GitLab Inc. (NASDAQ:GTLB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Unidentified Analyst: Hi, thanks for taking my question. This is Ethan on for Rob. Sid, I wanted to ask a question around open source projects. It seems like right now, one of your larger competitors host a lot of the bigger open source projects that are out there. And so I was curious if you are focusing at all on trying to migrate some of these projects over trying to encourage new open source projects to be hosted on the GitLab platform kind of as a way to gain more visibility and interaction with the developer community on your platform? Or are you kind of more focused on the commercial side of things right now?

Sid Sijbrandij: Yes. Thanks for that. We do have a program to host open source protect and that has many different open source projects on it. Not as many as our biggest competitor. We are focused on winning commercial business. And one of our imperatives is to make sure that people also contribute back to GitLab. So we have hundreds of users and customers who contribute back to GitLab every quarter. We’re starting a leading organizations program to help them contribute back and to help them even more in doing that. If you want to contrast it, we are focused on hosting closed source software, the software that makes our customers’ money, and we are an open core platform, one that benefits from the innovation of all of the users

Sharlene Seemungal: Next, we have Joel from Truist.

Joel Fishbein: Thank you for taking my questions. Brian, this is for you. I would — we got your message loud and clear about growth is the priority here. But you’ve also talked about — you also talked about the path to profitability, and I would love to understand some of the drivers of the operating leverage as you move towards free cash flow profitability. I know it’s FY ’25, but the trajectory and what’s going to drive that?

Brian Robbins: Yes, absolutely. Thanks, Joe. Yes, I guess, number one is, we want to win the DevSecOps platform category, and we’re doing that through growth and doing that responsibly. We’ll continue to invest as long as our unit economics remain strong. I think we demonstrated that quarter-over-quarter, if you look at third quarter this year over third quarter last year, we added $46 million of incremental revenue and did that for $2.3 million less. We also had increased public company expenses, JiHu increases and so forth in there. And so we’re continuing to get more leverage out of the model. The more efficiency and scale, we’re going to be, provide better unit economics. We land relatively small. But as I mentioned, we expand with those customers over time.

And so our sales and marketing is getting more efficient as we grow. I think gross margin, we’re best-in-class. There’s not a lot to do there. On G&A this year, we absorbed a lot of public company expenses. Thank goodness, D&O insurance has gone down. We have our management and G&A. And so we’re building up more at the staff level. And then in R&D, we’re just continuing to invest in the platform. As we get larger, we don’t have to grow R&D as high to the revenue growth on a relative basis. And so, we’re looking at things across the entire company. We’re measuring them. We have a lot of internal metrics that we look at, and we’re continuing to drive profitability.

Sharlene Seemungal: Our next question comes from Karl at UBS.

Brian Robbins: We can skip to the next person and then come back to Karl.

Sharlene Seemungal: Next, we have Matt from RBC.

Matthew Hedberg: Thanks for taking my question. Sid, first of all, I love the change in your tagline from DevOps platform to the DevSecOps platform, something I think we’ve all sort of heard in checks in terms of how you guys are resonating with security use cases. Can you just talk about, I guess, the significance of that and how you think about even a security-led sale and maybe even adding even more SecOps functionality.