GitLab was written in a house in Ukraine with no running water. In 2011 Dmitriy Zaporozhets decided that a good tool for working together on code mattered more than his daily trip to the communal well. A Dutch programmer, Sid Sijbrandij, found the project online a year later. By the time GitLab went public in October 2021, it had no headquarters office at all. Every one of its employees worked remotely, and it was one of the largest all-remote companies in the world.

Code by the Well

Zaporozhets released GitLab as an open-source project in 2011. Sijbrandij discovered it from his home in the Netherlands in 2012 and began building a business around it. The company was incorporated in Delaware in September 2014. The bet was that developers wanted one application for the whole software life cycle, from planning to deployment. GitLab gave away a free community edition and sold paid tiers with more features.

Seventy-Seven Dollars a Share

GitLab priced its offering at $77 a share and began trading on Nasdaq as GTLB on October 14, 2021. It raised about $650 million, and the stock closed its first day well above the offer price. Sijbrandij later handed the chief executive role to Bill Staples and stayed on as chairman. GitLab reported more than 10,000 customers paying at least $5,000 a year. It still trades on Nasdaq.

Cover: Badger, from the series "Mirror of Stone Rubbings of Views of the Provinces", Utagawa Hiroshige. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a badger (GitLab's tanuki).