UPDATED 15:32 EDT / JANUARY 20 2020

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How GitLab parlayed an unusual approach to collaboration software into a multibillion-dollar business

In 2011, the co-creator of GitLab Inc.Dmitriy Zaporozhets, found himself working for a software company in the Ukraine, and he had a choice to make: Bring running water to his home and avoid daily trips to the communal well, or create a collaboration tool to make the lives of software developers easier.

He chose the latter, and though there is no firm evidence the water problem was ever resolved, Zaporozhets’ decision resulted in a global DevOps lifecycle company with more than 1,100 employees, customers such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., a valuation of nearly $3 billion and plans for an initial public offering, likely later this year.

“He started with what he perceived as the most important problem to solve,” said Sid Sijbrandij (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of GitLab. “So, he built GitLab to have better collaboration software.”

Sijbrandij spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the GitLab Commit event in San Francisco. They discussed key business decisions that Sijbrandij and his team made in the early days, the company’s contribution to cycle time for developers, plans for a potential public offering and the value of working remotely.

This week, theCUBE features Sid Sijbrandij as its Guest of the Week.

Tools for greater efficiency

The rise of GitLab as an important player in the developer collaboration ecosystem is a story of how a Ukrainian (Zaporozhets) and a Dutchman (Sijbrandij) came together to form a business as an alternative to the code repository GitHub. The launch of GitLab is also a tale of how a crucial decision on tool efficiency and gaining entry to a prestigious startup program ultimately propelled the company and the DevOps world.

By November 2012, Zaporozhets had created the first version of GitLab CI, a continuous integration tool designed to integrate code created by developers into a shared repository. Although GitHub provided a similar interface, GitLab’s founders were frustrated by having to beg for allotting repository, and a firewall edition would have cost them $5,000 for 20 users, according to a posted history of the company.

Zaporozhets and Sijbrandij had also created GitLab version control as a separate project, with both the control and CI operated independently. When Kamil Trzciński, now a distinguished engineer at GitLab, joined the fledgling company, he offered a then radical proposal to combine the two. The idea was initially resisted by the two co-founders, but eventually they realized that Trzciński was right.

“Everything in a DevOps tooling place was a point solution; people wanted to mix and match,” Sijbrandij recalled. “We realized we’d be able to ship at a faster rate if we combined them, and that was important to us because we’re all about efficiency. People reported it was so much easier having everything in a single interface, and that’s how we stumbled across this secret.”

Boost from Y Combinator

GitLab’s secret was that it had found a better way to continuously deliver code and help launch enterprise continuous integration/continuous delivery or CI/CD releases while appealing to developers weary of tool sprawl and system complexity. By creating a single application, GitLab brought in key tools, such as auto-remediation, to detect and fix vulnerabilities in a code base and deliver it safely into a production environment.

On its own website, GitLab noted that other code repositories have followed its streamlined tool model since 2015. Bitbucket combined its Pipelines functionality into a single application, and GitHub’s Actions was built into a single offering in 2018.

GitLab’s biggest break may have been its acceptance into the legendary Y Combinator startup accelerator program in 2015. The seed program, which has an acceptance rate of 1.5%, was responsible for launching companies such as Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, PagerDuty, Docker and Dropbox.

Y Combinator required that the entire founding team live in Silicon Valley during the three-month program, so GitLab’s group of nine employees packed up and moved into one small Bay Area apartment. When a potential large customer requested a meeting in Los Angeles, 400 miles away, the entire group piled into a large car they had nicknamed “The Boat” for the seven-hour drive.

The Y Combinator experience was instrumental in launching GitLab on its way to unicorn status. The company went from 100,000 to 250,000 downloads in one month, and it raised an initial round of funding. Perhaps more significantly, the firm began to acquire customers as businesses started to grasp the importance of DevOps and cycle time in software development.

“That time between planning to do something and getting it out to users, that’s where companies need to become software companies,” Sijbrandij said. “They’re seeing that they’re able to do that faster with GitLab.”

Focus on channels and IPO

GitLab clearly plans to capitalize on its place in the DevOps enterprise world. After GitHub was acquired by Microsoft Corp. for $7.5 billion in 2018, GitLab has embarked on a process to expand the partner base and train collaborators in building full stack DevOps practices.

The company recently recruited its first channel chief, Michelle Hodges, whose previous experience included channel leadership roles with Intel Corp., Microsoft and VMware Inc. The goal will be to convert the 100,000 organizations that rely on GitLab’s open-source technology into commercial customers.

GitLab also used the occasion of its Commit gathering in San Francisco last week to announce the hiring of a new chief legal officer and corporate secretary amid speculation that the company will go public later this year.

Sijbrandij took the unusual step of announcing to the world in 2018 that he would take his company public on Nov. 18, 2020. He was less specific about these plans in a recent interview, yet he remained convinced that the move makee sense for both branding and transparency.

“One of the big things holding GitLab back is we’re not as well known,” Sijbrandij explained. “Becoming a public company will help spread awareness about what we can do. We don’t mind sharing what we’re about and what our financials are.”

Indeed, GitLab has taken a culture of open collaboration and brought it to a radically new level. Sijbrandij provides time-noted documentation of his daily actions on the company website, and much of GitLab’s ongoing operations are posted in open links as well.

Don’t bother stopping by GitLab’s offices anytime soon, because there aren’t any. The company may well be the largest remote work business in the world where all 1,100-plus employees contribute from home.

The firm actually tried to set up a formal office in San Francisco after graduating from Y Combinator. People came in for a while; then they stopped showing up all together, according to Sijbrandij. Since then, GitLab has relied on a combination of Slack channels, video calls, Google Docs, an extensive handbook and various company-developed tools to manage its multibillion-dollar business.

“We’re figuring out a lot of things you have to do to be all remote, and we’re trying to share those lessons,” Sijbrandij said. “If you Google ‘GitLab all remote,’ you’ll find tons of tips. Those are based not just on what we say, but what we do.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of GitLab Commit:

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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