The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: GitLab is not really a SaaS company
“GitLab just IPO to sixteen billion. It's not really a SaaS company.”
Sijbrandij: Buyer-based open core best aligns revenue with community contributions
“So we ended up charging based on the buyer. For features that are used by an individual contributor, we put them in the open source code base. For features that are the focus of an executive, we put them in the highest paid version. That works really well beca…”
Lemkin: HashiCorp and GitLab should be valued at $20B each
“Yeah, those should be twenty billion dollar companies, Harry. They should be twenty billion dollar companies.”
Sijbrandij: GitLab commits to never moving free features into paid tiers
“Some specific promises that we make are that we won't move features from free code into a paid tier. We won't artificially limit or delay features for the free tier. For example, in our code base, we're not putting a limit on repositories, user size, or perfor…”
Sijbrandij: Open-source companies should avoid heavily recruiting from their own community
“Over time, you should focus your active recruiting efforts elsewhere to avoid depleting your wider community.”
Lemkin: VC is designed strictly for outliers, not sub-$500M exits
“Venture capital is a niche, niche, niche asset class only designed for outliers. It is, the job is to find an outlier. It is to find a GitLab. It is to find an Okta. It is to find a Stripe. It is to find an Algolia. That is the job. The job is not to find a te…”
Joe Thomas: GitLab Handbook Provides Copy-Paste Templates to Decline Meetings
“They actually go as far as to provide copy and paste text in their handbook to turn down meetings, saying that this just isn't useful for us to do synchronous, we should do asynchronous.”
Sijbrandij: GitLab achieved 58% YoY revenue growth and 97% retention
“Revenue growth is 58% year over year, and our dollar-based growth retention is 97%.”
Sijbrandij: Up to one-third of GitLab's core team are company employees
“Up to a third of the core team are people that are also GitLab Inc. Team members, with the rest being part of the wider community contributions.”
Sijbrandij: Consulting margins are too low to reinvest into software products
“We tried consultancy, but consultancy doesn't let you have high margins. Those high margins are needed for you to be able to invest back into the product, to pay for work that is unpaid otherwise.”
GitLab's S-1 filing reported net retention exceeding 150%
“And in our S-one filing, we talked about
Our net retention. It's the money that customers spent with us, and it's grown more than a 150%, which means that if a cohort of customers is spending a hundred dollars with you last year, they're now spending a 150 dol…”
Sijbrandij: Majority of GitLab-built features will be open source
“We will actively contribute to the open source code with the majority of features built by GitLab Inc. Being open source.”
Sijbrandij: Making open-source features proprietary quickly destroys community goodwill
“For example, the quick, the quickest way to lose goodwill is to make an open source feature proprietary.”
Founders must define freemium boundaries early to avoid paywalling backlash
“If you're gonna build a company and you know you want a free tier, be very thoughtful in the beginning about what goes into that free tier, because it's really hard to email your customers and say, hey y'all, super sorry, we're taking that free thing you love …”
Joe Thomas: GitLab's Employee Handbook Spans 13,000 Pages
“This quote, this question underpins the async mindset, and their employee handbook is 13,000 pages. That is not an exaggeration. It's an open code repository.”
Sijbrandij: GitLab donations topped out at $1,000 per month
“We started with donations. They topped out at 1000 dollars per month. It wasn't enough to sustain the business.”
Sijbrandij: GitLab merged 335 community contributions monthly in 2021
“And from January to October of this year, we've merged on average 335 wider community code contributions each month, a significant accelerant to our development efforts.”
GitLab has shipped monthly releases on the 22nd over 100 consecutive times
“Yeah, so we had, since the beginning of GitLab, we released a new version on the 22nd of every month, and we've done that for more than a hundred times.”
Sijbrandij: 50% of GitLab community contributions come from paid users
“Looking at GitLab's wider community contributions from January to October of 20 21, where 50% of them came from users in our paid tiers.”