GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public

Today, GitLab Inc. announced the next milestone in our journey as we become a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq Global Market (NASDAQ: GTLB). GitLab was the first company to publicly live stream the entire end-to-end listing day at Nasdaq.

In a world where software defines the speed of innovation, every company must become a software company or they’ll be disrupted by a software company. We believe that GitLab, the DevOps Platform, helps companies to deliver software faster and more efficiently, while strengthening security and compliance. And it all happens inside our single platform where engineering, security, and operations teams can collaborate together.

In my Founder’s Letter, which you can read below, I told GitLab’s origin story. GitLab did not start in a tech incubator, garage, or Bay Area apartment. In 2011, my co-founder, Dmitriy Zaporozhets, created GitLab from his house in Ukraine. In 2012, I discovered GitLab from my home in the Netherlands on a tech news site. I thought that it was natural that a collaboration tool for developers was open source so people could contribute to it. As a Ruby developer, I was impressed by GitLab’s code quality, especially since it absorbed more than 300 contributions in the first year. In 2013, Dmitriy tweeted that he would like to work on GitLab full-time. After reading that tweet, I approached him, and we partnered so he could work on GitLab full-time. We incorporated GitLab Inc. in 2014 and applied to Y Combinator, a technology accelerator in Silicon Valley. In 2015, we participated in their program, and this greatly accelerated our business.

To ensure the quality of the GitLab application, Dmitriy built a second application, GitLab CI, to automatically test our code. In 2015, Kamil Trzciński, a member of the wider community, contributed a better version of the GitLab CI application so that it could run jobs in parallel. Dmitriy and I quickly made this new Runner the default version, and Kamil ended up joining the company. Kamil proposed integrating the two applications, which Dimitriy and I initially disagreed with. Thankfully, Kamil persisted in arguing for combining GitLab and GitLab CI into a single application. Dmitriy and I came around to Kamil’s point of view and the results were far better than anyone expected. The single application was easier to understand, faster to use, and enabled collaboration across functions. We had invented what we believed to be the first true DevOps platform and proceeded to build it out.

Today, we believe that GitLab is the leading DevOps platform with an estimated 30 million registered users. GitLab's mission is to ensure that everyone can contribute. When everyone can contribute, users become contributors, and we greatly increase the rate of innovation.

“GitLab also has more than 2,600 contributors in its open source community, which it lists as a competitive strength” - Stephanie Condon, ZDNet*

We are making progress toward our mission by elevating others through knowledge sharing, job access, and our software platform.

GitLab’s values and underlying operational principles are core to our past, present, and future success. Most companies regress to the mean and slow down over time. We plan to maintain our startup ethos by continuing to do the following:

• Reinforcing our values
• Making quick, informed decisions
• Designating a directly responsible individual (DRI) to own decision making for a workstream or initiative
• Organizing informal communications
• Challenging conventions and using boring solutions
• Having a bias for action
• Remembering we are an organization, not a family
• Having time based releases
• Supporting individual innovation through coaches and incubation
• Dogfooding

We believe our approach has an impact on not only our business, but the industry as a whole. And we are not the only ones.

“There are few companies that have had as positive an impact on the culture of an industry as @gitlab has.” - James Wise, Partner, Balderton on Twitter

From day 1, we have co-created with the wider GitLab community, and together we have advanced the DevOps Platform. I am excited to keep building to make GitLab’s “everyone can contribute” mission a reality.

Founder’s Letter from the GitLab S-1

Letter From Our CEO

Origins

GitLab did not start in a tech incubator, garage, or Bay Area apartment. In 2011, my co-founder, Dmitriy Zaporozhets, created GitLab from his house in Ukraine.

In 2012, I discovered GitLab from my home in the Netherlands on a tech news site. I thought that it was natural that a collaboration tool for developers was open source so people could contribute to it. As a Ruby developer, I was impressed by GitLab’s code quality, especially since it absorbed more than 300 contributions in the first year. In 2013, Dmitriy tweeted that he would like to work on GitLab full-time. After reading that tweet, I approached him, and we partnered so he could work on GitLab full-time. We incorporated GitLab in 2014 and applied to Y Combinator, a technology accelerator in Silicon Valley. In 2015, we participated in their program, and this greatly accelerated our business.

DevOps Platform

To ensure the quality of the GitLab application, Dmitriy built a second application, GitLab CI, to automatically test our code. In 2015, Kamil Trzciński, a member of the wider community, contributed a better version of the GitLab CI application so that it could run jobs in parallel. Dmitriy and I quickly made this new Runner the default version, and Kamil ended up joining the company.

When Kamil proposed integrating the two applications, Dimitriy and I initially disagreed with him. Dmitriy felt that the applications were already integrated as well as two separate applications could be. And I believed that customers wanted to mix and match solutions. Thankfully, Kamil persisted in arguing for combining GitLab and GitLab CI into a single application. Dmitriy and I came around to Kamil’s point of view once we realized that combining the two applications would lead to greater efficiency for our team members and our users.

The results were far better than anyone expected. A single application was easier to understand, faster to use, and enabled collaboration across functions. We had invented what we believed to be the first true DevOps platform and proceeded to build it out. Kamil’s advocacy inspired GitLab’s “disagree, commit, and disagree'' sub-value. We allow GitLab team members to question decisions even after they are made. However, team members are required to achieve results on every decision while it stands, even while they are trying to have it changed.

Mission

GitLab's mission is to ensure that everyone can contribute. When everyone can contribute, users become contributors, and we greatly increase the rate of innovation. We are making progress toward our mission by elevating others through knowledge sharing, job access, and our software platform. We promote knowledge sharing through publishing how we operate in our handbook, an online repository of how we run the company that now totals more than 2,000 webpages. The lessons we have learned and put in the handbook are available to anyone with an internet connection. We contribute to job access by helping people with their tech careers and educating the world on remote work best practices. We believe that remote work is spreading job access more evenly across regions and countries. Our software platform brings together development, operations, and security professionals and makes it faster and more secure for them to innovate together.

Stewardship

Most of the time, when a company starts commercializing an open source software project, the wider community around the project shrinks. This has not been the case with GitLab. The wider community around GitLab is still growing. We are proud that GitLab is a co-creation of GitLab team members and users. We have ten stewardship promises that commit us to balancing the need to generate revenue with the needs of the open source project and the wider community. In our first year, we received just over 300 code contributions. Now, we frequently exceed this number in a single month.

Values

From the beginning of GitLab, we have been all-remote as the initial team members lived in the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Serbia. GitLab was founded before remote work was a proven model, so investors were worried about our ability to effectively manage the business and scale. That early skepticism required us to establish explicit mechanisms for value reinforcement. We now have over 20 mechanisms listed in our handbook. Some reinforcements are small. For example, team members have access to a Zoom background that showcases each of our values as icons. Others are more substantial. For example, every team member’s promotion document is structured around our values and shared with the entire company.

GitLab’s values and underlying operational principles are core to our past, present, and future success. These values are:

1. Results - This is the most important value in our values hierarchy as strong results enable us to keep doing the right things. If we have strong business momentum, we can continue to invest toward our ambitious, long-term mission. We care about what is achieved, not the hours worked. Since you get what you measure and reward, we do not encourage long hours and instead focus on results. For example, to discourage team members from focusing on hours worked, team members are discouraged from publicly thanking others for working long hours or late nights. This is intended to prevent pressure to work longer hours or highlighting longer hours as something that is rewarded.
2. Collaboration - Team members must work effectively with others to achieve results. To encourage collaboration, we have about four group conversations per week. These are meetings in which departments at GitLab share their results with team members throughout the company. Group conversations enable all team members to understand and question every part of the business. This access to information and context supports collaboration.
3. Efficiency - Working efficiently enables us to make fast progress, which makes work more fulfilling. For example, we only hold meetings when topics need to be discussed synchronously. When we do have a meeting, we share the discussion topics, the slide deck, and sometimes a recording of someone presenting the slide deck beforehand. This way we can dedicate the synchronous time of the meeting to discussion, not team members presenting material. We also have speedy meetings that are short, start on time, and end at least five minutes before the next one begins. We encourage team members to work together in public chat channels as much as possible instead of through direct messages. This makes information readily available to anyone who is interested or may become interested at a future point.
4. Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) - We believe that team member diversity leads to better decisions and a greater sense of team member belonging. We spend more money than the industry average per hire to ensure we approach a diverse set of candidates. We have a DIB Program which includes Team Member Resource Groups (TMRGs), voluntary, team member-led groups, focused on fostering DIB within GitLab. I'm proud of team member driven initiatives such as mentoring for an advanced software engineering course at Morehouse College, a historically Black liberal arts school. We also do Reverse Ask Me Anything, meetings in which I ask questions of Team Member Resource Groups and get to learn from their experiences. We try to work asynchronously as much as possible to not be dependent on time zone overlap. This enables us to hire and work with people around the world from different cultures and backgrounds.
5. Iteration - By reducing the scope of deliverables, we are able to complete them earlier and get faster feedback. Faster feedback gives us valuable information that guides what we do next. We measure and set targets for how many changes are expected from each engineering team. This encourages teams to reduce the scope of what they build and ship changes in smaller increments. We know that smaller changes are easier to review and less risky. The end result is that we are able to get more done as the higher frequency of changes more than compensates for the smaller size of them. We release features and categories even when they are minimally viable. We do not wait for perfection when we can offer something of value, get feedback, and allow others to contribute to features by refining and expanding upon them.
6. Transparency - By making information public, we can reduce the threshold to contribute and make collaboration easier. In addition to our publicly shared handbook, we also livestream and share recordings of some of our meetings. I have CEO Shadows who attend all my GitLab meetings during a two week rotation. We are public about our strategy, risks, and product direction.

These are living values that are updated over time. In 2020 alone, we made 329 improvements to the GitLab Values page of our handbook.

Still a Startup

Most companies regress to the mean and slow down over time. We plan to maintain our startup ethos by doing the following:

1. Reinforcing our values: We have more than 20 documented ways to reinforce GitLab’s values. Since hiring, bonuses, and promotions provide strong signals of what is valued and rewarded, we make values the lens through which we evaluate team member fit and advancement.
2. Quick and informed decisions: We are able to combine the advantages of consensus organizations and hierarchical organizations by splitting decisions into two phases. In the data gathering phase, we employ the best of consensus organizations as we encourage people to contribute their ideas and opinions. In the decision phase, we benefit from the best of hierarchical organizations with one person, the directly responsible individual, deciding what to do without having to convince the people who made suggestions.
3. A directly responsible individual (DRI): A DRI is a single person who owns decision making authority and responsibility for the success of a given workstream or initiative. We avoid confusion and empower team members by being clear about the DRI. With a few documented exceptions, the person who does the work resulting from the decision gets to make the decision. DRIs tend to have the context required for good decision making and are empowered by their ability to use their own judgement in doing what is best for the business.
4. Organize informal communications: Informal team member communications, such as a chat about life outside of work, are necessary for building trust. Trust is essential for great business results. Many businesses invest heavily in offices and facilities, because they believe offices are necessary for informal communication.

During the pandemic, many businesses that were forced to work remotely discovered that productivity increased. Many of these same businesses are now making plans to return to the office. One reason being given for the return to the office is that not everyone can work from home. We solve this by allowing people to rent work space. The other main reason given is that people miss working from a central office with co-workers. I don’t think that people miss the commute or the office furniture. They miss informal communication. Central offices are a really expensive, inconvenient, and indirect way to facilitate information communication. It is more efficient to directly organize informal communication.

For example, every person who joins GitLab has to schedule at least five coffee chats during their onboarding. We also have social calls, Ask Me Anything meetings with senior leaders, and 15 other explicit ways to encourage employee connections and relationship building. Intentionally organizing informal communication enables the trust-building conversations that are essential for collaboration. This can be more effective than relying on chance encounters in an office building. You can connect with team members throughout the world and across departments through a coffee chat. You may not meet people outside of your own floor in an office setting.

5. Challenge conventions: We do not do things differently for the sake of being different, and we use boring solutions whenever possible. That said, we're also willing to deviate from conventions when it can benefit GitLab and the wider community. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we believe GitLab was the largest all-remote company in the world. We now teach others how to succeed as remote companies and employees. We aim to be the most transparent company of our size. This transparency has had demonstrable benefits ranging from increased team member productivity to enhanced brand awareness. What some saw as a liability, we have shown to be a strength.
6. Bias for action: Decisions should be thoughtful, but delivering fast results requires the fearless acceptance of occasionally making mistakes. Our bias for action may result in the occasional mistake, but it also allows us to course correct quickly. We keep the stakes low for mistakes for the sake of transparency. When people are comfortable communicating missteps, risk aversion and secrecy don’t become the norm.
7. Not a family: Some companies talk about being a 'Family.' We don't think that is the right perspective. At GitLab, the relationship is not the end goal. The goal is results. We are clear about accountability and hold people to a clearly articulated standard. When people do not perform, we try to help them improve. If they still can’t meet expectations, we let them go.
8. Time based release: We have introduced a new, enhanced version of our software on the 22nd of every month for over nine years. A time based release ensures that when a feature is ready, its release will not be held up by another that is not. Aligned with our value of iteration, we try to reduce the scope of each feature so that it fits in a single release.
9. Individual innovation: We empower individuals to innovate. For example, we have designated coaches who support contributors from the wider community in getting their contributions to the point where they can be merged by GitLab. We also have an incubation department dedicated to quickly turning ideas into viable features and products.
10. Dogfooding: The best way to quickly improve GitLab is to use it ourselves, or dogfood it, so that we have a quick feedback loop. We use our own product even when a feature is in its early stages of development. This helps us to develop empathy with users and better understand what to build next.

Long-Term Focus

More than 40 million software professionals are driving change through software, and this number is growing. These software professionals are rapidly adopting DevOps to accelerate this change. Gartner predicts that by 2023, 40% of organizations will have switched from multiple point solutions to DevOps value stream delivery platforms to streamline application delivery, versus less than 10% in 2020. I believe that 40% is just the beginning, and almost all organizations will eventually use a DevOps Platform. GitLab has a unique opportunity to lead the DevOps Platform market and shape innovation. With a large addressable market, GitLab plans to optimize for long term growth--even if it comes at the expense of short-term profitability. This means that we may not make a profit for a long time as we need to weigh profitability against the clear opportunity to pursue larger, future returns.

Closing

With the wider GitLab community, we have created and advanced the DevOps Platform. I am excited to keep building to make GitLab’s “everyone can contribute” mission a reality. I look forward to welcoming investors who share our enthusiasm for collaboration and innovation.

• 2,600 contributors as of July 31, 2021