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Then I looked at what was missing. What was missing was you couldn't try out GitLab. You had to install it before even giving it a spin, so that's why I created gitlab.com, so it would be software as a service. I was aware of the success of Salesforce, SaaS was the future. I didn't create it yet, I just made that landi... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. I never heard the story of how it actually began that way. I mean, Dmitriy beginning, and even having a pristine codebase - you're right. Usually, it's somebody tinkering with a new thing, an interest, and the codebase is (as you said) not idiomatic, and not the best patterns, not the b... |
Given the timing of GitLab/GitHub, what do you say to people, especially those who were there in the early days, that look at maybe the interface, and the name, and the mascot..> The similarities. What do you say to them when they say "Well, you're just simply a copy and paste of GitHub"? What do you say to them? |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** GitHub and GitLab share a common ancestor in GitWeb. So GitWeb is the interface that came with Git out of the box. It allowed you to run a simple server. So in my mind, I don't know how the name GitHub came about, but I can imagine that it was inspired by GitWeb. Now, the project already had a name ... |
**Break:** \[23:48\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about where you're going. Let's fast-forward quite a bit, just to sort of tease where we're heading. You're planning to IPO this year; November, if I understand correctly, is that right? |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, that's what we have set as a goal in 2015. I don't think it's likely we'll make that date in November, but we're getting pretty close. We're over 100 million dollars of revenue. We're still growing at a healthy clip. We're unlikely to go public end of this year, but it's getting really close. ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. Over 400 million currently raised, I believe, if I got my numbers correctly. Current valuation - roughly 2.75 billion, which is what I wanna go into... GitHub was acquired a couple years back for 7.5 billion. They were valued at the time for two billion. You're valued now over what they were va... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[28:05\] Well, first of all, it's not always your decision. The majority of the company is owned by investors. It's not my decision, it's a joint decision with the investors, and if someone came about and offered something that's way more than we ever expected, that we can get to in the future, the... |
The reason that we have the ambition to become a public company is because it would allow us to stay independent. If you stay independent, it's more likely that you'll be a good steward of the open source project, and that we'll be able to preserve and further improve our values and the way we live them. That's importa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, also given the fact that you're pretty focused on being transparent, which is to some degree an oddity for a public company. Public companies have to be, by regulation, very transparent with their fiscal reports and things like that, but you're already sort of practicing all the practices that... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Well, yes and no. It's ironic that it's in the name, public company, but apart from the things that they're forced to disclose, they tend to disclose very little outside of that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Exactly, yes. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** If we go public, we'd probably be the most transparent public company. It'd be fun to try that and to kind of push the envelope of what we're disclosing. The more you disclose, the more things people have to sue you over and to cause problems... So it'd be interesting to see how we manage to stay an... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, there's a lot of risk in it. Even doing things like this, once you go public, you're gonna have to be very careful with what you say to someone like me... Even though I'm not a journalist, I'm just a podcaster, but it's written, it's recorded, it's in history, it's stuck, so you have to be ver... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** For sure. But there's kind of rules around that, and the rule for this is material information, so it's fine to talk about how GitLab started as a company. It's not so great to say "Oh yeah, we're over 100 million in revenue. Actually it's (let's do an imaginary number) 650 billion today." Like, wow... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** But I think we can navigate that, and we'll see. We now have over 5,000 pages of our internal processes that are open to the public, and there's gonna be some more disclaimers on there, but we'll see what we'll be able to keep having. It says on our Transparency value that it's not gonna be easy all... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[31:57\] So that's gonna be super-interesting, to see if we have the resiliency to deal with that as a company. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I believe in you, that's for sure. What I wanna get into - you mentioned that it was not just your decision, but your investors and others who make this decision... And I really wanna understand - if GitHub can be acquired for that amount of money, at that same valuation, and given the annoyances yo... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah. Well, first of all, a shout-out to our investors relations person, Tony... Speculating about becoming a public company itself is something that is regulated. And the closer you are to becoming public, the less you can do of it. So the fact that we can talk about it now is only because we're a ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** We don't necessarily wanna cash out the company, a so-called exit. I like to keep going. I'm having fun, it's interesting, we're adding something; I think the people at GitLab are producing great work... And the community is really helping the product become better at a rapid pace. On the 22nd we'll... |
A thing I can talk about is that in 2014, when GitLab was less than nine people, and I was living in the Netherlands, and we never took an external dollar - we got an offer for ten million dollars to sell the company. The company was owned completely by me and Dmitriy at the time. And my accountant said "You should sel... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. \[laughs\] |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Of course, if you think it will be worth much less in the future, you should get out. But the most common reason to get out is it's draining, it's tiring. So that's why we try to not get tired. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Wouldn't you be able to stay though? I mean, if you got acquired, wouldn't you -- I mean, you're the negotiator, you can negotiate your ability to remain as you are. Why would things have to change given an acquisition? |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, generally there's some change, but that doesn't have to change. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** It changes over time. There's a couple factors - who is the acquirer? Some companies are better than others, I think. Microsoft has shown, for example with LinkedIn, they can do a great job of letting the company run by itself. It also changes over time. It tends to be straight after the acquisition... |
But most of the time when a company is acquired there is a strategic benefit. The company is of more value combined with other things than before. For example, what you see with GitHub is they have now all kinds of Azure DevOps functionality, like packages and code spaces. It's now branded as GitHub and shipped as part... |
\[36:07\] During the selling process you probably make a plan for what you're gonna do, but you should expect that to continue. And you might not always agree with it. In the end, it's not your company anymore. Over time there's gonna be more and more things you have to do that you don't agree with. So most founders en... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Personally, you're saying that you like working, you wanna keep working, and any acquisition would possibly change that. Well, not just you, but you know... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah... Well, first of all, the decision whether to sell or to get acquired is not about me. There's a ton of investors, they have the majority of the company. There's also 1,200 team members, so it's not so much about what I want. The only thing is if I wanna stop working on GitLab, there's no supe... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** But whether we sell or not depends on what's best for everyone involved, of the shareholders, as well as the shareholders that are \[unintelligible 00:37:30.20\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's dig into something that makes you quite unique... You're all-remote, and in many cases, especially in today's climate of the world, there's a lot of press out there, a lot of interest in working from home and doing it well, ways to work remotely... And from what I can understand, you've always... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah. I think the only exception has been Y Combinator, where we stayed in Mountain View for three months with the whole company. But other than that, we've never congregated in an office. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So if you've always had this as a thing -- how did you get to all-remote? Was it just by accident, and you stumbled into it, or you sort of developed some values around it, and you were like "Well, this really makes sense for us, because of these reasons..." How did you get there? How did you get to... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, it started with me being in the Netherlands, Dmitriy being in the Ukraine, and our first team member, Marin, being in Serbia. So it wasn't practical to get together. Then I hired a few people in the Netherlands and they came to my house (I had a spare desk) for a couple days... But after that,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** And after Y Combinator, they told us that there's been very few companies that were all-remote successfully, so they advise us to get an office, and especially for the non-engineering functions, centralize them at the office. But after we got an office, the local people stopped showing up after a wh... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's awesome. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** So we're kind of remote because there's just no added value in being in the office. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So they didn't ask for permission... That means that you have a perspective of giving individuals an opportunity to make choices in their position that best-suited themselves, as well as their position and the work they do. They didn't have to ask for permission because you already sort of gave them... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Never explicitly... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:04\] Right. Just through your demeanor. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** They never asked me. But the other people were working remote, so I figured that they didn't think it was a big deal. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** At what point did you begin to develop values around it? You've got a lot of -- like you mentioned, 5,000 pages of written material that describe and help people understand your culture, as well as internals and externals... So how did you get to this point where everything you were doing was docume... |
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