Wonder

Research Outline

Prepared for Maria P. | Delivered September 28, 2019

GitLab Investment Memo

Goals

To obtain an investment memo for GitLab that contains the company's vision, the problem it's solving, the product, the founders, early hires, market size, market drivers, market challenges, business financials, funding, and risk analysis for the purposes of sending to potential investors. 

Early Findings

Preliminary research was able to find most of the basic information for the overview section of the investment memo; however, the in-depth details for each section will require additional research. 
VISIONGitLab's vision is to "replace disparate DevOps toolchains with a single application that is pre-configured to work by default across the entire DevOps life cycle."
The company wants to make it faster for contributors to deliver value to their users by enabling a faster cycle time and easier workflows.
PROBLEMWhen multiple people collaborate on a project, it can cause problems with seeing what other team members are working on and the possibility of overlap exists.
PRODUCTGitLab's open source product allows people to collaborate on coding projects so that everyone is responsible for prioritized issues that are continually checked for any problems as their contributions are updated. 
FOUNDERSDmitriy Zaporozhets and Sytse Sijbrandij co founded GitLab in 2011.
 Sytse Sijbrandij is now the CEO and founded online publisher Comcoaster in 2008. He was also a lead architect at Ministerie van Justitie, an operational director for U-Boat Worx BV, and an intern at both Proctor & Gamble and IBM.
 Dmitriy Zaporozhets is now an engineering fellow at GitLab, but was the CTO until 2018. Prior to that, he was an ROR developer for Sphere Consulting, Inc. and an ROR/PHP developer for 2D-Arts. 
EARLY HIRES Emily Chin joined GitLab in 2013 as brand manager. 
Job van der Voort joined GitLab in 2014 as a service engineer and worked his way up to VP of product; however, he left the company in January 2019.
Most employees joined GitLab in 2016 or later. 
MARKETAccording to MarketWatch, the open source services global market will reach $32 billion by 2023.
The market is growing at a CAGR of 22%, which means the global market size will be the following:
2023: $32 billion 
2022: $26.23 billion ($32 billion / 1.22)
2021: $21.50 billion ($26.23 billion / 1.22)
2020: $17.62 billion ($21.50 billion / 1.22)
2019: $14.44 billion ($17.62 billion / 1.22)
The major drivers of the open source software market include "the accessibility to the source code which enables enterprises to study and modify the software" to meet their needs.
The flexibility, reduced costs, and accelerated time-to-market provided by open source software are also main drivers of the market. 
 Technical debt, the speed of technical change, mass market adoption, learning curves, license issues, monetization, long-term viability, and no vendor lock-in are the main challenges of the market. 