The below is a full (unedited) transcript of a Youtube session / podcasting episode I recorded with Sid Sijbrandij, the co-founder and CEO of Gitlab in Q2 2019. You can view the video/listen to the podcast on Youtube, Apple Podcast, Stitcheror wherever you get your podcasts.
Erasmus Elsner 0:01
Welcome to another episode of Sand Hill Road, the show where I talk to successful startup founders and their venture capitalists, about the companies that they build and invest in. And the goal like always, is to give you a little bit of a sense of what it’s like to be in their shoes, how their businesses take, and sometimes take a little bit of a deep dive. Today, I’m super excited to announce our very special guest Sid Sijbrandij and the co-founder of Gitlab. Well, thanks for having me as part of a very rare breed of European founders who have managed to build and scale successful breakout companies in the Valley. After recording this episode, Gitlab announced a $268 million series E valuing the company at $2.7 billion. Gitlabs journey from a simple open-source repository to a $2.75 billion company, is so unique and inspiring that I’m super honored to be able to share it with you today. So what does Gitlab do? A lot of people have first heard about Gitlab last year, when Microsoft announced the $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub. If you remember, the open source community was shocked by this announcement. So what happened was that in a matter of a few hours, 1000s of projects were pulled from GitHub over to Gitlab. So from today’s perspective, Gitlab looks like a clear success story. It is a late stage venture-backed company in the version control and DevOps space. And the last funding round brings the total amount raises to almost $440 million. they’ve raised from some of the best names in the Valley, including Khosla, August, and Google Ventures. And while the company could certainly stay private for a bit longer, they’re actually planning to go public in 2020. I think it’s going to be a direct listing. As I said, it looks like a clear success story now. But like many great technology companies, Gitlabs journey to commercial success was far from clear from the beginning. In fact, for a long time, it wasn’t even clear whether Gitlab would actually become a company. And herein lies much of the beauty of the Gitlab story to meet in many ways. The Gitlab journey epitomizes to me the open core software journey. So Gitlab started as an open-source project, many miles away from Silicon Valley, his co-founder Dimitri conceptualized the first version of Gitlab in very humble beginnings in the Ukraine. Every day, he had to walk out and get water from well, he would come back with buckets of water and kept writing code. The project started out with the ability to manage Git repositories, Dimitri first worked on this project on his own, but only a year later, he was already joined by more than 300 collaborators from all over the world. So at one point, Sid who was living in the Netherlands read on TechCrunch that Salesforce-like SaaS models would be the future. So he came up with this idea of building a SaaS layer on top of Gitlab. So he emailed Dimitri saying I’m going to build this, I’m going to make money off of your open source project, and Dimitri replied back, very chill, saying: “Yeah, that’s fine with me”. So for almost a year, they work completely separately, said was building this commercial sauce layer, while Dimitri was contributing to the open source project. So enough spoiler alerts, and let’s hear it from set himself.
Interview
Erasmus Elsner: I’m super excited to have today with me sit sobrang ji, who is the co founder and CEO of Gitlab. And before I want to dive into the product and his founding journey, I want to learn a little bit more about Sid. So said you weren’t like the typical Silicon Valley. And for computer science dropout, you weren’t even the European version of this. So in fact, you you work for a submarine company for five years of all places. And then you started get lab out of Amsterdam, of all places in the world, which I think when you started it, it wasn’t really a huge tech hub. So tell me a little bit about this journey and how and when you realize that you really had to build this.
Sid Sijbrandij 4:18
Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, before Gitlab, I did a bunch of things. I had a couple of companies, but I think the one that resonates most is where we started a company called building recreational submarines. I wasn’t a shareholder of that company. But I was the first employee the first full time person to work on it, I incorporated it. And by the time I left, five years later, we built the most submarines so today still, if you have a cruise ship or a big yacht and you want a submarine you’re probably going to use one from Cuba works. At the end, a There were two things I wanted. A couple of things I wanted to see, first of all, I wanted to see more growth, we were 15 people, and it was growing, but not very fast. I wanted to see more profitability. We ran it, the company, because we were all very passionate about submarines, especially the inventor and, or the investor and want to do something that was more profitable. And I saw this new programming language called Ruby on Rails, and, or called Ruby and, and the whole Ruby on Rails movement. And I was very intrigued. And I always wanted to get into programming. So I started learning programming. And that’s how I became a developer. And eventually, if socketlabs.
Erasmus Elsner 5:49
So maybe, let’s talk a little bit about the early days of Gitlab. So if I have to describe the early days, for me, it’s a little bit in version control language, like a Pull-and-Merge. So in a way, there’s this famous email that you wrote, to Dimitri your, your co-founder, and the creator of Git, that you’re basically saying: “I’m going to monetize on this, and you’re not going to be part of it”. And then even more famous reply of him saying: “that’s totally fine with me”. I’m happy that someone is working on it. Tell me a little bit about this first year when you basically worked on it on your own, you were building on this open source project. But you were basically I think you’ve never even met Dimitri. He you only knew his avatar. And, and you basically went out in the world and, and started to work on this. So tell me a little bit about this part of the journey.
Sid Sijbrandij 6:43
Yeah, so I saw a Gitlab, it was a year old Dimitri made it and 200 people joined him in that effort, like 200, people contributed to get a lot by dent. And I thought this makes so much sense. That’s something you collaborate with is something you can contribute back to make sense for me too. But that that would be open source. And I saw that you could download Gitlab, but you could not use it as a web service. And I thought, that’s the future. Salesforce, everything I consume is now a website. I’m going to start the website for Gitlab. And it should be easy. I just spin up Gitlab open it up. So I did a show Hacker News where he said, Hey, this is my plan are people interested? And it It didn’t trend. So I went downstairs and started making pancakes. And then it started trending and what ended up in the Hacker News homepage, and my now wife had to kind of finish the pancakes and bring them up to me. So thanks for that. Because I was busy answering questions and learning about the market, send the email to Dimitri, hey, I’m going to do this hope you don’t mind. He was totally cool with it. And I set up that first website and slowly kind of invited people. And we tried to keep the website online and fix all the problems that that arose. After a year, I kind of was not doing so well, with the website, people weren’t prepared to pay for it. But there were a lot of people running Gitlab themselves, and they were prepared to pay for features that they were missing. So when Dimitri tweeted out, I want to work on Gitlab full time I hired him as, as a second second employee and as a co founder.
Erasmus Elsner 8:35
So let me drill in a little bit on these days when he joined, before that you were basically operating as two lone wolves in a way he out of Ukraine, you out of the Netherlands. And then you basically at this point, you knew you were going to join forces. So So how is that feeling of like, I’m now going to work with the co-creator of this project that I’ve worked on it on a year trying to find product market fit for and like, find a sauce model, I think at that point was a SaaS model.
Sid Sijbrandij 9:03
Yeah, for that year. We didn’t have a lot of interaction. I thought it was great effort. It was great. We quickly agreed on kind of what his what he would earn every month. So that went very smooth. And from his perspective, he basically had two jobs so he he woke up in the morning work on get lab went to work, came back work from get lab. So now that he was getting paid for his get lab work, he could quit his previous job and focus on get lab full time.
Erasmus Elsner 9:36
So his life became a lot better. And then did you meet or was it all mainly digital in the beginning?
Sid Sijbrandij 9:44
I think it was mainly email. We might have had an audio call, he wouldn’t turn on his video, so I didn’t know how he looked. And the reason I knew I sent the check to the right person was when the feature started landing in the master branch of giving up.
Erasmus Elsner 10:00
Okay, that’s interesting. You said you knew at this point after a year that customers wanted to have certain features and that they that you knew that this was going to be the model. I looked at your Y Combinator application. And, and there, it seemed that you had already like massive traction, like 1000 100,000 teams using it 10,000 commits 1 million arr 60% month over month growth. So how was that? Did you quickly land on this model? Or was there still some trial and error going on in this early month?
Sid Sijbrandij 10:33
Yeah, what what we try to do is keep it an open source project. So completely open source, we thought that was, I still think that will be the most beautiful thing to do. And we tried that in different ways. We tried the donations. And when we on the biggest month for we did a big drive, we got $1,000. And it wasn’t even enough to pay for Dimitri, let alone for Dimitri, me and Marlin. So that didn’t work. And we tried paid feature development, we basically started like that, hey, you want the feature, we’ll build it. But there was, there was a big free rider problem where as soon as we told people that other companies were also interested in the same feature, and they could split the cost, they were all reluctant to pay for it, because they were kind of waiting till the other company would pay. And also, when you when they had to kind of get it approved internally, the company would say, look, we already have a contract for paid development. So if you want to pay for software development, you got to go with our preferred vendor. So we got these people that like, yeah, we want to help out with with this preferred vendor, and they will make the feature. But people weren’t familiar with Gitlab, sometimes he couldn’t even do Ruby. So it didn’t really help. And it costs us more time and like zero income. So that wasn’t working. And we tried to charge for like, kind of installation and upgrades. But every time we kind of saw things, we change the readme, change the documentation, made sure that everyone was helping Mr. Customer paying for that cost, basically, for the demand to go away. But because we improve the the installers, and the documentation to a point that nobody needed help anymore. So people got a subscription with us for support, but then they didn’t use it then a year and then they didn’t renew. So slowly, but surely we figured out, okay, we really need to charge for features, because that’s something where it’s recurring, people will have to renew it is it is super high margin. And that that will allow us to scale as the the demands on the software scale.
Erasmus Elsner 12:54
You bootstrap this all the way to this massive traction that I mentioned before. And so then at one point in 2014, you decide to move west and apply for Y Combinator, as your first outside money to take in. You mentioned in the past that you were very skeptical of venture capital, and that you said to your wife that if you want to raise money after after YC, she should stop you just because of the difficult venture model that basically decreases the chances of success. It’s either grow fast or or die. So what was this decision to go from the bootstrapping mode to go into this Silicon Valley startup route?
Sid Sijbrandij 13:33
Well, first of all, I’ve always, like been intrigued with Silicon Valley, and the fast growth rate was a visitor there. And we got an offer for $10 million in 2014. And I was like a one liner to Dimitri and he said one word back and we agreed that it wasn’t for us. So we were clear about that. But we were like, Okay, this is so much potential. We should, we should give it a go and try Y Combinator. So we applied, we bootstrapped it up to that point, I don’t think we were at a million arr. But we had over 100,000 companies using it, but all mostly for free. So we weren’t making a lot of money, but enough to sustain ourselves and slowly grow. And then Y Combinator was a huge boost. I think VC money venture capital money is fine. I’m not skeptical of the model. But the thing is, it greatly increases the average outcome. But it greatly decreases like the median outcome, the median outcome basically goes to zero you’re most likely to fail and end up empty handed. The average outcome can can greatly increase. Since as a founder, financially, like the median outcome is way more important, you want to end up with learning whether that’s a million dollar or a billion dollar, it doesn’t matter like as long as you but it doesn’t matter that much. Like, but ending up empty handed is is not so nice.
Erasmus Elsner 15:04
Yeah, I agree. You’re trading the mean for the variance.
Sid Sijbrandij 15:08
Yeah. So we really had to, we wanted to hire people in Silicon Valley with expertise without taking venture, but those people demand stock options. And then if you give out stock options, at some point, they have to be worth something, there has to be a liquidity event. And the liquidity event you basically can choose between being acquired or becoming a public company. So you want to become a public company, but at the end, we have to get to a certain size by a certain date. So a couple of years, we said, okay, we’re going to get about stock options. 2015, then we weren’t in five years who want to be a public company. Also, because Dimitri, his commitment was until 2021. So it put on our website, our aspiration was to become a public company by 2020.
Erasmus Elsner 16:07
Just let me dig a little bit deeper into this, how was this process of raising money for you? I mean, I think by that time, when you were raising, we already had the 100 million, a 16, zet. Round by by by a GitHub, you had a lot of traction, people by that time already got the open core model. So how are these discussions? I mean, I imagine it being a little bit like a, like a walk in the park that you walk in, and you you go out with a term sheet, a fleece vest with your logo on it, warrior front seat tickets, and I mean, you managed to raise from some of the best names like Coachella and and August, I think and Google Ventures. So maybe I’m imagining that this was basically the dreamland. But at the same time, I think you were also or that’s something I wondered, you were already talking to people about the distributed nature of your teams? And how did that feed into the pitching process?
Sid Sijbrandij 17:02
Yeah, so our first and second round, are seed and a were we, we were still committed to becoming a boring company in every aspect possible, like boy solutions is one of our values. So we want to just get an office at yc. They told us like, remote works for engineering, but not for the other functions. So we purchased an office. And the first fundraising went really well, I think our first pitch was at a valuation of 7 million. Because our CD rightly said, Look, you want to make sure you don’t bounce off the atmosphere. So start with a low valuation, just keep increasing it before, while the company is at least worth 10 million, because that’s what we were offered last year, and we’re doing way better. But we figured we just we just we need a first check. So we pitched it 7 million, and that investor was from founders front. And the deal were so enthusiastic, we’re like, Okay, this is too low. So the second pitch I did at 9 million. And then we closed the 9 million. But then Founders Fund came back and said, well, we’ll have to see no, so it was good that they seemed very enthusiastic. And it was, by the time we close at night, so we kept increasing it. And over the course of two weeks, it crept up to 15 million. So kind of doubled over two weeks. And then the punishment came back and said, I couldn’t sleep about this. Can we still invest? I’m like, well, that’s totally cool. But the problem is devaluation more than doubled. And he did something that was I thought was really shows how analytical you have to be like day. At that point, when you say you basically have to take the loss like he could have done this at this, you you basically lose that money. As soon as you have to acknowledge you kind of wasted that money as soon as you sign. And you don’t know whether it’s going to return a profit yet, but they did it. And so far that turned out for the better. I i after yc, I planned one month in in the US to do the fundraising and then go back to the Netherlands and I was kind of done in two weeks. So I asked kasar, our mentor from yc. What I should do is like well, lots of companies fail because they can’t raise in a round. So if you can raise right now so you don’t have that problem. Okay, that makes sense. So, Khosla already did half of our seed round and we negotiated an era with them. So in in one month, we’ve we’ve gotten both rounds done and luckily ended up hiring a great CFO Paul mackel Still with the company who did those two rounds and flipped the company from a Dutch to a US one?
Erasmus Elsner 20:06
Wow, that’s incredible to go from an unpriced, round to first prize round, where basically then I think you mentioned that you, you had the first term sheet on a $9 million cap, and then the second one at $15 million, and then they converted at different prices, I assume, right?
Sid Sijbrandij 20:25
9, 12 and 15.
Erasmus Elsner 20:28
Now you’re on this VC route. And these people expect you to have an office and hire staff salespeople and engineering team in San Francisco. And at one point you decide, well, we’re doing kind of okay, being a remote distributed company. How did these discussions go with the with investors?
Sid Sijbrandij 20:47
Yeah, so it it kind of happened over time. So people kind of stopped showing up at the office because they could as well work from home. We never made them. And then every time an executive joined to we’re like, Okay, this, this works for x. So it works for salespeople, it doesn’t work for SDRs, who are mostly like recently graduates, and they, they need to learn a lot. And they need enthusiasm of each other somewhere like, okay, cool, well, just feel free to hire them here. And then they found some amazing SDRs in Utah, oh, what you’re gonna do, you can hire the great people, are you gonna settle for something for not so great people in San Francisco who will also tend to be more expensive. So overtime, every time they were skeptical, but then that same leader, like, was very happy not to have a four hour commute every day anymore from Sacramento to San Francisco. So it kind of solved itself. Investors rightly made a promise to like keep an open mind about it, if it would fail at scale to reconsider it. And we always said, Yeah, well keep an open mind. Like we have our values that on our value speech or not find remote or remote. That’s not one of our values. It’s an outcome, maybe have some of our values but not an input. And it just when we raised our B round, I just spoke to an investor yesterday, who declined our B round, because what they did is they looked at it and the most likely outcome for any companies to get acquired. And they called a couple of curb deaf people and said, Look, this is a roll remote company, how do you feel about acquiring them? And these are like, the usual suspects in acquisition land, like, let’s say, the oracles of the world? He said, Look, we’re not going to do that. That doesn’t that’s so hard to integrate. We’re not going to do that. And they, they passed on ob, and August, there was a lot of skepticism as well. And there were two things. So first of all, they know they would get a discount on an acquisition. And if you get about 50%, so half devaluation, because there’s no people to move over. You could live with that hook, the goal was to go for an IPO. And even if it failed, even at a 50% discount, it was looking like a good deal. The second thing was it going to be able to manage the company. So if you’re the wheelchair have invited me to give a presentation about that. He said we’re concerned please address it, which is great. Like all the other VCs are many of them just passed without giving us a chance to explain. So I came in with a deck explained all the different fixes we were doing. And then Okay, still concern. And then one of the associates that look, I went online, I looked at their handbook that Sid is talking about, and it’s amazing. It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. This is the best run company we’ve ever seen. This makes sense.
Erasmus Elsner 23:50
So I’m so fascinated about this, you know, there’s a theory of the firm. And I think you’re not only challenging how software is developed, but at the same time, you’re challenging how an organization can be run, for example, today, when I tried to find out about the shadow programs, you will shatter them, I could find it in the handbook. Yeah, it’s it’s so amazing to have a company like laying out every like granular steps of how it works and operates. So maybe let’s move on a little bit to the product. Let’s start with the basics of the product. I think you mentioned ones, which I think was really interesting in comparing it to GitHub, you mentioned that GitHub is in many ways closed source software used for open source projects while Gitlab is open source, but it is often used to develop proprietary software. Was this always the plan or did this sort of evolve over time in terms of the product?
Sid Sijbrandij 24:43
Yeah, I think what happened is that GitHub had a focus on hosting open source projects. It was something the founders were very proud and Dimitri was working at a consultancy and and he was focusing on his own use case, From then on, most of the people starting to use Gitlab were using it in kind of an enterprise setting. So we focused on that enterprise use case. And what’s happening now is that companies are switching from kind of agile development to DevOps, where development and operations are integrated. They all found that they need like 1520 different applications to do that. And they all picked their preferred point solutions, and then try to integrate all of them into their homegrown DevOps platform. And what they’re finding is that they don’t have enough visibility across the entire pipeline. And this is all the way from planning what you’re going to do, writing to code to securing that monitoring that the packaging, everything else. And get lab is coming in as a single application that can replace that homegrown solution. And people are finding that their cycle time is greatly reduced, they can go much faster from deciding what to do, to delivering it to users measuring the response and then having input for the next iteration. The we kind of got lucky that the enterprise market in that sense was underserved. And it wasn’t intuitive to us that a single application would be better it took someone in the company Camille to stand up and say that and us Giving that a try and finding out it was really bad.
Erasmus Elsner 26:29
Today, you have a broad range of products competing with the likes of JIRA, J frog artifactory. I think in the beginning, it was just source control. And then I think the first additional feature you made was was the CI, now you have like all kinds of features, including security, monitoring, the whole DevOps sites, as you said, I had Joseph Jackson program a couple of weeks ago. And I think you had a discussion with him once where you basically talked about the value capture of open source projects. And given that you have so much surface of the product, you can afford in a way to capture minimum value. Whereas if you if you were focusing on just one tiny problem set, you would have to basically capture much more value to get to profitability. So maybe talk a little bit about this, how this expanded, the product range expanded and how you think about this value capture and commercial open source software in general.
Sid Sijbrandij 27:28
Yeah, so I think you put it really well, because we do everything from managing the entire process and planning up to verifying, releasing, configuring, monitoring defending it. That’s an enormous market. And we’re competitors for monitoring, we’ll have to charge per gigabyte in order to build a giant company, we can take a very small rake, very small piece of of the pie and still be a giant company. And I think that’s a superpower. Also. It felt like a year ago, it felt like, it might have been too ambitious. But we’re seeing that we’re able to integrate everything into a single application, which is a bit counterintuitive. But it also helps us to differentiate from kind of stringing a bunch of point solutions together. And it allows us to hire great people who are passionate about that. So kind of the ambition has really helped, both with like the addressable market and not having to capture a lot but also with selling the product, marketing the products and hiring great people.
Erasmus Elsner 28:47
Let’s focus on one particular trend that I’ve noticed in your product, which is that you’ve really doubled down on the on the Kubernetes ecosystem. The container container orchestration system, obviously, is an open source project initiated by by Google, one of your large investors is Google Ventures. And when the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub was announced last year, you also moved all the Gitlab SaaS infrastructure from Microsoft, Azure to GCP. How do you think about this relationship with this giant?
Sid Sijbrandij 29:24
So we’re very happy with our relationship with GCP Google Cloud Platform, but also happy with the relationship we have with all the other cloud providers basically, except for Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, many others are now that GitHub is part of Azure and Azure DevOps, for example, Salesforce dx. Their conference for developers is now kind of we did a big session about how Gitlab is a great way to make Salesforce applications. So although we want to be cloud agnostic, we want to have a great way to deploy to Azure as well. But we’re seeing that like, the collaboration in the field with salespeople, the salespeople of all the other old Microsoft’s competitors, and now more open to collaborating with us. And getting kind of workflow portability for for customers with the help of Gitlab Kubernetes came at the right time for us. We were trying to make sure that you can just write your code, give love this the rest, we call that auto DevOps, we package it up, we we figure out what tests need to be run, we make sure it’s secure everything else, also want to deploy it, roll it out gradually, etc. And all of the environments our customers had were different. And then Kubernetes came along and kind of commoditize that space where it’s a single API, you want to do a deploy, just tell Kubernetes to do to deploy and point it to to get lab Container Registry, that makes things a lot simpler, and want to make sure that if you want to do DevOps, all you need is a cluster and get lab, and you have it done end to end, you don’t need any other tools. It’s been great. And we’ve seen that customers are increasingly demanding from their, from their public cloud that they offer great Kubernetes clusters, and the customers can take care of the rest.
Erasmus Elsner 31:38
If you could dream a little bit in terms of products that you could have get lab for music, video design sketches, basically, if you could dream of what Gitlab could become, in terms of the company for source control.
Sid Sijbrandij 31:52
Yeah, so our mission is everyone can contribute. And we want people to be able to contribute to the company, okay, you you read on our CEO shadow problem, if there’s something on that page, that’s wrong, you can send us a request to change it. We want people to contribute to Gitlab itself. Over the last half year, the number of contributions to Gitlab doubled it now over 200 a month 200 improvements a month that are coming from the wider community. And last but certainly not least, want people to kind of use Gitlab to to make things better. Right now that software. And what’s possible now in software, it is that someone doesn’t have to invite you to improve something as long as you can see it is as long as you can see your coat you can contribute to it. And I hope that will become available not just for software, but many other things. Asked and coach who is an investor in Gitlab and with him we talked about, if you have a movie, right now you get the final edit, what if you can get all the individual camera feeds, and all the editing information and all the audio tracks, and you could remix it yourself, you could maybe make a slightly different cut or make an improvement, you can send that back. So instead of like three people in a studio in a couple of weeks making an edit, you can have all these remixes of things. I think that’d be interesting. I think if I look at that my desk, all the hardware that’s there, if I have a better idea, I cannot send something back. Like all those formats are not conducive to that. I hope we can change those formats where you can you can suggest an improvement and their their movements like open hardware, things like that are starting to happen.
Erasmus Elsner 33:45
That’s so cool. I really love that product vision. So final question. You’re one of the very few companies publicly announced date for going public. So So what does this journey look like in the next year? I mean, you’re obviously the most transparent company out there. But how you feel about this process of gearing up for for the public?
Sid Sijbrandij 34:08
Yeah. So going public is a combination of an ambition we said a long time ago. But also we think it fits us. As a public company. It almost implies that transparency, we will be a way for us to tell our story and reach more people like our biggest problem is awareness. And people think who we do source control even though we do 10 times more than that today. We think going public will help with that. And we also look forward to kind of the operational discipline you have to have as a public company we think that’s a healthy way to operate. Think as being remote forced us to do things you should do anyway but do them earlier, and I hope the same will be true with hopefully becoming a public company.
Erasmus Elsner 34:57
Okay, wonderful. Last thing called to action, where can people find out more about you and find out more about Gitlab?
Sid Sijbrandij 35:05
Yeah, so Gitlab D it la B, if you Google it, you’ll you’ll find everything you need to know. You can sign up for an account, you can view our website contribute to our source code. If you’re a watcher of this program, you’re a bit curious about, like how we run the company. You can Google get lab Handbook, and have a public Handbook of over 3000 pages. And if you’re more into video, there’s a channel called get lab unfiltered on YouTube and it contains a lot of our calls. So if you want to attend a meeting at get lab, go there to to join one.
Erasmus Elsner 35:42
Okay, wonderful. So this is it for today. So I hope you found this episode, as exciting as I did. I really loved recording it sits around is such a great guy. He’s so open is so approachable, and I’m really looking forward to follow their journey. And if you want to hear more about what I’m up to, you can always subscribe to my newsletter on Santo road, the Ohio or just subscribe to the channel and tune in next time. It’s up to you. Cheers, guys.
The below is a full (unedited) transcript of a Youtube session / podcasting episode I recorded with Sid Sijbrandij, the co-founder and CEO of Gitlab in Q2 2019. You can view the video/listen to the podcast on Youtube, Apple Podcast, Stitcheror wherever you get your podcasts.
Erasmus Elsner 0:01
Welcome to another episode of Sand Hill Road, the show where I talk to successful startup founders and their venture capitalists, about the companies that they build and invest in. And the goal like always, is to give you a little bit of a sense of what it’s like to be in their shoes, how their businesses take, and sometimes take a little bit of a deep dive. Today, I’m super excited to announce our very special guest Sid Sijbrandij and the co-founder of Gitlab. Well, thanks for having me as part of a very rare breed of European founders who have managed to build and scale successful breakout companies in the Valley. After recording this episode, Gitlab announced a $268 million series E valuing the company at $2.7 billion. Gitlabs journey from a simple open-source repository to a $2.75 billion company, is so unique and inspiring that I’m super honored to be able to share it with you today. So what does Gitlab do? A lot of people have first heard about Gitlab last year, when Microsoft announced the $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub. If you remember, the open source community was shocked by this announcement. So what happened was that in a matter of a few hours, 1000s of projects were pulled from GitHub over to Gitlab. So from today’s perspective, Gitlab looks like a clear success story. It is a late stage venture-backed company in the version control and DevOps space. And the last funding round brings the total amount raises to almost $440 million. they’ve raised from some of the best names in the Valley, including Khosla, August, and Google Ventures. And while the company could certainly stay private for a bit longer, they’re actually planning to go public in 2020. I think it’s going to be a direct listing. As I said, it looks like a clear success story now. But like many great technology companies, Gitlabs journey to commercial success was far from clear from the beginning. In fact, for a long time, it wasn’t even clear whether Gitlab would actually become a company. And herein lies much of the beauty of the Gitlab story to meet in many ways. The Gitlab journey epitomizes to me the open core software journey. So Gitlab started as an open-source project, many miles away from Silicon Valley, his co-founder Dimitri conceptualized the first version of Gitlab in very humble beginnings in the Ukraine. Every day, he had to walk out and get water from well, he would come back with buckets of water and kept writing code. The project started out with the ability to manage Git repositories, Dimitri first worked on this project on his own, but only a year later, he was already joined by more than 300 collaborators from all over the world. So at one point, Sid who was living in the Netherlands read on TechCrunch that Salesforce-like SaaS models would be the future. So he came up with this idea of building a SaaS layer on top of Gitlab. So he emailed Dimitri saying I’m going to build this, I’m going to make money off of your open source project, and Dimitri replied back, very chill, saying: “Yeah, that’s fine with me”. So for almost a year, they work completely separately, said was building this commercial sauce layer, while Dimitri was contributing to the open source project. So enough spoiler alerts, and let’s hear it from set himself.
Interview
Erasmus Elsner: I’m super excited to have today with me sit sobrang ji, who is the co founder and CEO of Gitlab. And before I want to dive into the product and his founding journey, I want to learn a little bit more about Sid. So said you weren’t like the typical Silicon Valley. And for computer science dropout, you weren’t even the European version of this. So in fact, you you work for a submarine company for five years of all places. And then you started get lab out of Amsterdam, of all places in the world, which I think when you started it, it wasn’t really a huge tech hub. So tell me a little bit about this journey and how and when you realize that you really had to build this.
Sid Sijbrandij 4:18
Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, before Gitlab, I did a bunch of things. I had a couple of companies, but I think the one that resonates most is where we started a company called building recreational submarines. I wasn’t a shareholder of that company. But I was the first employee the first full time person to work on it, I incorporated it. And by the time I left, five years later, we built the most submarines so today still, if you have a cruise ship or a big yacht and you want a submarine you’re probably going to use one from Cuba works. At the end, a There were two things I wanted. A couple of things I wanted to see, first of all, I wanted to see more growth, we were 15 people, and it was growing, but not very fast. I wanted to see more profitability. We ran it, the company, because we were all very passionate about submarines, especially the inventor and, or the investor and want to do something that was more profitable. And I saw this new programming language called Ruby on Rails, and, or called Ruby and, and the whole Ruby on Rails movement. And I was very intrigued. And I always wanted to get into programming. So I started learning programming. And that’s how I became a developer. And eventually, if socketlabs.
Erasmus Elsner 5:49
So maybe, let’s talk a little bit about the early days of Gitlab. So if I have to describe the early days, for me, it’s a little bit in version control language, like a Pull-and-Merge. So in a way, there’s this famous email that you wrote, to Dimitri your, your co-founder, and the creator of Git, that you’re basically saying: “I’m going to monetize on this, and you’re not going to be part of it”. And then even more famous reply of him saying: “that’s totally fine with me”. I’m happy that someone is working on it. Tell me a little bit about this first year when you basically worked on it on your own, you were building on this open source project. But you were basically I think you’ve never even met Dimitri. He you only knew his avatar. And, and you basically went out in the world and, and started to work on this. So tell me a little bit about this part of the journey.
Sid Sijbrandij 6:43
Yeah, so I saw a Gitlab, it was a year old Dimitri made it and 200 people joined him in that effort, like 200, people contributed to get a lot by dent. And I thought this makes so much sense. That’s something you collaborate with is something you can contribute back to make sense for me too. But that that would be open source. And I saw that you could download Gitlab, but you could not use it as a web service. And I thought, that’s the future. Salesforce, everything I consume is now a website. I’m going to start the website for Gitlab. And it should be easy. I just spin up Gitlab open it up. So I did a show Hacker News where he said, Hey, this is my plan are people interested? And it It didn’t trend. So I went downstairs and started making pancakes. And then it started trending and what ended up in the Hacker News homepage, and my now wife had to kind of finish the pancakes and bring them up to me. So thanks for that. Because I was busy answering questions and learning about the market, send the email to Dimitri, hey, I’m going to do this hope you don’t mind. He was totally cool with it. And I set up that first website and slowly kind of invited people. And we tried to keep the website online and fix all the problems that that arose. After a year, I kind of was not doing so well, with the website, people weren’t prepared to pay for it. But there were a lot of people running Gitlab themselves, and they were prepared to pay for features that they were missing. So when Dimitri tweeted out, I want to work on Gitlab full time I hired him as, as a second second employee and as a co founder.
Erasmus Elsner 8:35
So let me drill in a little bit on these days when he joined, before that you were basically operating as two lone wolves in a way he out of Ukraine, you out of the Netherlands. And then you basically at this point, you knew you were going to join forces. So So how is that feeling of like, I’m now going to work with the co-creator of this project that I’ve worked on it on a year trying to find product market fit for and like, find a sauce model, I think at that point was a SaaS model.
Sid Sijbrandij 9:03
Yeah, for that year. We didn’t have a lot of interaction. I thought it was great effort. It was great. We quickly agreed on kind of what his what he would earn every month. So that went very smooth. And from his perspective, he basically had two jobs so he he woke up in the morning work on get lab went to work, came back work from get lab. So now that he was getting paid for his get lab work, he could quit his previous job and focus on get lab full time.
Erasmus Elsner 9:36
So his life became a lot better. And then did you meet or was it all mainly digital in the beginning?
Sid Sijbrandij 9:44
I think it was mainly email. We might have had an audio call, he wouldn’t turn on his video, so I didn’t know how he looked. And the reason I knew I sent the check to the right person was when the feature started landing in the master branch of giving up.
Erasmus Elsner 10:00
Okay, that’s interesting. You said you knew at this point after a year that customers wanted to have certain features and that they that you knew that this was going to be the model. I looked at your Y Combinator application. And, and there, it seemed that you had already like massive traction, like 1000 100,000 teams using it 10,000 commits 1 million arr 60% month over month growth. So how was that? Did you quickly land on this model? Or was there still some trial and error going on in this early month?
Sid Sijbrandij 10:33
Yeah, what what we try to do is keep it an open source project. So completely open source, we thought that was, I still think that will be the most beautiful thing to do. And we tried that in different ways. We tried the donations. And when we on the biggest month for we did a big drive, we got $1,000. And it wasn’t even enough to pay for Dimitri, let alone for Dimitri, me and Marlin. So that didn’t work. And we tried paid feature development, we basically started like that, hey, you want the feature, we’ll build it. But there was, there was a big free rider problem where as soon as we told people that other companies were also interested in the same feature, and they could split the cost, they were all reluctant to pay for it, because they were kind of waiting till the other company would pay. And also, when you when they had to kind of get it approved internally, the company would say, look, we already have a contract for paid development. So if you want to pay for software development, you got to go with our preferred vendor. So we got these people that like, yeah, we want to help out with with this preferred vendor, and they will make the feature. But people weren’t familiar with Gitlab, sometimes he couldn’t even do Ruby. So it didn’t really help. And it costs us more time and like zero income. So that wasn’t working. And we tried to charge for like, kind of installation and upgrades. But every time we kind of saw things, we change the readme, change the documentation, made sure that everyone was helping Mr. Customer paying for that cost, basically, for the demand to go away. But because we improve the the installers, and the documentation to a point that nobody needed help anymore. So people got a subscription with us for support, but then they didn’t use it then a year and then they didn’t renew. So slowly, but surely we figured out, okay, we really need to charge for features, because that’s something where it’s recurring, people will have to renew it is it is super high margin. And that that will allow us to scale as the the demands on the software scale.
Erasmus Elsner 12:54
You bootstrap this all the way to this massive traction that I mentioned before. And so then at one point in 2014, you decide to move west and apply for Y Combinator, as your first outside money to take in. You mentioned in the past that you were very skeptical of venture capital, and that you said to your wife that if you want to raise money after after YC, she should stop you just because of the difficult venture model that basically decreases the chances of success. It’s either grow fast or or die. So what was this decision to go from the bootstrapping mode to go into this Silicon Valley startup route?
Sid Sijbrandij 13:33
Well, first of all, I’ve always, like been intrigued with Silicon Valley, and the fast growth rate was a visitor there. And we got an offer for $10 million in 2014. And I was like a one liner to Dimitri and he said one word back and we agreed that it wasn’t for us. So we were clear about that. But we were like, Okay, this is so much potential. We should, we should give it a go and try Y Combinator. So we applied, we bootstrapped it up to that point, I don’t think we were at a million arr. But we had over 100,000 companies using it, but all mostly for free. So we weren’t making a lot of money, but enough to sustain ourselves and slowly grow. And then Y Combinator was a huge boost. I think VC money venture capital money is fine. I’m not skeptical of the model. But the thing is, it greatly increases the average outcome. But it greatly decreases like the median outcome, the median outcome basically goes to zero you’re most likely to fail and end up empty handed. The average outcome can can greatly increase. Since as a founder, financially, like the median outcome is way more important, you want to end up with learning whether that’s a million dollar or a billion dollar, it doesn’t matter like as long as you but it doesn’t matter that much. Like, but ending up empty handed is is not so nice.
Erasmus Elsner 15:04
Yeah, I agree. You’re trading the mean for the variance.
Sid Sijbrandij 15:08
Yeah. So we really had to, we wanted to hire people in Silicon Valley with expertise without taking venture, but those people demand stock options. And then if you give out stock options, at some point, they have to be worth something, there has to be a liquidity event. And the liquidity event you basically can choose between being acquired or becoming a public company. So you want to become a public company, but at the end, we have to get to a certain size by a certain date. So a couple of years, we said, okay, we’re going to get about stock options. 2015, then we weren’t in five years who want to be a public company. Also, because Dimitri, his commitment was until 2021. So it put on our website, our aspiration was to become a public company by 2020.
Erasmus Elsner 16:07
Just let me dig a little bit deeper into this, how was this process of raising money for you? I mean, I think by that time, when you were raising, we already had the 100 million, a 16, zet. Round by by by a GitHub, you had a lot of traction, people by that time already got the open core model. So how are these discussions? I mean, I imagine it being a little bit like a, like a walk in the park that you walk in, and you you go out with a term sheet, a fleece vest with your logo on it, warrior front seat tickets, and I mean, you managed to raise from some of the best names like Coachella and and August, I think and Google Ventures. So maybe I’m imagining that this was basically the dreamland. But at the same time, I think you were also or that’s something I wondered, you were already talking to people about the distributed nature of your teams? And how did that feed into the pitching process?
Sid Sijbrandij 17:02
Yeah, so our first and second round, are seed and a were we, we were still committed to becoming a boring company in every aspect possible, like boy solutions is one of our values. So we want to just get an office at yc. They told us like, remote works for engineering, but not for the other functions. So we purchased an office. And the first fundraising went really well, I think our first pitch was at a valuation of 7 million. Because our CD rightly said, Look, you want to make sure you don’t bounce off the atmosphere. So start with a low valuation, just keep increasing it before, while the company is at least worth 10 million, because that’s what we were offered last year, and we’re doing way better. But we figured we just we just we need a first check. So we pitched it 7 million, and that investor was from founders front. And the deal were so enthusiastic, we’re like, Okay, this is too low. So the second pitch I did at 9 million. And then we closed the 9 million. But then Founders Fund came back and said, well, we’ll have to see no, so it was good that they seemed very enthusiastic. And it was, by the time we close at night, so we kept increasing it. And over the course of two weeks, it crept up to 15 million. So kind of doubled over two weeks. And then the punishment came back and said, I couldn’t sleep about this. Can we still invest? I’m like, well, that’s totally cool. But the problem is devaluation more than doubled. And he did something that was I thought was really shows how analytical you have to be like day. At that point, when you say you basically have to take the loss like he could have done this at this, you you basically lose that money. As soon as you have to acknowledge you kind of wasted that money as soon as you sign. And you don’t know whether it’s going to return a profit yet, but they did it. And so far that turned out for the better. I i after yc, I planned one month in in the US to do the fundraising and then go back to the Netherlands and I was kind of done in two weeks. So I asked kasar, our mentor from yc. What I should do is like well, lots of companies fail because they can’t raise in a round. So if you can raise right now so you don’t have that problem. Okay, that makes sense. So, Khosla already did half of our seed round and we negotiated an era with them. So in in one month, we’ve we’ve gotten both rounds done and luckily ended up hiring a great CFO Paul mackel Still with the company who did those two rounds and flipped the company from a Dutch to a US one?
Erasmus Elsner 20:06
Wow, that’s incredible to go from an unpriced, round to first prize round, where basically then I think you mentioned that you, you had the first term sheet on a $9 million cap, and then the second one at $15 million, and then they converted at different prices, I assume, right?
Sid Sijbrandij 20:25
9, 12 and 15.
Erasmus Elsner 20:28
Now you’re on this VC route. And these people expect you to have an office and hire staff salespeople and engineering team in San Francisco. And at one point you decide, well, we’re doing kind of okay, being a remote distributed company. How did these discussions go with the with investors?
Sid Sijbrandij 20:47
Yeah, so it it kind of happened over time. So people kind of stopped showing up at the office because they could as well work from home. We never made them. And then every time an executive joined to we’re like, Okay, this, this works for x. So it works for salespeople, it doesn’t work for SDRs, who are mostly like recently graduates, and they, they need to learn a lot. And they need enthusiasm of each other somewhere like, okay, cool, well, just feel free to hire them here. And then they found some amazing SDRs in Utah, oh, what you’re gonna do, you can hire the great people, are you gonna settle for something for not so great people in San Francisco who will also tend to be more expensive. So overtime, every time they were skeptical, but then that same leader, like, was very happy not to have a four hour commute every day anymore from Sacramento to San Francisco. So it kind of solved itself. Investors rightly made a promise to like keep an open mind about it, if it would fail at scale to reconsider it. And we always said, Yeah, well keep an open mind. Like we have our values that on our value speech or not find remote or remote. That’s not one of our values. It’s an outcome, maybe have some of our values but not an input. And it just when we raised our B round, I just spoke to an investor yesterday, who declined our B round, because what they did is they looked at it and the most likely outcome for any companies to get acquired. And they called a couple of curb deaf people and said, Look, this is a roll remote company, how do you feel about acquiring them? And these are like, the usual suspects in acquisition land, like, let’s say, the oracles of the world? He said, Look, we’re not going to do that. That doesn’t that’s so hard to integrate. We’re not going to do that. And they, they passed on ob, and August, there was a lot of skepticism as well. And there were two things. So first of all, they know they would get a discount on an acquisition. And if you get about 50%, so half devaluation, because there’s no people to move over. You could live with that hook, the goal was to go for an IPO. And even if it failed, even at a 50% discount, it was looking like a good deal. The second thing was it going to be able to manage the company. So if you’re the wheelchair have invited me to give a presentation about that. He said we’re concerned please address it, which is great. Like all the other VCs are many of them just passed without giving us a chance to explain. So I came in with a deck explained all the different fixes we were doing. And then Okay, still concern. And then one of the associates that look, I went online, I looked at their handbook that Sid is talking about, and it’s amazing. It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. This is the best run company we’ve ever seen. This makes sense.
Erasmus Elsner 23:50
So I’m so fascinated about this, you know, there’s a theory of the firm. And I think you’re not only challenging how software is developed, but at the same time, you’re challenging how an organization can be run, for example, today, when I tried to find out about the shadow programs, you will shatter them, I could find it in the handbook. Yeah, it’s it’s so amazing to have a company like laying out every like granular steps of how it works and operates. So maybe let’s move on a little bit to the product. Let’s start with the basics of the product. I think you mentioned ones, which I think was really interesting in comparing it to GitHub, you mentioned that GitHub is in many ways closed source software used for open source projects while Gitlab is open source, but it is often used to develop proprietary software. Was this always the plan or did this sort of evolve over time in terms of the product?
Sid Sijbrandij 24:43
Yeah, I think what happened is that GitHub had a focus on hosting open source projects. It was something the founders were very proud and Dimitri was working at a consultancy and and he was focusing on his own use case, From then on, most of the people starting to use Gitlab were using it in kind of an enterprise setting. So we focused on that enterprise use case. And what’s happening now is that companies are switching from kind of agile development to DevOps, where development and operations are integrated. They all found that they need like 1520 different applications to do that. And they all picked their preferred point solutions, and then try to integrate all of them into their homegrown DevOps platform. And what they’re finding is that they don’t have enough visibility across the entire pipeline. And this is all the way from planning what you’re going to do, writing to code to securing that monitoring that the packaging, everything else. And get lab is coming in as a single application that can replace that homegrown solution. And people are finding that their cycle time is greatly reduced, they can go much faster from deciding what to do, to delivering it to users measuring the response and then having input for the next iteration. The we kind of got lucky that the enterprise market in that sense was underserved. And it wasn’t intuitive to us that a single application would be better it took someone in the company Camille to stand up and say that and us Giving that a try and finding out it was really bad.
Erasmus Elsner 26:29
Today, you have a broad range of products competing with the likes of JIRA, J frog artifactory. I think in the beginning, it was just source control. And then I think the first additional feature you made was was the CI, now you have like all kinds of features, including security, monitoring, the whole DevOps sites, as you said, I had Joseph Jackson program a couple of weeks ago. And I think you had a discussion with him once where you basically talked about the value capture of open source projects. And given that you have so much surface of the product, you can afford in a way to capture minimum value. Whereas if you if you were focusing on just one tiny problem set, you would have to basically capture much more value to get to profitability. So maybe talk a little bit about this, how this expanded, the product range expanded and how you think about this value capture and commercial open source software in general.
Sid Sijbrandij 27:28
Yeah, so I think you put it really well, because we do everything from managing the entire process and planning up to verifying, releasing, configuring, monitoring defending it. That’s an enormous market. And we’re competitors for monitoring, we’ll have to charge per gigabyte in order to build a giant company, we can take a very small rake, very small piece of of the pie and still be a giant company. And I think that’s a superpower. Also. It felt like a year ago, it felt like, it might have been too ambitious. But we’re seeing that we’re able to integrate everything into a single application, which is a bit counterintuitive. But it also helps us to differentiate from kind of stringing a bunch of point solutions together. And it allows us to hire great people who are passionate about that. So kind of the ambition has really helped, both with like the addressable market and not having to capture a lot but also with selling the product, marketing the products and hiring great people.
Erasmus Elsner 28:47
Let’s focus on one particular trend that I’ve noticed in your product, which is that you’ve really doubled down on the on the Kubernetes ecosystem. The container container orchestration system, obviously, is an open source project initiated by by Google, one of your large investors is Google Ventures. And when the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub was announced last year, you also moved all the Gitlab SaaS infrastructure from Microsoft, Azure to GCP. How do you think about this relationship with this giant?
Sid Sijbrandij 29:24
So we’re very happy with our relationship with GCP Google Cloud Platform, but also happy with the relationship we have with all the other cloud providers basically, except for Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, many others are now that GitHub is part of Azure and Azure DevOps, for example, Salesforce dx. Their conference for developers is now kind of we did a big session about how Gitlab is a great way to make Salesforce applications. So although we want to be cloud agnostic, we want to have a great way to deploy to Azure as well. But we’re seeing that like, the collaboration in the field with salespeople, the salespeople of all the other old Microsoft’s competitors, and now more open to collaborating with us. And getting kind of workflow portability for for customers with the help of Gitlab Kubernetes came at the right time for us. We were trying to make sure that you can just write your code, give love this the rest, we call that auto DevOps, we package it up, we we figure out what tests need to be run, we make sure it’s secure everything else, also want to deploy it, roll it out gradually, etc. And all of the environments our customers had were different. And then Kubernetes came along and kind of commoditize that space where it’s a single API, you want to do a deploy, just tell Kubernetes to do to deploy and point it to to get lab Container Registry, that makes things a lot simpler, and want to make sure that if you want to do DevOps, all you need is a cluster and get lab, and you have it done end to end, you don’t need any other tools. It’s been great. And we’ve seen that customers are increasingly demanding from their, from their public cloud that they offer great Kubernetes clusters, and the customers can take care of the rest.
Erasmus Elsner 31:38
If you could dream a little bit in terms of products that you could have get lab for music, video design sketches, basically, if you could dream of what Gitlab could become, in terms of the company for source control.
Sid Sijbrandij 31:52
Yeah, so our mission is everyone can contribute. And we want people to be able to contribute to the company, okay, you you read on our CEO shadow problem, if there’s something on that page, that’s wrong, you can send us a request to change it. We want people to contribute to Gitlab itself. Over the last half year, the number of contributions to Gitlab doubled it now over 200 a month 200 improvements a month that are coming from the wider community. And last but certainly not least, want people to kind of use Gitlab to to make things better. Right now that software. And what’s possible now in software, it is that someone doesn’t have to invite you to improve something as long as you can see it is as long as you can see your coat you can contribute to it. And I hope that will become available not just for software, but many other things. Asked and coach who is an investor in Gitlab and with him we talked about, if you have a movie, right now you get the final edit, what if you can get all the individual camera feeds, and all the editing information and all the audio tracks, and you could remix it yourself, you could maybe make a slightly different cut or make an improvement, you can send that back. So instead of like three people in a studio in a couple of weeks making an edit, you can have all these remixes of things. I think that’d be interesting. I think if I look at that my desk, all the hardware that’s there, if I have a better idea, I cannot send something back. Like all those formats are not conducive to that. I hope we can change those formats where you can you can suggest an improvement and their their movements like open hardware, things like that are starting to happen.
Erasmus Elsner 33:45
That’s so cool. I really love that product vision. So final question. You’re one of the very few companies publicly announced date for going public. So So what does this journey look like in the next year? I mean, you’re obviously the most transparent company out there. But how you feel about this process of gearing up for for the public?
Sid Sijbrandij 34:08
Yeah. So going public is a combination of an ambition we said a long time ago. But also we think it fits us. As a public company. It almost implies that transparency, we will be a way for us to tell our story and reach more people like our biggest problem is awareness. And people think who we do source control even though we do 10 times more than that today. We think going public will help with that. And we also look forward to kind of the operational discipline you have to have as a public company we think that’s a healthy way to operate. Think as being remote forced us to do things you should do anyway but do them earlier, and I hope the same will be true with hopefully becoming a public company.
Erasmus Elsner 34:57
Okay, wonderful. Last thing called to action, where can people find out more about you and find out more about Gitlab?
Sid Sijbrandij 35:05
Yeah, so Gitlab D it la B, if you Google it, you’ll you’ll find everything you need to know. You can sign up for an account, you can view our website contribute to our source code. If you’re a watcher of this program, you’re a bit curious about, like how we run the company. You can Google get lab Handbook, and have a public Handbook of over 3000 pages. And if you’re more into video, there’s a channel called get lab unfiltered on YouTube and it contains a lot of our calls. So if you want to attend a meeting at get lab, go there to to join one.
Erasmus Elsner 35:42
Okay, wonderful. So this is it for today. So I hope you found this episode, as exciting as I did. I really loved recording it sits around is such a great guy. He’s so open is so approachable, and I’m really looking forward to follow their journey. And if you want to hear more about what I’m up to, you can always subscribe to my newsletter on Santo road, the Ohio or just subscribe to the channel and tune in next time. It’s up to you. Cheers, guys.