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- Lucas: If I told you in 2011 that a startup with no offices and no physical headquarters could go public ten years later valued at fifteen billion dollars, you would have laughed at me. Luna: I probably would have. In 2011, remote work was something freelance designers did, not serious software companies. Lucas: Exactly. And yet that is exactly what GitLab did. The company was founded in that year by Sid Sijbrandij and Dmitriy Zaporozhets, and from day one it was fully remote. No exceptions. No hybrid. No 'we'll open an office when we grow.' Luna: And at the time that was genuinely radical. Most startups were still copying the open floor plan of Facebook or the campus culture of Google. Lucas: Right. But Sijbrandij had a thesis. He believed that if you could make remote work actually work, you would get access to the best talent anywhere in the world, not just within commuting distance of Silicon Valley. And you would force yourself to be better at communication because you couldn't rely on hallway conversations. Luna: So the bet was less about flexibility and more about competitive advantage. Lucas: Exactly. And the thing that made GitLab's bet different from other remote-friendly companies at the time — companies like Basecamp or Automattic — was the sheer scale and speed of growth. GitLab went from zero to over a thousand employees in about eight years, and they did it all without ever sitting in the same room. Luna: How did that not fall apart? I mean, onboarding a thousand people who have never met each other, no shared context, no water-cooler moments. Lucas: The answer is — and this sounds almost too simple — they wrote everything down. I mean everything. GitLab maintains a public company handbook that is over ten thousand pages long. It covers everything from how to set up your laptop to how the CEO thinks about strategy. Luna: Ten thousand pages? That is a novel series, not a handbook. Lucas: It is. But the philosophy is that any decision, any process, any meeting note that isn't written down might as well not exist. Because if you're in an office, you can ask the person next to you. If you're distributed across thirty time zones, the document is your colleague. Luna: And that is the asynchronous work model. You don't need everyone to be online at the same time. Lucas: Right. GitLab actively discourages synchronous communication. They say: default to writing, not talking. If you want to have a meeting, you have to write an agenda document first. If someone can't attend, they review the recording and the notes. The assumption is that everyone's time is equally valuable, and nobody should have to stay up until midnight to join a call. Luna: That is a very different culture from the 'hustle 24/7' startup stereotype. Lucas: Completely different. And it's backed up by a specific tool that GitLab built for itself: the issue tracker. Every conversation, every decision, every piece of feedback happens in a GitLab issue, which is essentially a shared document with comments. That way, the entire history is preserved and searchable. Luna: So the company's memory is institutionalized. It doesn't depend on what people remember. Lucas: Exactly. And that turned out to be a massive advantage when the pandemic hit in 2020. Suddenly every company was scrambling to figure out remote work. GitLab had been doing it for nine years. They published a remote work playbook that got downloaded millions of times. Their own internal processes barely changed. Luna: But here's the thing I wonder about. Now that everyone has had a taste of remote work, and the hype has faded a bit — we're seeing companies like Amazon and Google calling people back to the office — is GitLab's model still a differentiator, or is it just one option among many? Lucas: That is the million-dollar question. And the data is mixed. GitLab's stock, which went public under the ticker G-T-L-B in October 2021, has been volatile. Revenue is growing year-over-year, but the company is still not profitable on a GAAP basis. Luna: But that's not unique to GitLab. Many high-growth SaaS companies are in that position. Lucas: True. But the challenge GitLab faces now is that remote work is no longer a unique selling point for talent. In 2015, if you wanted to work from home, GitLab was one of the few places you could do that. Now, most tech companies offer some form of remote flexibility. So the talent arbitrage is gone. Luna: So what's the new moat? What keeps people at GitLab? Lucas: Sijbrandij argues that it's the transparency and the documentation. He says that a new hire at GitLab can become productive faster than at any other company because everything they need to know is already written down. There's no secret knowledge locked in someone's head. Luna: And that's a culture that's hard to copy. You can't just decide to become a documentation-obsessed company overnight. It takes years of habit. Lucas: Exactly. And GitLab has also built a strong open-source community around its DevOps platform. The product itself — GitLab, the software — is used by millions of developers. The company offers a free tier, and then sells premium features. That creates a funnel that doesn't depend on salespeople knocking on doors. Luna: So the remote culture and the open-source strategy reinforce each other. Lucas: They do. The community contributes code, files bug reports, writes documentation — all asynchronously, all in the open. It's like having thousands of unpaid employees who genuinely want the product to be better. Luna: I want to go back to something you said earlier about the handbook. Ten thousand pages. How does a new employee even know where to start? Lucas: It's a fair question. GitLab has a structured onboarding process. Every new hire gets a checklist in the handbook that says: read these five pages first. Then these ten. Then these twenty. The expectation is not that you read the whole thing, but that you know where to find answers. Luna: So it's more like a reference library than a training manual. Lucas: Exactly. And crucially, the handbook is not static. Anyone can submit a merge request to change it. If you find a policy that doesn't make sense, you propose a fix. That's how the culture evolves while staying transparent. Luna: That's a powerful model. It's democratic in a way that most companies aren't. Lucas: It is. And it's also a check on managerial power. If your decision has to be written down in a public document, you're less likely to make capricious choices. Luna: Speaking of public documents — one thing I've always admired about GitLab is how transparent they are about their own metrics. They publish their revenue, their customer counts, even their employee engagement scores. Lucas: That's part of the same philosophy. They call it 'radical transparency.' The idea is that if you trust your team with the truth, they'll make better decisions. And if you trust the market with the truth, you build long-term credibility. Luna: But there's a downside too. Competitors can see exactly where you're weak. Lucas: True. Sijbrandij has acknowledged that. He says it's a calculated risk. GitLab believes that the benefits of transparency — faster decisions, better alignment, stronger culture — outweigh the competitive cost. Luna: I think that's a bet that only works if you're genuinely committed to it. A half-transparent company would just look confused. Lucas: Exactly. And GitLab has been remarkably consistent. They've been doing this since they had ten employees. It's not a PR stunt. It's how they operate. Luna: Let's talk about the IPO itself. What was that moment like for the company? Going from a fully remote startup to a public company with all the regulatory demands. Lucas: It's interesting because the IPO process forced them to do a lot of things that go against their remote culture. Roadshows, for example — you have to meet institutional investors in person. Sijbrandij traveled extensively during that period. But the company itself remained remote. They didn't open a fancy new headquarters to impress Wall Street. Luna: So they stayed true to the model even when it might have been easier to compromise. Lucas: They did. And the market rewarded them. The IPO priced at seventy-seven dollars a share, and on the first day it jumped to over a hundred. The company was valued at roughly fifteen billion dollars. Luna: That's an incredible outcome for a company that started with no office and no plan to ever have one. Lucas: It is. And it's worth noting that GitLab's success has inspired a whole generation of startups to go remote-first from day one. You see it now in companies like Zapier, Doist, and many others. Luna: But GitLab was the proof of concept. They showed it could scale. Lucas: They did. And I think their story holds a lesson that goes beyond remote work: if you're going to make a contrarian bet, build systems that make that bet work at scale. Don't just hope it will work. Engineer it. Luna: That's a good way to put it. And it's something I think about a lot in my own work. The systems matter more than the intentions. Lucas: Yeah. And that's part of why we keep having these conversations. We want to understand how those systems are built, not just the outcomes. Luna: Quick honest thing — a handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what funds making this many episodes. No ads, no sponsors. Just people who find value in the show. Lucas: It's true. And it keeps us free to pick the stories we think matter, not the ones an advertiser wants. So if these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, that link is there. No pressure. Luna: Alright, back to GitLab. So given what we know now, what do you think the next chapter looks like for them? Lucas: I think the big question is whether they can become the default DevOps platform for enterprises. They compete with Microsoft's GitHub, which has a massive head start in terms of user base. But GitLab has a more integrated product — one application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, rather than stitching together multiple tools. Luna: And that integration is a selling point, especially for large organizations that want to simplify their tech stack. Lucas: Exactly. If GitLab can win that argument, the remote model will be remembered as the foundation that made it possible — not because they worked from home, but because they built a culture of documentation and transparency that scaled. Luna: That's a legacy worth building. And I think it's a story that will be studied in business schools for years. Lucas: I agree. GitLab proved that the default way of building a company — offices, face time, synchronous everything — is not the only way. And maybe not even the best way, depending on what you're trying to build.