People celebrate the Gitlab IPO at the Nasdaq, October 14, 2021.
Source: Nasdaq
On Oct. 9, 2017, GitLab announced a $20 million funding round led by Alphabet’s GV, formerly known as Google Ventures. The news hit just as larger rival GitHub was about to start its annual developer conference.
It was just one instance of the smaller upstart trying to snag attention from its more established rival.
Just over a year earlier, on Sept. 13, 2016, GitLab said it had raised $20 million in a round led by August Capital. GitHub’s developer event, dubbed Universe, kicked off the next morning.
In the market for code collaboration, GitLab grew up in the shadows of GitHub. Both companies were built on top of the open-source software Git, which was started by Linux creator Linus Torvalds as a way for software developers to share code and work together from disparate locations.
GitHub was founded in 2008. Four years later, it raised $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz, a mammoth round in those days. GitLab launched around the time of that financing.
In early 2015, after GitLab wrapped up its three-month stint in the Y Combinator accelerator program, CEO Sid Sijbrandij namechecked GitHub three times in his two-minute presentation at YC Demo Day.
“Our competitor GitHub has 270 employees. GitLab has 800 contributors,” he said, touting his company’s open-source bona fides. “That is why GitHub enterprise has been playing catch-up to our feature set.”
GitHub had little reason to sweat at the time. GitLab only had $1 million in annualized revenue, and GitHub was not only backed by Andreessen but would soon pull in another $250 million in a round led by Sequoia.
However, GitHub’s cultural deficiencies had been exposed by an engineer named Julie Ann Horvath, who tweeted at length in 2014 about sexism in the upper ranks. Although the company continued expanding after some C-suite tweaks, GitLab suddenly had an opportunity to use its distinguishing culture to its advantage.
GitLab was founded as a fully remote company with no headquarters and not a single piece of real estate. All employees across the globe were said to have equal access to information. GitLab has an expansive online handbook, now consisting of over 2,000 web pages, that lays out in detail how the company operates, regarding everything from finance, engineering and marketing to hiring, stock options, compensation and remote work.
Board meetings were held at Sijbrandij’s apartment in San Francisco’s South of Market district.
“We would all be sitting around his kitchen table, and he had a cat that would be in his bedroom meowing to come hang out,” said Dave Munichiello, a partner at GV who became a board observer after leading his company’s investment in 2017.
Eventually, the board fell in line with the rest of GitLab’s operations and went fully remote.
“It was the last aspect of the company to go remote, and our board…
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