GitLab’s CEO on Building One of the World’s Largest All-Remote Companies

When two software engineers decided, in 2013, to launch an enterprise software-as-a-service business around GitLab—the open-source collaborative software-development application that they’d been working on—they didn’t intend to turn it into the world’s largest all-remote organization. But they lived 2,000 kilometers apart—one in Ukraine and the other in the Netherlands—and their first hire was in Serbia. None of them wanted to move, so GitLab began its corporate life with a small, distributed workforce. As the founders began hiring more people, they made it official: The company would have no offices; employees could work from anywhere.

Today GitLab’s 2,000 team members are spread across some 60 countries and regions around the world. The company neither owns nor rents any corporate office space. Well before the Covid-19 pandemic hastened such a shift for other organizations, GitLab’s leaders embraced and developed best practices around virtual collaboration. They learned that success depends on measuring output, not input; aligning people on norms and values; ensuring that policies and processes are continually and openly documented; and reinforcing key self-management and people-­management skills.