Where In The World Are GitLab’s Workers? Anywhere

Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Carolyn Said
Photo: Companies looking for GitLab sometimes go to a Mailboxes Etc., Sijbrandij said. (Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle)

When people seek out GitLab’s address, they wind up at a UPS store in downtown San Francisco where it has a mailbox.

“They come there thinking it’s our headquarters, and they’re pretty disappointed,” said Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab CEO and cofounder.

Although the maker of software development tools has more than 1,150 employees, has raised $426 million and is valued at $2.75 billion, it has no headquarters — in fact, no physical location at all.

GitLab ranks among the largest all-remote companies in the world. While letting employees telecommute is a growing trend — and amid coronavirus fears, some companies are asking workers returning from China to work from home for weeks — only a few organizations take it so far as to eschew any office space. GitLab believes it can help change that.

Sijbrandij, who works out of his spacious Millennium Tower apartment where a giant video screen displays his employees’ locations in more than 60 countries, said the reasons for being all-remote are simple: recruitment and real estate.

“We have access to a much broader talent pool and can save on costs” by not renting offices and by paying local salaries, rather than Silicon Valley’s inflated wages, he said. “We can spread job opportunities to other places, for people who don’t want to move to San Francisco.”

It’s an easy sell to potential hires. Working remotely accommodates the ebbs and flows of life.
Back to Gallery

“You can move home if your parents need you,” Sijbrandij said. “You get back the commute time of up to two hours a day. You have flexibility if your kids are sick.” Some GitLab workers are military spouses who have to relocate every couple of years. GitLab gets thousands of applications a week from people all over the globe who’d love to work from home, he said.

Last year, GitLab tripled its head count; this year it plans to double it. There’s no need to rent more space to keep up. And finding the people is easier because it can cast a worldwide net.

“We went from 350 people to more than 1,000 in one year,” said Darren Murph, whose title at GitLab is head of remote. “If we were co-located, we would have had to move offices three or four times.”

Kyle Doherty, a partner at General Catalyst, which has invested more than $30 million in GitLab, is sold on remote work.

“It is absolutely something we’d consider an advantage for a company, both in cost and speed,” said Doherty, who looks to fund companies that make tools to support all-remote organizations.

Other all-remote companies with more than 500 workers cited by Murph — all in the tech sector — include WordPress developer Automattic, talent network Toptal, software maker Elastic, digital product-design company InVision, app-automation maker Zapier. He maintains a list of several dozen other all-remote firms along with job sites catering to people who work from home.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Where-in-the-world-are-GitLab-s-workers