Latest / Startup Stories with Fexingo: Conversations About Founders, Funding, and Building Companies from Zero / How GitLab Built a Remote-First Billion Dollar Company
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this company that's been public for almost five years now, but I still think it's one of the most misunderstood business models out there. GitLab. You know, the DevOps platform. Luna: Yeah, it's that open-source tool a lot of engineering teams use. But they're also a public company, right? Over a billion in revenue? Lucas: Just shy of nine hundred million in 2025 — eight hundred and ninety, to be precise. Growing about thirty percent year-over-year. But the really unusual thing isn't the product, it's how they built the company. GitLab has no headquarters. No physical office. Two thousand employees spread across sixty-five countries, and they've been fully remote since day one. Luna: That's not that unusual anymore, though. Lots of companies went remote during the pandemic. But most of them were forced into it. GitLab was designed that way from the beginning. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the difference. Most companies that claim to be remote today still have a headquarters, or they do offsites, or they have at least some kind of anchor office. GitLab's CEO, Sid Sijbrandij, has never wanted one. The company was incorporated in the U.S. but Sijbrandij himself lives in the Netherlands. And the entire operating system of the company is built around that assumption. Lucas: And, before we go deeper — you know, if these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, we want to keep them coming without shoving ads in your ears. We deliberately don't run ads on these. If you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a straightforward way to keep this ad-free. We appreciate it. Lucas: So, back to GitLab. The most distinctive thing about their culture is something they call 'handbook-first.' Every decision, every process, every policy is documented in a publicly available handbook on GitLab's own platform. When you join the company, your onboarding is basically reading the handbook. And when there's a disagreement, they don't rely on a meeting — they rely on a merge request. Luna: A merge request — like changing a document and asking for approval. That's literally how they make decisions? Lucas: Yes. Someone proposes a change to the handbook. Other people comment. The CEO or the relevant team lead reviews it. And then it gets merged. That's the decision. There's no Slack thread, no hallway conversation, no 'let's grab lunch and talk it over.' Everything is written and asynchronous. Luna: That sounds incredibly slow for urgent things. Lucas: They'd argue the opposite — that it's faster in the long run because you don't have to re-explain things. Every decision is recorded, so anyone can look it up. And they've been doing this since 2015, long before remote work was mainstream. It's not a reaction to the pandemic; it's a core philosophy. Luna: Let's talk about the financial side. They went public via a direct listing in October 2021, which was less common back then. Why not a traditional IPO? Lucas: Sijbrandij has said he didn't want to dilute existing investors and employees through the typical IPO underwriting process. A direct listing lets existing shareholders sell their shares directly to the public without issuing new shares. It's cheaper and more transparent. But it also meant they didn't have the big bank 'pop' on day one. Their reference price was seventy-six dollars, and the stock opened around a hundred. It's been volatile since, but the business itself has been consistently growing. Luna: And they're still not profitable, right? I think I saw a headline about that. Lucas: Correct. They've been operating at a loss — a hundred and forty million dollar operating loss in 2025. But the gross margin is around eighty-nine percent, which is strong for a software company. The losses are mostly from sales and marketing spending. They're investing in growth. The question is whether they can reach profitability before the market demands it. Luna: So what's the specific lesson for founders here? It's not just 'go remote.' It's about aligning your entire operating model with that remote philosophy. Lucas: Exactly. The lesson is that remote work isn't just about where people sit. It's about how you communicate, how you make decisions, how you handle performance. GitLab has documented everything so thoroughly that any new hire, anywhere in the world, can ramp up in a week. And they've turned that documentation into a competitive advantage. Luna: I've heard that their handbook is something like two thousand pages long. Is that true? Lucas: It's actually over three thousand pages now. It covers everything from how to expense a coffee to how the CEO allocates his time. And it's public. Anyone can read it — competitors included. Sijbrandij's argument is that copying the handbook doesn't give you the culture, and the transparency builds trust with customers and employees. Luna: But doesn't that also create a risk? Some competitor could just clone their entire playbook. Lucas: That's the counterargument. But Sijbrandij says execution matters more than secrets. And he has a point — a lot of companies have tried to replicate GitLab's model, but few have the discipline to actually live by the handbook. It's like the open-source ethos applied to management. Lucas: One more thing that's really specific to GitLab: they have a value called 'boring solutions.' They explicitly avoid flashy, innovative approaches in favor of the most predictable, reliable path. So instead of building a custom in-house tool for something, they'll buy a standard SaaS product. Instead of a fancy new hiring process, they'll use a standard template. They want to save their innovation budget for the product itself. Luna: That's refreshingly anti-Silicon-Valley. Most startups want to be disruptive in everything they do. Lucas: Right. And it's worked. They now have over thirty million registered users and more than half of the Fortune 100 uses GitLab in some form. The top line is approaching a billion dollars. And they did it without a single office, without a traditional IPO, and without a culture of urgency or hype. Luna: So if I'm building a company today, what's the takeaway? Should I go fully remote and write a handbook? Lucas: The takeaway isn't necessarily to copy the model. It's to recognize that your operating system — how you make decisions, how you communicate, how you document — is a strategic choice. GitLab made a set of very deliberate, internally consistent choices. Most companies just default to whatever seems normal. That's the real lesson: don't default. Design your company's way of working as carefully as you design your product. Luna: I think that's a great note to end on. Next episode, we'll look at another company that built a billion-dollar business on a counterintuitive idea. Lucas: See you then.