Sytse “Sid” Sijbrandij is the co-founder, chairman, and longtime chief executive officer of GitLab. He joined the open-source GitLab project, which began in 2011, and built a company around it, serving as the public face of the business through its growth and its 2021 initial public offering.
Writing firsthand on the GitLab blog about taking the company public, Sijbrandij described GitLab’s defining traits: it has been all-remote from the start, and at the time of its IPO it had “approximately 1,350 team members in over 65 countries.” Rather than list a physical headquarters, the company wrote “Address Not Applicable” in its SEC filing, because it has no offices.
Sijbrandij is closely associated with GitLab’s culture of radical transparency. The company publishes a public handbook describing how it operates, and Sijbrandij has credited that openness with making the business easier for outsiders, including regulators and insurers, to understand. He tied the IPO to the project’s roots, noting the ten-year anniversary of the “first commit to the GitLab open source project” on October 8, 2011.
Under his leadership GitLab grew from an open-source code-hosting tool into a single-application DevOps platform and a public company, while keeping its open-core, all-remote, handbook-first way of working as a deliberate identity rather than a temporary arrangement.