No office, no problem: Software unicorn Gitlab’s CEO warns you’re probably doing remote work wrong by alexrkonrad
knows the perils of working from home. In 2018, after years of toiling exclusively from a small room in his 47th-floor apartment in a San Francisco high-rise, the entrepreneur developed foot problems. So he moved in a treadmill desk alongside his Zoom-friendly green screen and three monitors.
Sijbrandij also relies heavily on documentation to allow GitLab staffers to work seamlessly. Employees update docs and take notes, or share information asynchronously in Slack channels and video messages. Resolved decisions or plans get merged into the handbook, which tracks it all. “Every time you have to wait for permission or sign-off for someone else to do something, that’s a problem,” he says.
GitLab’s own globetrotting setup got its start in Europe. Sijbrandij had worked at a submarine company and helped run an online app-review startup on the side when, while managing web projects for the Dutch Ministry of Justice, he came across an open-source project from Ukraine called GitLab with hundreds of volunteer contributors.
Most of GitLab went back to Europe afterward. Sijbrandij, enamored of the startup scene and with an eye to fundraising, stayed behind. Today, GitLab, most of which is still on its balance sheet; it sells a suite of 10 different app tools, from development to security, for up to $99 per user per month, bringing in over $75 million in revenue last year from more than 15,000 customers, including Nvidia, Siemens and Goldman Sachs, which later invested.