Gitlab is a company that provides a DevOps platform that provides the ability to develop, secure, and operate software in one platform. The platform allows for collaboration amongst developers, IT, operations, security, and business teams to deliver business outcomes. The ultimate goal of DevOps is to allow teams to collaborate and work together to shorten the development lifecycle and evolve from delivering software on a slow periodic basis to rapid, continuous updates. Gitlab’s strategy is predicated around Agile development, iteration and continuous development (CD), Continuous Iteration/Integration (CI).

The image below shows the stakeholders and all the steps required to build software. Gitlab’s competitive advantage is their ability to provide a full product stack and centralize everything that an IT and business team would need to deliver projects.

Fun Facts:

*Git is software for tracking changes within software. It is most often used for coordinating work amongst teams of software developers who are collaboratively developing code. Git, itself, has been around for 16 years. It was originally developed by Linus Torvalds, the developer of the Linux kernel. It has been widely adopted by developers. Git is often thought of as part of a DevOps paradigm*

*The overall definition of DevOps is that “it is a set of practices, tools and a cultural philosophy that automates and integrates the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.”helps multiple developers work on the same code without stepping on each others code or hindering the other's progress. Each developer works on their own "branch" or copy of the main code and after making changes will "commit" changes via a "merge request”*

Lesson: Create an amazing product, build the community, focus on the developers and let them have an amazing developer experience, wait until approaching enterprise customers.

The Market: Software DevOps is large:

The addressable market opportunity for Gitlab within DevOps Platform is ~$40 billion. According to Gartner, the TAM for Global Infrastructure Software is estimated to be $458B by the end of 2024 (11.8% CAGR). This would represent 300% growth from a 20% adoption rate in 2021.

Gitlab’s product advantage and expansions:

The image below is an overview of the important software development steps and how Gitlab has a product that aligns within each of those segments. The darker green represents fully-built products and the lower green, more open source tools available.

My key thesis for the business can be summarized:

1. Gitlab has a very high Dollar-based net retention rate (DBNRR) of 152%. This is amongst one of the best in software. It signals that the product is sticky amongst its userbase and points to evidence that they can continue maintaining growth at a larger scale (almost without growing new customers as fast.)
2. Continuous Integration (CI) building tools and source code management (SCM) is Gitlab’s biggest strength over competitors amongst developers. These areas have their their biggest strngths against competitors. GitLab platform spans all six major buckets of DevOps solutions as discussed earlier, If GitLab is successful in driving penetration across all six, it could generate revenue growth materially.