How GitLab scaled to 30M users with transparency, remote work, and the ultimate employee handbook | Sid Sijbrandij

**Sid Sijbrandij** (0:00)
One thing we've done is to re-enforce our values in as many ways as possible. Many companies say that their values are really important to them. But then you ask, like, how many ways do you have to re-enforce them? At GitLab, we have 22 ways to re-enforce our values. From really essential ones, like how we hire, how we give performance bonuses, to really trivial ones, that the songs in the GitLab songbook and the songbooks' songbook reference our values a lot.

**Eric Ries** (0:30)
Today on The Eric Ries Show, I sit down with Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder of GitLab. If you're a programmer, you know them already, and if not, ask a developer. They are a DevOps platform used by over 30 million people, and yet another incredible overnight success many years in the making. Sid is one of the most original thinkers in the technology industry. Before building a public company, his career began in one of the most unexpected places, building submarines in the Netherlands. From there, he taught himself to code and eventually joined forces with GitLab's open source creator to build something radically different. In this conversation, Sid opens up about how GitLab maintains its unconventional ethos. Things like radical transparency, remote work from before the pandemic, and open source collaboration. You'll hear the whole story from a hacker news side project through his successful IPO, about the many acquisition offers he turned down, how they built the company in this unusual way, and most importantly, how a 2,000-page public handbook has become their superpower for scaling trust, alignment, and decentralized decision-making. The handbook is such a great example of what I've called in these episodes, a leader's guide, a way to institutionalize the intention behind a company's ethos. This is one of the best examples you'll ever see. If you care about building enduring companies with values that actually hold up under pressure, this episode is not to be missed. Here's my conversation with Sid Sijbrandij. Thank you so much, Sid, for doing this.

**Sid Sijbrandij** (2:06)
You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

**Eric Ries** (2:09)
I've wanted to have this conversation for a long time. Our recent people who have been following the podcast know we just did an episode with Matt Mullenweg.
When I asked him who was the number one person we should talk to, your name was the very first one that he talked about. He said that so many of the things that they pioneered at WordPress, he felt like you had taken... I don't even think he said to the next level, but he used a more extreme adjective than that, like really taking it really far that he was really proud of what you had done. I got me really hyped for this conversation.

**Sid Sijbrandij** (2:39)
Yeah, for sure.
He's been a big inspiration in the way he kept all the code open source and the way he built a completely remote company. We're really amazing and really inspirational to us.

**Eric Ries** (2:50)
So let's start with your background and just how did GitLab come to be?

**Sid Sijbrandij** (2:56)
Started in 2011 My co-founder, what later turned out to be my co-founder, Dimitri, had a need for GitLab himself, and his company wouldn't pay for anything. So he said, well, how hard can it be? I'll just make it myself. And in that first year, 300 people contributed to it. He published it online, and people started using it and gave back to it. I saw it a year later. I thought, this is awesome. Did a show, Hacker News, and said, hey, if you don't want to download GitLab, just want to use it as a service, I'll make a place for that. Are people interested? And it didn't trend, and I was very sad. And then went on to bake pancakes. And then I checked my phone one more time, and I said to my wife, oh my goodness, I'm number one on the Hacker News homepage. I got to go upstairs and go talk to people. 300 people signed up for the beta, and we launched a couple of months later, and we got amazing demand. Except people didn't want to pay us for hosting GitLab, but they did host GitLab themselves. And these were like Fortune One companies doing that. And I started catering to that, and a year later, I hired Dimitri, and we formed a company together.

**Eric Ries** (4:15)
So what did GitLab do in those days? Like, what was the MVP for GitLab?

**Sid Sijbrandij** (4:19)
The MVP was making sure you could do source control on source code. With Git, there was a new revolutionary technology for that, and GitLab was a way to have a web interface to that. And software rules everything around us, and it's super important to be able to contribute to that, to suggest a change, to review those. Over time, it added more and more functionality, where today, GitLab is a DevOps platform. You can go all the way from planning what you want to build, build it, check it, make sure it's secure, deploy it, monitor what you've done, and do that entire software improvement loop all within one application.