![]() ![]() ![]() Startups that raise a private financing before a direct listing, they note, might bring in comparable sums of cash for smaller pieces of their company. Like Snowflake’s CEO Frank Slootman and others before him, Sijbrandij wasn’t swayed by such arguments. GitLab’s CEO says he preferred to select investors through a traditional IPO roadshow. “It’s great there’s so many options available to companies,” he says. “There’s a lot more possibilities available to entrepreneurs. I think there’s good reasons for each … we’re really happy with the route, and happy with the investors we’ve been able to attract.” So I encourage everyone to do their due diligence and talk to a few companies that when through the different processes. Perhaps an even bigger factor for GitLab: as a DevOps business, the company and its leader wanted as much exposure as they could get. GitLab’s spent aggressively on sales and marketing in recent quarters relative to its revenue, and Sijbrandij noted repeatedly that being public would help raise GitLab’s awareness and profile with potential customers, partners and investors. The company was the first-ever on Nasdaq to livestream its entire IPO day, with about 18,000 people stopping by over the course of the broadcast, it says.Ī former submarine company employee and web project manager for the Dutch Ministry of Justice, Sijbrandij launched GitLab in 2012 as a business built on top of an open source project created by Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov. Zaporozhets joined a year later as cofounder and CTO (Sizov followed in 2014). GitLab (the company) would sell subscriptions to software tools to help manage projects built on that tech, charging for what became a suite of 10 distinct tools for different stages in an app’s lifecycle. That’s meant GitLab has competed with a variety of offerings from other companies, including, unsurprisingly from the name, Microsoft subsidiary GitHub, but also infrastructure players and security specialists. “A couple of years ago when we introduced security, we saw a lot of revenue coming from it and we interviewed those people, ‘why did you buy this?”” Sijbrandij says. The tool wasn’t as good as others yet, GitLab heard back. But customers would find the vulnerabilities faster within GitLab buying everything from one vendor was simpler enough that they trusted GitLab to catch up over time. “That’s been a great accelerant of our growth,” Sijbrandij says.Īlong the way, Sijbrandij also became known as one of remote work’s leading evangelists, advocating a no-hybrid, radically transparent office culture he says is fairer and more productive. ![]()
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