS that is in development. At least based on first impressions.
I am likely to try something similar with saying “DevOps for ML” or “CI for ML”. Will see how that goes.
