GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public

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Published on: October 14, 2021
Today is the day GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public.
Today, GitLab Inc. announced the next milestone in our journey as we become a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq Global Market (NASDAQ: GTLB). GitLab was the first company to publicly live stream the entire end-to-end listing day at Nasdaq.
In a world where software defines the speed of innovation, every company must become a software company or they’ll be disrupted by a software company. We believe that GitLab, the DevOps Platform, helps companies to deliver software faster and more efficiently, while strengthening security and compliance. And it all happens inside our single platform where engineering, security, and operations teams can collaborate together.
In my Founder’s Letter, which you can read below, I told GitLab’s origin story. GitLab did not start in a tech incubator, garage, or Bay Area apartment. In 2011, my co-founder, Dmitriy Zaporozhets, created GitLab from his house in Ukraine. In 2012, I discovered GitLab from my home in the Netherlands on a tech news site. I thought that it was natural that a collaboration tool for developers was open source so people could contribute to it. As a Ruby developer, I was impressed by GitLab’s code quality, especially since it absorbed more than 300 contributions in the first year. In 2013, Dmitriy tweeted that he would like to work on GitLab full-time. After reading that tweet, I approached him, and we partnered so he could work on GitLab full-time. We incorporated GitLab Inc. in 2014 and applied to Y Combinator, a technology accelerator in Silicon Valley. In 2015, we participated in their program, and this greatly accelerated our business.
To ensure the quality of the GitLab application, Dmitriy built a second application, GitLab CI, to automatically test our code. In 2015, Kamil Trzciński, a member of the wider community, contributed a better version of the GitLab CI application so that it could run jobs in parallel. Dmitriy and I quickly made this new Runner the default version, and Kamil ended up joining the company. Kamil proposed integrating the two applications, which Dimitriy and I initially disagreed with. Thankfully, Kamil persisted in arguing for combining GitLab and GitLab CI into a single application. Dmitriy and I came around to Kamil’s point of view and the results were far better than anyone expected. The single application was easier to understand, faster to use, and enabled collaboration across functions. We had invented what we believed to be the first true DevOps platform and proceeded to build it out.
Today, we believe that GitLab is the leading DevOps platform with an estimated 30 million registered users. GitLab's mission is to ensure that everyone can contribute. When everyone can contribute, users become contributors, and we greatly increase the rate of innovation.
“GitLab also has more than 2,600 contributors in its open source community, which it lists as a competitive strength” - Stephanie Condon, ZDNet*
We are making progress toward our mission by elevating others through knowledge sharing, job access, and our software platform.
GitLab’s values and underlying operational principles are core to our past, present, and future success. Most companies regress to the mean and slow down over time. We plan to maintain our startup ethos by continuing to do the following:
We believe our approach has an impact on not only our business, but the industry as a whole. And we are not the only ones.
“There are few companies that have had as positive an impact on the culture of an industry as @gitlab has.” - James Wise, Partner, Balderton on Twitter
From day 1, we have co-created with the wider GitLab community, and together we have advanced the DevOps Platform. I am excited to keep building to make GitLab’s “everyone can contribute” mission a reality.
GitLab did not start in a tech incubator, garage, or Bay Area apartment. In 2011, my co-founder, Dmitriy Zaporozhets, created GitLab from his house in Ukraine.
In 2012, I discovered GitLab from my home in the Netherlands on a tech news site. I thought that it was natural that a collaboration tool for developers was open source so people could contribute to it. As a Ruby developer, I was impressed by GitLab’s code quality, especially since it absorbed more than 300 contributions in the first year. In 2013, Dmitriy tweeted that he would like to work on GitLab full-time. After reading that tweet, I approached him, and we partnered so he could work on GitLab full-time. We incorporated GitLab in 2014 and applied to Y Combinator, a technology accelerator in Silicon Valley. In 2015, we participated in their program, and this greatly accelerated our business.
To ensure the quality of the GitLab application, Dmitriy built a second application, GitLab CI, to automatically test our code. In 2015, Kamil Trzciński, a member of the wider community, contributed a better version of the GitLab CI application so that it could run jobs in parallel. Dmitriy and I quickly made this new Runner the default version, and Kamil ended up joining the company.
When Kamil proposed integrating the two applications, Dimitriy and I initially disagreed with him. Dmitriy felt that the applications were already integrated as well as two separate applications could be. And I believed that customers wanted to mix and match solutions. Thankfully, Kamil persisted in arguing for combining GitLab and GitLab CI into a single application. Dmitriy and I came around to Kamil’s point of view once we realized that combining the two applications would lead to greater efficiency for our team members and our users.
The results were far better than anyone expected. A single application was easier to understand, faster to use, and enable