Comment by passive

I've built a developer platform around GitLab, and it's got some nice stuff, but it's not revolutionary.

But that's not all that relevant to the opportunity in front of them.

The opportunity, generally, exists because of their place in an industry that most folk believe will be very different a decade from now.

That belief is going to lead a lot of CTOs to try new things. When a company tries something new, it almost always picks a new vendor to work with, rather than adding complexity or risk to an existing vendor engagement.

Yes, there are other alternatives, but they are less well known, require self hosting, and/or are secondary products of companies with very broad focus.

Atlassian might be another, given how much of the rest of the software development cycle they have their hooks in, but many tech leaders have unresolved JIRA trauma. :)