At first I saw "to focus on his health" and assumed it was typical PR speak to cover someone asked to leave, but the amount of detail on sytse's cancer makes it seem otherwise. I'd noticed he wasn't as often active in Gitlab related threads, and I guess that explains that too. Hope the recovery continues to go well.
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I do think the change in leadership is probably more a continuation of Gitlab moving from a developer focused company to one focused on enterprise sales, so the product is probably going to continue to feel less interesting for me. They were pretty innovative in how open they were, so I hope at least some of that survives.
I don't think companies ever use "health" as cover to fire someone, even that is a step to far. Usually they say "personal reasons" or "to spend time with family", or "mutually beneficial" etc.. "Health" is usually something quite serious.
> On today’s earnings call, I am announcing that I am transitioning from my role as GitLab’s CEO and will serve as the Executive Chair of the Board. I want more time to focus on my cancer treatment and health. My treatments are going well, my cancer has not metastasized, and I'm working towards making a full recovery. Stepping down from a role that I love is not easy, but I believe that it is the right decision for GitLab.
Usually when a the founding CEO of a public company steps into a strategic non-operations position, it's basically their way of saying "I'm taking the money and retiring" without tanking the stock by just leaving.
By taking a strategic role, investors are less worried because they know the CEO is still around.
But in this case it looks like it is legitimately a health reason. I hope he heals quickly.
> On today’s earnings call, I am announcing that I am transitioning from my role as GitLab’s CEO and will serve as the Executive Chair of the Board. I want more time to focus on my cancer treatment and health. My treatments are going well, my cancer has not metastasized, and I'm working towards making a full recovery. Stepping down from a role that I love is not easy, but I believe that it is the right decision for GitLab.
> but the amount of detail on sytse's cancer makes it seem otherwise. I'd noticed he wasn't as often active in Gitlab related threads, and I guess that explains that too. Hope the recovery continues to go well.
Yeah, I tried to separate the two statements but I guess it wasn't clear. I'm not saying he was pushed out and they used the cancer as an excuse.
I was saying the choice of a business-focused replacement with a track record of prepping companies for acquisition (vs say getting someone internal or with a more engineering track record) is a sign of changing direction, however.
How do they intend on competing in the enterprise space? MSFT and Atlassian will happily bundle their SCM offering for 0 dollars if you spend enough on licensing other core products like visual studio or jira.
While I haven't been directly involved in the negotiations, at three separate companies the internal comments indicated that what they were quoted for GitHub Enterprise Server pricing was just not in the same universe as Gitlab EE.
One migrated from Github Enterprise Server explicitly as a cost saving measure. One migrated from Bitbucket Server because the writing seemed very much on the wall for Atlassian's self-hosted solution with the Jira pricing model change and a trial migration from Jira Server to Jira Cloud had gone so badly the whole thing was called off (though they did pay up for JIRA Data Center, JIRA was deemed less replaceable than Bitbucket apparently). The last went from Gitlab CE to Gitlab EE, so maybe there wasn't the hardest investigation of alternatives on that one, but they did at least claim they looked at Github Enterprise server as an alternative.
Now none of these companies used Exchange, Azure, Office, Teams, etc. etc. so maybe there's a bunch more discounts and synergy if you're fully bought into the MS ecosystem
We can see looking at both websites that GitHub is drastically cheaper on paper alone when it comes to enterprise. GitLab would have to be undercutting their premium offering by almost a third of the price to match GitHub which seems doubtful even if you have something like a volume discount.
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I do think the change in leadership is probably more a continuation of Gitlab moving from a developer focused company to one focused on enterprise sales, so the product is probably going to continue to feel less interesting for me. They were pretty innovative in how open they were, so I hope at least some of that survives.