GitLab CFO on Remote Culture Success, AI Integration

Summary

Motley Fool Money: GitLab CFO on Remote Culture Success, AI Integration

Release Date: June 28, 2025

In this insightful episode of Motley Fool Money hosted by Tom, Dylan Lewis, Ricky Mulvey, and Mary Long, the spotlight shines on Brian Robbins, Chief Financial Officer of GitLab. Brian delves deep into GitLab’s journey as the leading all-remote DevSecOps platform, its strategic integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its robust financial health. This summary captures the essence of the hour-long discussion, highlighting key topics, notable quotes, and actionable insights.

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1. Introduction to GitLab and Brian Robbins’ Journey

Brian Robbins opens the conversation by outlining GitLab's mission and platform capabilities.

Brian Robbins [00:45]: "GitLab is the most comprehensive, intelligent DevSecOps platform for software innovation. We help developers be more productive, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation."

He emphasizes GitLab’s extensive user base of approximately 50 million and its standing as a premier DevSecOps solution in the market.

2. Understanding DevSecOps

Tom prompts Brian to explain DevSecOps, making the term accessible to listeners unfamiliar with it.

Brian Robbins [01:15]: "GitLab enables everybody to work on it with a system of record in a single pane of glass, so you can see exactly what's happening. GitLab increases cycle time for software development by 7x."

Brian illustrates the efficiency GitLab brings by comparing it to using Google Docs for real-time collaboration, eliminating the need for a centralized “air traffic controller.”

3. Scaling Remote Culture at GitLab

Carl inquires about GitLab’s experience scaling its all-remote culture, especially post-pandemic.

Brian Robbins [04:02]: "GitLab was founded as an all-remote company, and everything was documented in the handbook. Being an all-remote company enables you to hire team members from anywhere. We have over 2,000 employees located in over 65 countries today."

Brian highlights the strategic advantage of a global talent pool, allowing GitLab to maintain a diverse and highly skilled workforce without geographical constraints.

4. AI Integration and Technological Shifts

Andy shifts the conversation to GitLab’s integration of AI and its impact on the platform.

Brian Robbins [06:02]: "We are investing heavily in AI, integrating it throughout the entire software development lifecycle. Our Duo product injects AI not just for code suggestions but across planning, managing, deploying, and securing software."

Brian explains the Duo suite as a comprehensive AI-enhanced toolset designed to boost developer productivity and streamline operations.

5. Competition with Microsoft and GitHub

Tom addresses the competitive landscape, particularly GitHub’s partnership with Microsoft.

Brian Robbins [10:19]: "While tools like GitHub Copilot focus on code suggestions, GitLab offers an integrated platform that manages the entire development lifecycle. This holistic approach positions GitLab uniquely in the market."

Brian asserts that GitLab’s single pane of glass approach provides a competitive edge by managing complexity and ensuring seamless integration across all stages of development.

6. Strategic Partnerships and AI Models

Carl probes deeper into GitLab’s partnerships, especially with AI model providers.

Brian Robbins [16:03]: "We’ve partnered with Amazon Q, integrating their AI development tools directly into our DevSecOps platform. This collaboration tackles critical development challenges like autonomous feature development and security vulnerability remediation."

Brian also mentions GitLab’s flexibility in utilizing various AI models, ensuring the platform remains model-neutral and adaptable.

Brian Robbins [50:39]: "Currently, we are using Anthropic as one of the LLMs for our AI functionalities. We continuously evaluate and integrate the best models to serve our customers effectively."

7. Financial Health and Growth Metrics

The conversation transitions to GitLab’s financial performance, with Brian highlighting the company’s robust balance sheet and revenue growth.

Brian Robbins [28:00]: "We generated over $100 million in free cash flow in the last quarter. Our cash balance exceeds a billion dollars, and we maintain zero debt."

On revenue growth:

Brian Robbins [33:04]: "We grew revenue by 27% year-over-year, with a non-GAAP gross margin of 90%. Our SaaS revenue now constitutes about 30% of total revenue, growing at 35% annually."

Brian emphasizes responsible growth and operating leverage, ensuring sustained financial health while investing in key areas like AI and security.

8. Go-to-Market Strategy and Customer Base

Andy inquires about GitLab’s go-to-market strategies and its diverse customer base.

Brian Robbins [23:43]: "We employ both bottoms-up and top-down sales motions. Approximately 50% of Fortune 100 companies use GitLab products, often starting with individual departments and expanding enterprise-wide."

GitLab’s flexible approach allows it to cater to a wide range of clients, from individual engineers to large enterprises, ensuring comprehensive market coverage.

9. Stock-Based Compensation and Employee Incentives

The discussion touches on GitLab’s compensation philosophy, particularly stock-based compensation.

Brian Robbins [42:02]: "Stock-based compensation constitutes around 30% of our gross profit, aligning employee incentives with company performance. We focus on rewarding high performers without making compensation the sole focus."

Brian underscores the importance of a balanced compensation strategy that fosters both personal and professional growth among employees.

10. Future Outlook and Excitement

As the episode nears its end, Brian shares his enthusiasm for GitLab’s future.

Brian Robbins [56:18]: "With over 50 million users and strong financials, we are well-positioned to continue our growth and enhance our AI capabilities. Our investments in AI and security will drive further value for our customers."

Brian is optimistic about GitLab’s ability to maintain its leadership in the DevSecOps market, leveraging AI to innovate and meet evolving customer needs.

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Key Takeaways

• GitLab’s Comprehensive Platform: GitLab offers an all-in-one DevSecOps platform that enhances productivity, security, and operational efficiency for developers worldwide.

• All-Remote Success: GitLab’s deliberate strategy to remain an all-remote company from inception has allowed it to tap into a global talent pool, fostering diversity and flexibility.

• AI Integration: GitLab is deeply integrating AI across its platform, particularly through its Duo suite, to automate and enhance various stages of the software development lifecycle.

• Strong Financials: GitLab boasts a clean balance sheet with substantial cash reserves and impressive revenue growth, ensuring stability and capacity for future investments.

• Competitive Edge: By providing a single pane of glass for the entire development cycle, GitLab maintains a competitive advantage over platforms like GitHub and Microsoft.

• Strategic Partnerships: Collaborations, such as with Amazon Q, enhance GitLab’s capabilities and expand its offerings, addressing critical development challenges.

• Balanced Compensation: GitLab’s compensation strategy, blending cash and stock-based incentives, aligns employee rewards with company performance and growth.

Notable Quotes

• Brian Robbins on DevSecOps Efficiency:
  "[...] GitLab increases cycle time for software development by 7x." [01:15]

• On AI Integration:
  "Our Duo product injects AI not just for code suggestions but across planning, managing, deploying, and securing software." [06:02]

• Competitive Strategy:
  "GitLab offers an integrated platform that manages the entire development lifecycle." [10:19]

• Financial Health:
  "We generated over $100 million in free cash flow in the last quarter. Our cash balance exceeds a billion dollars, and we maintain zero debt." [28:00]

• Future Outlook:
  "Our investments in AI and security will drive further value for our customers." [56:18]

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Conclusion

Brian Robbins provides a comprehensive overview of GitLab’s strategic initiatives, financial robustness, and innovative integration of AI. Emphasizing a strong all-remote culture and a unified DevSecOps platform, GitLab is poised for continued growth and market leadership. This episode offers invaluable insights for investors, developers, and technology enthusiasts keen on understanding GitLab’s pivotal role in the evolving software development landscape.

Transcript

[Brian Robbins]

Foreign.

[Tom]

Thank you so much for spending the next hour with us. I feel like what I'm about to do is unfair, but I expect that to happen throughout this entire hour. So here we go. That's just the way we roll. I'm going to screen Share Brian's LinkedIn page. Brian, can we go on a little quick walking tour of your career and what led you here to GitLab?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Tom, and for the others for having GitLab on today. Appreciate you having us on the show today. Before I get into my bio, it would be helpful just to let the viewers know what GitLab does.

[Tom]

Yes, please, absolutely.

[Brian Robbins]

GitLab is the Most comprehensive, intelligent DevSecOps platform for software innovation. We help developers be more productive, improve operational efficiency, we reduce their security and compliance risk and we help them with their accelerate their digital transformation. We have approximately 50 million users on our platform and we are one of the leading DevSecOps platforms out in the market today.

[Tom]

Can you just explain what DevSecOps is to somebody who doesn't understand that term?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, absolutely. When people, people manage, deploy secure software, there's a number of different Personas that touch. Typically if you go back 10 years ago, developers would work on it. Then the developers would actually toss it over to the security professionals, they'd come back with the security vulnerabilities, it'd go over to operations for QA and testing and so forth. GitLab enables everybody to work on it with a system of record in a single pane of glass and, and so you can see exactly what's happening. So there's no one that has to play air traffic controller. Analogy that I'll use is I've written several S1s, taken a couple of companies public and I used to spend a majority of my time being the air traffic controller who has this section, who has that section, when was it last updated and so forth. When I wrote the S1 for GitLab with a team, we used Google Docs and so everybody knew all the moves add changes and deletes as a document was being put together and everybody could work on it in real time. And so GitLab increases cycle time for software development by 7x.

[Tom]

Thank you very much for that. So we'll just go quickly through this. Talk to us about your time. We can just go to Brighton Park Capital Forward and how it led you to GitLab and then obviously you have your board seat on ID. Me love to hear just a little bit about that. But then we're going to the whole hour is going to be GitLab. This is our Brian Robbins moment.

[Brian Robbins]

Appreciate it, Tom. You know, and so, you know, I've been a software CFO that have gone into several software companies and prepared them to go public. A number of them have actually been bought with that. I've been asked to be an advisor for different VC funds and private equity funds. I'm an advisor at Brighton Park Capital. You know, they have, you know, over a billion dollars under management and I help advise them on some of their software investments. You know, I came to GitLab just because GitLab was the largest all remote company pre pandemic and one of the most public, public companies out there. We have a handbook with a lot of what we have published out in the market and so you can go on our handbook and search a lot about the company. And we have, we're a very transparent company that's out there. I recently joined a board called ID ME, ID.ME is located over by where you guys are located at. Yeah. So happy to go into any further details about any of that.

[Tom]

That's great. Maybe I'll turn it over to Andy and Carl for the next questions and then I'll jump in after.

[Carl]

Yeah, I can ask first. I mean, how has it scaled for the remote culture? So you joined. It was already the biggest all remote company. Has it been fine? Has it been bumps through the process since you've joined?

[Brian Robbins]

You know, it's been a great experience. I was at a software conference one time and this is during the height of the pandemic and people were asking, hey, should we be all remote or should we be in office? At that point it really dawned on me. Most people spend most of their time deciding on the strategy of how they want to be versus change management. But when GitLab was founded, from the start it intended to be an all remote company. And everything was documented in the handbook, whether you start as a CFO or whether you start as a BDR in sales and you all go through the same onboarding process. It's a self led process where you go through videos, quizzes, you read papers, you learn about the culture of the company. You actually go and learn how to use GitLab and do merge requests. Since they were very deliberate about being all remote and everything was outlined. Everybody had the same foundation and expectations when they joined the company. Being the CFO and hiring a number of new people to be on the team. You know, if we were just based in San Francisco or New York or London, for example, you Know the amount of people that you could hire would be on that geography, how far they live away from the office, what their commute would be like. Being an all remote company enables you really hire, you know, team members from anywhere. And so we're located in over 6,565 countries today. We have over 2,000 employees. And it's made it really helpful to go through that process and really have obviously the world as sort of your talent pool.

[Andy]

Brian, can you talk a little bit about just how the technology has shifted over the years since GitLab's been around the AI impact just in general. And you gave a great analogy about Google Docs. I'm just wondering if you could do something similar to how development has changed maybe over the last few years and how GitLab has helped in that regard.

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, GitLab as a whole has helped developers, security and operations professionals become more efficient. The Forester Wave study, one of the sites that we did. If you buy GitLab ultimate, the payback period on that is less than six months and ROI is over 480% in three years. The GitLab's mission is always being able to help people go through the software development life cycle and do that more efficiently. And so we have constantly looked at ways of doing that. We continually iterate on our software to allow releases come out to our customers that they can use to get the benefits of what we do. Over the last two or three years, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars in R and D putting that into the platform, allowing our developers to get more feature functionality for that software development life cycle. AI is just another way of doing that. We approach AI a little bit differently than other people. Our Duo, Enterprise Duo is our series of AI products, if you will, basically injects AI throughout the entire software development life cycle. Instead of just around code suggestions and code development, we looked at the entire problem set and came up with ways to actually help allow AI with the process to enable our customers to do that more efficiently.

[Tom]

I want to talk a little bit more specifically about the technical side with you and Carl jumping in some of those questions. But first, just your broad philosophical view at GitLab or Brian Robbins, his view of employment going forward and what AI means. Obviously remote work is a different work format. The Motley fool is has offices. But we allow all of our foolish employees and contractors to select where they would like to work. And that has opened up the opportunity for us to recruit talent around the world. A number of our leading AI practitioners at the Motley fool are on contract around the world. We were able to find them in ways that it wouldn't have been possible if we were forcing everyone into a single zip code. We could never have brought this talent together. So but as we see that happening, we see a lot more interaction between full timers and contractors, for example, or, or short contract advisors that have a specialized skill and come in over an eight week period and help to level us up in ways that we wouldn't have been able to do in a formal workplace structure. And then of course now co generation automation and this, the potential that we could have an apocalypse, you know, the employment apocalypse. So do you subscribe to that or what do you think? I don't know if you have children or if you're ever teaching a class in college, what you would tell college seniors or college freshmen about what employment will look like for them over the next 10 plus years.

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, I do have two boys, one graduated college, one's in college today. You know, I think it's obviously the advice that you give your children is different than advice maybe in the work world itself. Tom, it seems like your firm is very similar to our firm in the sense that we can employ people from literally all over the world and basically assemble the best talent pool to conquer the opportunities that we have in front of us today. There's a lot of similarities there. I think it's important today for people getting into the workforce and people looking at how that's going to change, you know, to be technical in nature. There's a lot of advancements in AI. I think data science is, you know, a necessary requirement for a lot of fields that people go into, you know, especially in the tech world. And so I think, you know, we're very similar to your beliefs as it relates to remote work and the ability to recruit from all over the world.

[Tom]

We'll go to the technical side now, then we're going to bring up your financial statements later and ask you a few questions about them so we can learn directly from you. I'm curious just more specifically and then turn it to Carl about the integrations with AI tooling and GitLab's integrations and what sort of competitive challenges you face with, you know, the relationship between GitHub and Microsoft. And you know, I can't. Developers can't easily use Cursor or windsurf with GitLab. So what do you see as the future of GitLab's position in the market? I would say certainly given the substantial competitive advantage that Microsoft and GitHub have together.

[Brian Robbins]

It's a great question. Two different things. Let me answer Cursor, Windsurf and then Microsoft and GitHub. There was a lot of questions on the earnings call related some of the press that Cursor, Windsurf and some of the M and A activity in that field has generated. We pick up where they leave off. Cursor Windsurf is really into the code suggestions and code generations. But once you actually develop, and it's located primarily in the ide, once you actually develop that, then you need to have a system to plan, manage, deploy, secure package, the rest of the software development lifecycle. The more code that is created, I'm a firm believer we'll create more complexity. The more complexity is you need an integrated platform that has a single pane of glass to look over the entire software development life cycle. I think the platforms today are well positioned with all the code that's going to get created. There has been a lot of questions around developer seat count and what will impact seat count over time, especially as it's related to the AI that's coming out. A simple equation to me is you have developers times productivity equals output and one of two things will happen. If productivity goes way up and you assume output is going to stay constant, then developer seat count will go down. If developers stay constant and productivity goes way up, you can bank on a lot of output increasing. And every company today has to become a software company regardless of what vertical you're in. If you're in transportation, manufacturing, federal sector, whatever sector you're in, software is a differentiator of giving customers more data, where your package is at, when it be arrived, how many stops, your delivery, drivers, way they're shopping more, they're more informed. And so I'm a big believer that the developer seat count will remain relatively the same, output will increase. But also with AI you can actually reach different Personas. And so there will be many more people doing developer like functions with AI out there today.

[Carl]

I'll follow up on that just because so I'm a developer here at the Motley fool and just for all the viewers. So there's these development tools, Cursor and Windsurf, where developers are using AI models to code a lot faster, get their throughput up a lot. As Brian is saying, I just wonder, I'm on that first half where we're working in the IDE before deployment and then maybe making changes after deployment and fixing things in production. But with so much time spent in the IDE and you're saying GitLab helps a lot afterwards for all that work that comes after. Do you not see that as a gap perhaps, where maybe it would be great if there wasn't an easy integration or access for AI coding models with Cursor, Windsurf or other tools just to allow easier access to that code for developers in that first section?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the question, Carl. If you think about the GitLab platform, all the code suggestion tools set on top of that GitLab is an open source tool. People can do co creation in GitLab. A lot of our customers, they will write merge requests, software enhancements to the platform, which all customers get the benefit of. We have something called Code Suggestions today. It's built into our Duo product. We just announced before earnings that you'll be included in all premium and ultimate subscriptions, that you will get the ability to have that as part of your base plan to do that. And so whether you use copilot, cursor, windsurf, GitLab, duo code suggestions, all that sits on top of GitLab and can be used in correlation with GitLab. And so it's not a replacement, it's the combination thereof. We've been trying to think of different analogies to explain this to investors and folks that ask. And one of the analogies our CEO used during the earnings call was the difference between Excel and Source Snowflake. Excel people are in the model, they're using the data, they're manipulating the data. But they use Snowflake more for the data warehouse, for broad data science. Still relatively the same data, but used for different purposes.

[Carl]

Gotcha. Nice. I wonder if you can say if there's any differentiators between your AI coding product duo and something like GitHub, Copilot and Cursor and Windsurf and all these other AI coding copilots.

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, they're all based on the underlying LLMs. One of the things that we have relative to our AI and code suggestions in general is we have the context of what you're doing within GitLab. We understand what's going on within your code, what corrections you're making, what security vulnerabilities you had. The more context the knowledge graph that you have, the better the suggestions are going to be. And so you'll still need a human to review it. You need to go through and look at quality and security and so forth. And so we're building Knowledge Graph to go around our AI products that will give more context, which is a differentiator to some of the other products out in the market today.

[Carl]

I'm very bullish on Knowledge Graph, so you're pushing the right buttons here. So I'm happy about that.

[Brian Robbins]

Thanks.

[Carl]

I also saw that Duo had a partnership with Amazon Q, right, or AWS q which is AWS's kind of platform and coding copilot system. I don't know if you want to talk about that for a second.

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, absolutely. April of this year we announced General availability of GitLab Duo with Amazon Q and so the integrated offerings available as a bundle for GitLab Ultimate Self Managed customers on AWS. And really what we're doing is we're bundling Amazon Q software development agencies directly into the GitLab DevSecOps platform. It's basically once again bring in the best of what we have, the best of what Amazon has, putting it together and jointly selling it to AWS customers and our customers. Some of the things that this partnership will do is help tackle some of the critical development challenges such as autonomous feature development, legacy code based modernization, security vulnerability remediation, quality assurance improvement and other things. And so we're super happy about the partnership. This was announced on the re invent stage, main stage live. You know, Amazon typically doesn't partner with a lot of companies and sort of co creation and really think this will bring a lot of benefit to Amazon and GitLab customers.

[N/A]

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[Andy]

You mentioned the DevSecOps tries to solve overall in software development. Can you talk a little bit about more recently? What are some of the challenges, some of the big problems that your customers, your key clients are asking you for and what you're trying to solve some of those really meaty problems you're trying to solve right now.

[Brian Robbins]

It's interesting, I think there's a number of meaty problems. I think security is always top of most of the people's agendas, if you will. This past quarter our ultimate product made up approximately 2/3 of the overall mix of what we sold. Ultimate is our highest priced product and it really has advanced security and compliance features that our customers love about the product. That's one I think companies today we're in a very dynamic environment obviously. And companies today want to basically take the best of breed tool chains that they have that they're constantly trying to integrate together to increase the software velocity. You can do that in the GitLab platform. And so a lot of people come to us where they're eliminating a lot of these point solutions to get onto the platform, to increase cycle time and to do software development better, faster, cheaper, more secure.

[Tom]

Well, it's time for another game here. I'm going to do another screen share and in this case you will see that I have prompted this question on GPT if you were the CEO if you were CEO of GitLab and you wanted to 5x the value of the company over the next 7 years, what exactly would you do? In layman's terms and in less than 300 words. So I'm going to read each of these quickly and then Brian, you can pick and choose any ones that you like or dislike share whether how accurate you think it is and how much we just learned from this, or whether it was a waste of time. If I were the CEO of GitLab and wanted to 5x the company's value in 7 years, here's exactly what I do in plain English, go all in on AI for developers. Make GitLab the default place where AI helps you write, test, review and deploy code faster and safer. Not just an add on, but built deeply into the product. Think copilot for the whole DevOps process. Number two build native support for tools like Cursor and Windsurf. Partner up or Pay to integrate GitLab into all the new AI dev tools. GitLab can't have a monopoly here. We need to be where tomorrow's coders are working. Number three win enterprise trust with private AI. Sell GitLab as the safe place to use AI inside companies. Make it easy for CIOs to say yes to GitLab because their data, code and models stay private and secure. Number four make money from the free tier. Millions use GitLab for free already. Convert more of them with irresistible AI tools, usage based pricing and easier onboarding for teams and finally be the Switzerland of Software development. Position GitLab as the open neutral alternative to Microsoft. We're not pushing Azure, we're helping teams ship better software no matter what cloud, AI model or stack they use. In short, focus everything on AI powered software creation. Turn the GitLab platform into an indispensable tool for modern teams and stop letting GitHub eat our lunch. Oh, I wasn't expecting the last line there anything that you'd like to reflect on there? Particularly nasty last line by GPT in partnership with Microsoft. I say jokingly, okay, which of these five stand out to you as persuasive?

[Brian Robbins]

Well, thanks Tom. I appreciate the games that you're playing. It's a very good list. It's interesting. The list is really very similar to our top three objectives this year as a company that we've outlined on our previous earnings calls. Number one is focus on first orders. We know once someone lands on GitLab, the benefit and ROI will be very high and that they'll continue to expand and grow in GitLab over a period of time. Cohorts from 10 years ago are expanding roughly at the same rate as cohorts are expanding today and we have a very high gross retention rate. That's number one. Number two is give more value to our customers that is going from premium to ultimate and building basically a product that enables them to realize the value of security and compliance. Three is investments in AI. If you look at the list that you've come up with, they're very similar to our objectives that we talk about externally as well as internally that we go through every week. I think 5 is really important. Being the Switzerland of software development, GitLab is a public company that isn't aligned with 1. Hyperscaler is a diverse revenue stream. One customer doesn't make up more than 2% of our overall revenue and we are developing for what's best for the DevSecOps market and we don't have other products that we're bundling together and selling a whole host of products together. And so we are the Switzerland of software development which I think is really important as well. Obviously monetizing the free tier. We have a bunch of people in our free tier. We have the wider community of developers which we think is very important from a contribution standpoint, from a brand standpoint. Getting into education early. We have a number of people in colleges and universities using the product so I think the list is spot on and it aligns with the objectives within the company. So I appreciate the game that you played.

[Tom]

It's not the only one we'll play and thanks for playing along Brian. We'll go back to Andy who has to exit in a few minutes. So Andy, the next two questions are.

[Andy]

Yours tying back to the free side of GitLab? I'm just curious if you can give some insights into your go to market strategy. The differentiating, how you're thinking about selling, reaching more clients, just Educate us a little bit more about what GitLab is doing from a uniqueness perspective on the selling side.

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, absolutely. We had a new CRO just join us this last quarter, Ian Steward. He's really focused on obviously the go to market motions. There's a number of ways for GitLab to grow, obviously selling to new clients, expanding with our existing clients. We have a number of new SKUs that our clients can actually buy such as Duo Pro, Duo Enterprise. This winter we have a Gentec workflow coming out which be the Duo agents. We also have Dedicated which is a single tenant SaaS that you can buy if you don't want to be in the public cloud. Most of ours run in the cloud today we have a partnership program, a channel program we sell through hyperscalers. We can expand GEOs and so the market, the estimated TAM of the market today, and this is before all the AI and the adjacent TAMS that you may get into, is about $40 billion. And it's growing at a relatively healthy clip. Once you add new Personas in there with AI and other things that we talked about earlier, the market's only going to get bigger. I think we are well positioned as a company with our current product set being a Switzerland that we talked about a little bit earlier from a DevSecOps perspective to go out and execute in that market.

[Andy]

Brian, I know you serve a lot of the Fortune 100, some of the largest clients. Just talk a little bit about the balance between serving large clients who are, what kind of large clients are you serving? What industries are you focusing the most on? All the way down to some of the smaller clients.

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the Fortune 100, about 50% of them, about half of them use a GitLab product today. That could be in a division department. It could be. It's usually a bottoms up adoption. So it could be anywhere in that enterprise today.

[Andy]

So Brian, sorry, is that not through the CIO's office? Is that through a different kind of process that you go through?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, there's primary two selling motions that I can talk about. One is a bottoms up adoption. The reason why our net dollar retention rate for cohorts 10 years ago is about the same as cohorts a couple years ago is because we're expanding within those clients by selling the different seats we're doing tier upgrades and then also increased customer yield. And so one motion is a bottoms up motion where a engineer within a division department will buy just for that division department. Typically that will be on a credit Card, It's a relatively small purchase. Then it will go from that department to the next department to the next department. Then it will change Personas, it will go from an engineer to an operations person. And then a lot of people use it from an operations perspective. Eventually when it gets to the security department, they'll look at what we have in Premium versus what we have in Ultimate. In ultimate we got vulnerability assessment, fuzz testing, container scanning, a number of different things. And they'll want to upgrade to ultimate to get the advanced security features. And so then we'll have an upsell in that department. That's our bottoms up motion. We do have top down motions which typically go through the CIO office that you alluded to. We talk about ubs. UBS had a wall to wall implementation. Their CIO put out a press release on purchasing GitLab and all the things that we're doing with them. And that's where they do an implementation across the entire enterprise. And so we have both selling motions, bottoms up and top down.

[Tom]

We will now go to the financial statements. I think we will lose. Andy, thank you so much for spending some time here, Andy, with us. And what we'd like to do, Brian, is it's kind of our opportunity to learn about how you see the company, to learn about GitLab and then also to learn about how to read financial statements in a way. For many of our members, we have a good continuum of investors at the Motley Fool. Some of them are retired CFOs of public companies, others just made their first investment three days ago. So we try to reach all of them in different ways here on fool24. So let's just start with the balance sheet here. What's one or two of the most important things that you focus on looking at this balance sheet? Obviously it's liquid cash rich situation that GitLab is in. So talk to us about the balance sheet.

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, for a public company where we're valued at today we have a very clean balance sheet. You know, in fourth quarter, I'm sorry, in the quarter that we just reported first quarter, we generated over $100 million of free cash flow. And so you can see our cash balance. We have over a billion dollars of cash on the balance sheet in cash and equivalents as well as short term investments. And so obviously that's from a company perspective and an investor perspective, I think that's really important. The company doesn't have any debt per se as a debt structure. You know, we have obviously liabilities on the balance sheet. Such as, you know, accounts payable and payroll to be accrued and paid and bonuses be accrued and paid. You know, we, from a bad debt perspective, you know, you know, we bill our customers typically net 30, net 45 days. We have a very good collections, very low bad debt. But from a balance sheet perspective, it's relatively pretty easy and very clean. We always collect up front, so we have a big deferred revenue. And so whether we sell a one, three or five year deal, we collect up front. And so we recognize that as a liability and then we'll work that off over time as we deliver the service.

[Tom]

Two quick follow ups. One, can you talk about, I mean, this is a beautiful balance sheet. Can you talk about how organic GitLab is in growth and why, why no acquisitions? Obviously, you'll see to the extreme end of the continuum in technology. You see what Salesforce has done, they've essentially acquired their way, you know, somewhat brilliantly, really. I mean, you'd have to say it's been an unbelievable success story. It hasn't necessarily drawn off of a lot of internal or organic innovation and growth relative to other companies given how much acquiring of businesses they do. So why hasn't GitLab made acquisitions? What's the, what's the leadership thinking there?

[Brian Robbins]

You know, we have a corporate development team. They're out looking at different deals all the time. We've made a number of acquisitions, but they've been relatively small in size and typically pre revenue. And so one of the things with GitLab is we think it's so important to be on the same code base and not actually attach a lot of modules to it. Part of GitLab is you have this single pane of glass where everybody can see everything that's happening at the same time. It's fully integrated. Any acquisition that we do, we deprecate the software and rewrite it within GitLab very, very quickly. If we were to go out and acquire a company that had $100 million in revenue or $500 million in revenue, that customer base is expecting that they're going to be, you have a contract to supply that product and that customer base is going to expect that product under certain terms and conditions. It's very difficult to deprecate and rewrite it, put it in the GitLab platform if you have these large contractual install bases. And so most of what we're doing in MA is buy versus build analysis and time to market and aqua hires. And so, you know, we look to, for the companies that we Acquire, you know, they're relatively small and it's buying the technology and then rewriting that and putting it back into GitLab and offering that is a feature functionality to our customers.

[Tom]

Do you think? And have there been acquisitions that are really geared to attract young developers using AI tools that might be the future developers at Fortune 100 companies?

[Brian Robbins]

You know, all of our acquisitions, you know, we do it, we have a great team doing our, our corporate development analysis, reaching out, looking at the market. We have a product roadmap of where we're going. Obviously some of that includes AI, some of it includes security, some of it's around our package product. And so they're looking at all types of acquisitions of which AI is a part of that. As we go through and look at it, AI developers may come on board as part of M and A.

[Tom]

Thank you. Last question on the balance sheet. Just for a simple one for clarity for our investing members. What's the difference between cash and cash and equivalents and short term investments? And why do you sit $255 million in one and $849 million in the other?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, it's the accounting definition of how you have to classify it on your balance sheet. So short term investments are. We have two banks that we primarily do our investments with. Typically the yield is greater than cash, but cash is cash and short term investments are, you know, sort of give us a little greater yield. We have investment policy. I'm sure it's found in our handbook and at some place on what we invest in. But it's to basically increase the yield of the return of the balance that we have.

[Tom]

Thank you very much for that. We'll go to the income statement. Any reflections? And it's great. We still have Andy Cross here and Andy spends so much times in the finance, so much time in the financials companies. If you have a follow up on this, Andy, but what stands out for you? Looking at the quarterly report ended April 30 on the income statement.

[Brian Robbins]

Brian, thank you for pulling this up. You know, we grew revenue 27% year over year, I think, which is top quartile for growth in software companies. I also am very proud of how we've done on gross profit. You know, we reported a non GAAP gross margin of 90%. We've been able to maintain that our SaaS revenue has grown 35% year over year. It now comprises about 30% of our total revenue. And we've done that with getting increased operating leverage in the model. And so one of the things that we set out when we went public is we said one of the objectives for the company is number one objective is the growth but we'll do that responsibly and we've been able to deliver increased operating leverage in the model every quarter.

[Tom]

When somebody says they're not GAAP profitable, there are investors who if they saw negative eps they simply wouldn't invest. Speak to somebody to explain to them how the model works and why it shows up as negative income but positive free cash flow.

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, absolutely Tom. You know one of the we have a gap to non GAAP reconciliation or 8K. And so you can look at all the tables and what goes in and out of that. But the biggest item that we non GAAP out is stock based compensation. And so that's not an actual cash charge, but it's a P and L charge. And so our compensation philosophy from a company and being a newly public company is a combination of cash and stock for team members and the stock based compensation is a charge that you need to take to your P and L. And that's the biggest difference between GAAP and non GAAP reconciliation.

[Andy]

Brian, can you quickly just describe the license business and as a percentage of total sales it continues to go down. Will you eventually see that as almost zero going forward once you get big enough?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, it's a great question Andy. And so you can we try to meet customers where they're at and you can basically buy GitLab as self managed, which is on premise, which is licensed or you can buy it SaaS and host it. As I mentioned a little earlier in the call, our SaaS business grew 35% year over year. Currently makes up 30% of our revenue. Companies are looking they like our SaaS product because they can get basically stood up quicker. It's a lower total cost of ownership. A lot of people are familiar with buying SaaS today because of the revenue recognition policies we follow revenue recognition standard called ASC 606. We have to recognize a portion of our self managed up front which goes into our license component because SaaS is growing quickly. That's why you don't see license growing as quickly. But we don't compensate different for our reps whether they sell a self managed or a SaaS license. And so we want to go in and have a consultative sales approach. Go in, talk about the benefits of GitLab and then let the customer decide do you want to buy it in the cloud, in our cloud or do you want to buy self managed and put it in your cloud and we charge the same price for that because once they get to that point, we don't want them to have to go through another several weeks of analysis on how much will it cost for us to host it versus GitLab hosting it. We do this every day for a number of our customers and we can do it very efficiently. And so that's part of the reason why our SaaS business has grown so quickly.

[Tom]

As we head towards the cash flow statement, I'm going to drop in a personal question about your work approach at GitLab, Brian. Almost seeming out of place, but I just can't not ask it for whatever reason. And that is down a continuum of 1 to 100, where 100 is maximally strategic as CS CFO and 1 is, you know, maximally accounting discipline as CFO, like deep finance numbers. Where do you place yourself? Where do you like to operate as a cfo? Do you like to be in the brainstorm idea generation meetings? Do you like to be updated when things have been rolling and you help to optimize and refine them? What's best suited for you?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, that's a great question. It's really interesting how this has changed over time. And so CFOs used to be very operationally focused and when Sarbanes Oxley came about, due to the things that led to that, they became very accounting focused and so forth. I find myself more focused in operations and really aligning myself with the CRO and sort of go to market. And so I learned at a very early age that if sales are going well, go to market's doing well. You know, that's really what can drive the shareholder value of the company. And so, you know, like to be strategic and focus on operations. But obviously as a public company, CFO compliance and accounting and closing the books and all that is is extremely important as well. So it's hard to give a percentage between the two. But I think, you know, in today's age you have to be very dynamic and understand the business, understand the growth levers, the drivers for shareholder value, and help do the resource allocation around the company to get the best return for dollars invested. But then you also need to do that in the most compliant way and report out to shareholders as well. And so I think they're both really, really important. And I find myself partnering with the CRO a lot on go to market initiatives.

[N/A]

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[Tom]

Thank you. Now we cruise down to the cash flow statement. For newer investors, this is usually the most confusing of all. But this is where you can net out and see that the company is generating over $100 million in operating cash from operating activities. And you come back up and Brian was mentioning the stock based compensation at 55 million. I'll ask a question about that in a second. But what stands out for you on the cash flow statement?

[Brian Robbins]

Once again, I think our financial statements are extremely clean and easy to understand. I think the most important thing for an investor to understand on a cash flow statement, especially cash flow from operations, is you basically start with the P and L, then you go back and you add back and subtract all the non cash events to see how the company did on cash flow from operating. Investing for us is super simple. It's a change in investments. I think we have a very simplistic cash flow statement from a company perspective.

[Tom]

Out of curiosity, what was the $1.7 million charitable donation of common stock?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, thanks for that, Tom. You know, GitLab has a every quarter donate stock to the GitLab Foundation. I sit on the board of the GitLab foundation as well. The GitLab foundation is a foundation that, it's a standalone foundation, not part of GitLab, a nonprofit that really focuses on investing to get earnings, power, return for people that can't get those. For every dollar invested, we have to get a certain amount return. And so we do a number of investments all around the world. And so I encourage you to go look at the GitLab foundation website. It's a very data driven process foundation and we get a lot of requests from other foundations to basically help them measure the impact, the social impact that they're making and the return that they're making.

[Tom]

Thank you. On the stock based compensation, one of the statistics we use as investors at the Motley fool is to take the stock based compensation as a percentage of gross profit to look and try to get some association between what that grant is getting is driving in terms of growth, you know, up towards the top line of the business. And we're certainly proponents of Having ownership across the entire employee base. Every Motley fool employee owns shares of our company. And that's pretty much been true for been in business for about over 30 years. We're a private company, so we have an internal market system all SEC approved. It's quite interesting, but that's a topic for another time. 55 million as, as a percentage of 189 million is nearly 30% which would be at the higher end of the range of most technology companies. So maybe explain your thinking as to why it's 55 million instead of 35 million or 75 million sort of the view. I know there's no perfect answer there. A lot of factors go into it. But why is GitLab sitting at a higher rate of granting within the overall growth dynamics of the business?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, this is something obviously at the board level and company level is discussed on a quarterly basis. We look at our comps relative to all the other companies as well and we actually probably sit right in the average of tech companies today. You know, it's a form of compensating our employees, you know, cash and stock based compensation. And you know, as a newer public company, you know we have stock options that are out there that get, they come up for vest and we recognize SBC charge related to that. But you know, as a percentage, you know that number has slowly dropped and you know something that we're focused on become GAAP profitable as well.

[Tom]

One of my favorite thinkers on compensation once told us, as I mentioned, we often go contract people to be advisors for us. I think companies significantly underdo this. Many people would like to help, particularly if they have some affiliation with the company or some connection to the industry, particularly if they're in semi retirement or retirement or in between. I mean just generally people will give you an hour, five hours. Steve Jobs once gave a very eloquent statement about calling and asking for help. And he had done that I believe as a 12 year old or 11 year old calling. I think it was Bill Hewlett if Hewlett Packard and actually ended up with a summer internship there because of it. Basically said you should be calling people all the time. Well, one of the compensation advisors I spoke to years ago said, you know, the most important thing about compensation is to not make it too much of a focus relative to peers. Get, get in the zone and work on your mission. Make sure the highest performers that are most passionate about your business are getting the rewards that they deserve. But you don't need to go into big outliers. It sounds to me from doing your comparisons to other technology companies that that's generally GitLab's compensation philosophy. True or false?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, absolutely. I would say true. If you focus solely on compensation, you're going to lose the team member. It's part of the brand, the mission that the company's after and everything else around it. GitLab being fully remote, we have a lot of top performers that don't want to drive two hours a day to and from the office. Instead they could be productive at home and actually be adding value to the company. And so you don't want to compete solely on compensation. We used to have a compensation calculator that was made public. We had to take it down because the accuracy of it and some of the people that were feeding our sources of that weren't happy with the data and how accurate it was. But we do have a compensation philosophy. It does include compensation, but there's a number of other things in that, you know. But I think the important part is from a team member perspective is what do they want to accomplish? How can they personally and professionally develop and help lay out a path for them to accomplish that?

[Tom]

One more question for me here as we move off the financials and then back to Carl on the technical side, Amazon came out recently. This is going back to kind of my apocalypse question previously, but Amazon came out as a dominant, very massive, growing, cash generating business, said, you know, we expect to succeed and grow, but do so with a smaller workforce than we actually have today. This is so unusual. This is such an outlier for in business history that you would have kind of the largest, let's say 10 of the largest companies in the world with all massively liquid cash, heavy balance sheets saying we're reducing our workforce. I mean that you would actually have layoffs at the magnificent seven companies when there's not any clear negative headwinds or business reason for doing so. So I guess I'm coming back and asking this question again about do you see similar dynamics at GitLab? Do you expect you, you talked about maybe same seat count, unemployment and more productivity. But are you starting to see that already or you're making those projections?

[Brian Robbins]

You know, there's obviously we go through an annual planning process and look at the tools that we have available to make us more efficient. I think that a lot of those companies where they say that they're laying off employees, they're actually laying off in one area to hire in another area because I think the skill sets are changing and they're adapting to what's happening in the macro environment and how to change with that. And so some AI tools out there may be great at call center, you know, at call center requests and you may be able be able to do that through a very intelligent bot and actually answer 80 to 90% of the questions in the call center automatically through the bot through generative AI and actually satisfy your customer. And so you may be able to reduce your call center agents by a certain amount, but then they're taking part of that and it's a higher price person and investing in AI. So the headcount isn't necessarily growing, but they're still making an investment in areas for technology innovation. And so I think each company is different. It depends on the company, where they're at in their life cycle and what they're investing in and what they're trying to accomplish.

[Tom]

Thank you, Carl.

[Carl]

Yeah, I'll pop in. I like that metaphor about the call center and I actually wonder to pivot back to your product. I know you have duo, I know you mentioned there's agents coming later in the year and I wonder what will that call center metaphor look like for GitLab so that companies can actually increase their usage of it through agents, increase their throughput with perhaps less people.

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, it will be interesting from GitLab's perspective. There's a lot of development, a lot of feature functionality to continue to work on. I could see things that we automate. We'll continue to reinvest back in the product in different ways as well. I would say we aren't too dissimilar to the companies that you mentioned, the Magnificent Seven on sort of what they're doing and how they're changing, obviously different scales and magnitudes. And so it will be to lesser of an effect. But we're looking at how people work today, how our product, we dog food our own product, obviously. And so the impact and savings that we could make. And so we'll re pivot those investments in other areas for higher impact with that savings.

[Carl]

Okay, nice. And just to be direct, I wonder what your roadmap is. If you could talk about it for the agent side and your product the way you talked about the Google Docs for DevSecOps. There's all these different teams looking through one pane of glass working on different parts of the same software for different reasons. Will each team have agents that help them and their productivity in your platform work on this software? Is that the right view?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, absolutely. We're developing a number of different agents that will these dual Agents will do functions that people would normally do, but that they can be done automatically. It will make them more productive for those functions so they can focus on other areas. Think of an agent as a non human doing what a human would otherwise do to actually get more increased cycle times, increase productivity, get more code published and deployed.

[Carl]

And I know we already talked about a solid partnership with aws. Exactly about that what we're talking about. Do you see any future partnerships with others like Oracle or Google or other platforms?

[Brian Robbins]

We're always looking for partnerships on how they're a win win. A lot of partnerships are more marketing press versus win win for both parties. And so we're really deliberate about the partnerships that we enter into and make sure that we can get to general availability, that we have sales targets associated with them, that both parties have skin in the game and that they can be beneficial to our customers. And so I think there's a number of partnerships over time, but there's a high bar to basically get over to make announcements around those partnerships.

[Carl]

Yeah, okay. And speaking of partnerships, the AI labs are like the top dogs these days, at least from my viewpoint. Everyone wants partnerships with them. I've wondered if you can call out if you have any partnerships if you're using anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral or what models are powering Duo, for example.

[Brian Robbins]

Current we've announced this, but currently today, Anthropic is one of the LLMs that we're using. One of the great things about GitLab is you can be model neutral. We have used and tested a number of different LLMs with GitLab being a pure play Switzerland DevSecOps platform. We're actually creating those models and the results specifically for that ecosystem. Our team will constantly look at models that come out, the results that they produce, the code that comes out of that, and use the best model for our customer base today and in the future.

[Carl]

Okay, nice. Now, like a future thinking question, if you had to describe GitLab's product with AI top of mind, of course, in this conversation, in two years from now, what does that experience look like for a developer?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, I think it's funny, Tom, the game that you played, asking ChatGPT or whomever you asked around the five things. I think being at Switzerland for the software developer for DevSecOps is really important and that will be done through humans, through agents, to create a use case and an experience for the developer that would be seamless, highly effective, great payback to really enable them to do their job, you know, with Joy and satisfaction.

[Tom]

Well, we're down to our final few questions, and these are helpful ones for us as investors as well. What companies do you admire? It could be anything. It doesn't have to be companies that GitLab works with directly, although please feel free to share any of those. You could simply say, I absolutely love all of my experiences with Airbnb in my personal life. What are a few different companies, public companies that you admire?

[Brian Robbins]

You know, they're all for different reasons, but I look at a number of different companies for, you know, what they do, their metrics or best practices and so forth. And so, you know, some are for personal reasons, some are for investment reasons, you know, and. And some are, you know, from a GitLab perspective. And so there's a number of different companies I look at, but like I said, all for different reasons.

[Tom]

And. And what's one that you. Is there a company you admire out there?

[Brian Robbins]

I. I don't want to give a particular company.

[Tom]

Okay, that's great. I got. That's.

[Brian Robbins]

I think there's a number of great companies out there. That's great. You know, it's great to learn from people who've been there, done that, you know, from that perspective.

[Tom]

Excellent. Anything you can share on your own investment style or what have you taught your son, your children about investing?

[Brian Robbins]

You know, my investment style being a CFO is fairly conservative, and so, you know, I'm, you know, in a lot of bonds and index funds. And diversity is very important, you know, for my kids. I thought it was really important for them. You know, one of the things that my father did for me as a young age was introduced me to a stockbroker. I don't know if they're called stockbrokers anymore, but, you know, at age 14, I gave my son some money and basically introduced him to a gentleman that helps manage my money and basically wanted him to understand how to read financial statements, how people invest. You know, there's a Warren Buffett style investing. There's a technical aspect of investing. And so both of my kids are very astute in the markets, and you follow the markets very closely and have their own small investment portfolio that they track and monitor and trade in so they can just understand it. And so I encourage people to get your kids involved early and to give them exposure to the market.

[Tom]

And obviously, you've made some investments in private companies in your life. So for somebody who's thinking about making private company investments, any guidance for them or any thoughts that you have on how to do that most effectively you.

[Brian Robbins]

Know, it's tough when you focus most of your time and as a public company cfo you don't have a lot of time to follow the private markets. And so a lot of my private investments have been relatively small and been through a friend to friend network if you will. And you know, it's been basically given a small amount of money based on a thesis that they're going to go try to solve. But you know, private markets are, you know, really take a lot of time to follow, you know, the founders, the technology, how things are evolving and so forth. I'm sure you, you guys have a, on your website, a lot of great material around that.

[Tom]

Thank you for that. And given that companies remain public private so much longer, it does, it does almost require opportunities, individuals to find opportunities to get onto platforms and make some private investments. Although of course it's still a very rich public market. Abundantly great companies around the world as well and easier access to companies around the world as well. GitLab is an, is an eight time recommendation in our real money portfolios of the Motley fool. It's a $6.7 billion market cap. It has about a billion dollars in cash and no debt on the balance sheet. It has great top line growth rates. One of the really interesting factors in life in the public markets is to follow how top line growth rates drive equity returns. Obviously there are examples of companies that got out over their skis, had massive demand and no, no hope of ever generating cash, a positive cash flow out of it and fell apart. But in general demand is a really important factor for long term investors. And at the Motley fool we typically hold our investments at least five years and teach others to do the same. I'd love to just close. Brian, final question with what, what, what are you most excited about in the, let's just say in the year ahead, starting on this day to this day, 12 months from now, what are you most excited about at Get Lab?

[Brian Robbins]

Yeah, I think GitLab is really well positioned in the DevSecOps market. As I mentioned, we have over 50 million people on our platform today. We give a great return for investment on our ultimate product and we enable people to build software better, faster, cheaper, more secure. Not only are we growing, we're doing it more effective quarter over quarter. And you can see the operating leverage in the business as you look at growth. I look at growth relative to when you can break that inflection curve and continue to add operating leverage in the business. And so with, you know, 90% non GAAP gross margins and great free cash flow generation. You know, I think we're well positioned to make the investments that we're making in AI as well as in security for the benefit of our current customers as well as our future customers.

[Tom]

Well, Brian Robbins, thank you so much for the hour. We learned a lot more about GitLab than we've learned so far. We tried to learn as rapidly as we can. We have all of our AI enterprises, engineers like Carl, all of our techies, and all of our investors working together to understand these companies better and better. And this hour certainly helps us a lot. So thank you so much for this time.

[Brian Robbins]

Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Carl. Really appreciate you having me on the show today.