Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab | | GitLab Commit 2020
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2020-01-14

Sid Sijbrandij, Co-Founder and CEO, GitLab | @sytses sits down with Stu Miniman at GitLab Commit 2020 in San Francisco, CA.

https://siliconangle.com/2020/01/20/ow-gitlab-parlayed-an-unusual-approach-to-collaboration-software-into-a-multibillion-dollar-business-gitlabcommit-guestoftheweek/

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.