Sid Sijbrandij

Well, it's been amazing kind of living the American dream.

2015, I came to the US.

We raised money for GitLab and we set our sights on growing the company, becoming a public company.

And then six years later, we took it public, which was amazing.

Amazing.

And we're very fortunate to... Six years to public, huh?

Yeah.

That speed.

Yeah, we tried to lead the company with a ton of transparency.

And we believe that helped us be an all remote company, but at the same time being super on the same page.

And it's paid its dividends both in

coordinating us, hiring great people, but also getting customers excited about the company itself and how we partner.

I stepped down as exec chair last year, or stepped down as CEO and now became an exec chair, which means that I'm still an employee of the company.

So I still have two engineers reporting to me, and we're taking on projects that I'm super excited about.

And right now we're working on adding observability into GitLab.

So really, really exciting to work on that.

Yeah, for sure.

So end of 22, one year after the IPO, I discovered I had bone cancer, a six centimeter tumor grown from my spine.

And we had to do surgery really quickly.

I was in a lot of pain and we removed the vertebrae and most of the cancer and did a spinal fusion with a titanium frame.