Founders Talk: Startups, CEOs, Leadership

Leading GitLab to IPO

May 10, 2022

Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO of GitLab, discusses their massive IPO and the benefits of staying independent and supporting every hyper cloud. They highlight GitLab's history, open core business model, and advantages of going public. They also explore the challenges and advantages of remote work, the rise of open core companies, and ways to track GitLab's future.

01:10:25

Creator website

Episode guests

Sid Sijbrandij

AI Summary

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

GitLab's successful IPO is a major win for open source and their decision to remain independent allows them to continue supporting multiple hyper clouds.

The shift in DevOps tools has led to the need for all-in-one platforms, and GitLab is at the forefront of this trend with their comprehensive DevOps platform.

GitLab acknowledges the flexibility of remote work and believes in the power of open source, envisioning a hybrid future where software development combines commercial off-the-shelf solutions and open source contributions.

Deep dives

GitLab IPO and Open Source Success

GitLab recently had a successful IPO, with their market cap reaching $15 billion. This accomplishment is seen as a major win for open source and GitLab's co-founder and CEO, Sid Sabranj. The company's decision to remain independent and go public allows them to continue being a good steward of their open source project while providing an independent platform that supports multiple hyper clouds. They aim to be a reliable, all-in-one DevOps platform that simplifies the software development process and offers the same security and productivity regardless of the cloud used.

Introduction

3min

Staying Independent and Supporting Every Hyper Cloud

17min

The History and Benefits of GitLab

7min

GitLab's Open Core Business Model

16min

Benefits of Going Public and Remote First Education

4min

The Advantages and Challenges of Remote Work

7min

The Rise of Open Core Companies

12min

Discussion of the quiet period, primary audience, and platforms for tracking GitLab's future

3min

This week Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO of GitLab, is back talking with Adam about all the details of their massive IPO last October 2021. To set the stage, this episode was recorded on Feb 1, 2022. During the show Adam mentioned they IPO’d at a $13B market cap, but they actually ended their opening day at approximately $15B. That’s a massive win for open source, GitLab, Sid, and the rest of the team. For loyal listeners you know we’ve had Sid on this show before, so of course we had to get him back on the show post-IPO to get all the details of this new journey.

Leave us a comment

Changelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.io
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com.
SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com/video and mention “Go Time” to receive an extra 5,000 video minutes.

Featuring:

Sid Sijbrandij – Twitter, LinkedIn, Website
Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

GitLab’s roadmap

Sid’s appearances on Changelog.com podcasts (in reverse chronological order)

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Get the Snipd
podcast app

Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more