Congratulations to GitLab on its IPO earlier this week. You can read coverage of GitLab’s public offering at TechCrunch (GitLab’s mega IPO), Bloomberg, and plenty of other places.
In May, we interviewed CEO and Co-Founder Sid Sijbrandij on the Distributed Podcast. The conversation didn’t specifically cover a potential public offering beyond Sid acknowledging GitLab’s well-known aspirations to go public.
But the two CEOs focused on being public in great detail, especially in terms of GitLab’s well-documented transparency. In the conversation, Matt said, “…there are often CEO backchannels where you’ll ping another CEO and be like, so how does this work at your company or what do you do for this? And I would say that you are the one I ping. And 99.9 percent of the time it’s a link to your public handbook.”
Every company has a unique path to growth. Matt recently wrote about Automattic’s approach to fundraising and acquiring products, and this week TechCrunch covered our untraditional journey. Meanwhile, GitLab has carved out an unparalleled growth path, and this week is the culmination of years of effort and commitment.
Two things our companies have in common, inarguably, are a commitment to a fully distributed team, and passionate support of open source software — one of the most powerful ideas of our time.
We admire GitLab’s very transparent approach to both, and congratulate them for their listing this week.
