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Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

Mar 5, 2025

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Session at day three of the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference. As a reminder, I'm Sanjit Singh. I run the infrastructure software coverage on the team. We are pleased to have the management team from GitLab, newly announced CEO Bill Staples, and Chief Financial Officer Brian Robins. Bill and Brian, welcome to the TMT Conference once again.

Brian Robins
CFO, GitLab

Thank you.

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

Thanks for having us.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Great to have you here. Awesome. So before we dive into what I think is a very interesting GitLab story, let me go through the disclosures. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. I thought we spent the beginning conversation just, you know, introducing yourself, Bill. You and I worked together while you were at New Relic. Maybe if you could just, you know, as the newly appointed CEO, for those in the audience who are unfamiliar with your background, can you give us a sense of your sort of career highlights? And what was the sort of reasons why you took on the CEO role at GitLab?

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

Yeah. It's great to be here today. Thanks for inviting us. And, you know, my journey has been 30 years now building developer tools and platforms. So in many ways, the journey to GitLab feels like home, back home to me. I spent a lot of time at Microsoft helping build out the developer platform and application platforms there. Spent some time at Adobe, and then, as you said, New Relic last. And, I've been drawn to this mission of software for my entire career. As I reflect on my last 10, 20 years, probably the same for you, I think about how software has just changed our world fundamentally. You know, the way we communicate, entertain, get business done is largely through software. And that's driven by software developers creating that software in really specialized languages, you know, deep technical talent. And I just love serving that customer.

And I've done it now for nearly 30 years. So I'm drawn to that mission. And I think of GitLab as, you know, the heart and soul of creating software. We're known as a market leader for software development lifecycle. And, it's a really special company, strong values, strong culture, exactly what I want to be doing at this part, stage of my career.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. You've had intimate experience with these end users and these customers throughout the course of your career. The point that you just made about creating, GitLab has created a sort of a distinctive culture. I think that was one of Sid's hallmarks, creating one of the most distinctive and transparent cultures in all of public company software. How do you anticipate the learning curve will be for you over the next year as you look at the business? What do you think is going well? Where do you think changes need to be made, as you look to grow faster and sharpen the execution?

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

Yeah. Actually, let me start with culture. And it leads naturally to that second part of your question. You know, it is a really distinctive culture. As I came in, you know, it's all remote company, zero offices. And so the company culture has been built up around how do we scale and build a world-class product, build a world-class business without any offices, with everyone remote, more than 2,000 employees across 65 countries. And the culture therefore was driven to be very collaborative, very asynchronous, very transparent. You used the words transparent. It's one of our core values, transparency. And it's a really incredible environment because our team members, we don't, we don't call them employees. We're all team members, demand from me a level of integrity, a level of transparency that you do. And that drives a high level of excellence in thought and in execution.

So when I came into the company, I wanted to live those values. I wanted to engage team members and learn from them, you know, what it is like to be in GitLab, what the opportunities are, and where we should focus as a company. So the very, very first thing I did actually is I invited every team member to send me an email and answer three questions. Number one, why are you here? Number two, what's one thing that you think we should not change as a company? And number three, what is one thing we should change in order to grow? I got about 2,000 emails, and I learned a ton about GitLab, about our people, about what they value and care about. I heard their passion for our mission and our business, as well as opportunities to improve.

I got a ton of advice and feedback on things that we should do differently and grow, you know, in order to grow the organization. I also then went on a number of customer visits, so I think I've visited now more than 50 customers, in my first 90 days, quite a few weeks on the road, and also virtual calls, of course, and heard from customers their passion, their love for GitLab and what we do, the amazing missions that we support across public sector, large enterprise, mid-market, and SMB, and learned from them as well, like where they think we do really well, product-wise and business-wise, and what we could do in improvement. I took all of that kind of experience and learning from both team members as well as customers, and I lived our transparent value. I wrote it all down.

In fact, I wrote a 20-page memo and published it internally to every team member to say, "Here's what I heard from you. Here's what I heard from customers. And here's what I think we need to do about it." We shared that at the beginning of the fiscal year, and then last week, the executive team held what we call the company kickoff meeting, and it was basically 90 minutes of the executive team virtually inviting every team member to sit down with us at the table and talk through the company plan, and we also then did our sales kickoff and did the traditional, you know, sales kickoff event and training for all the sales team, so we're now completely aligned around our fiscal year plan, around our company objectives, and what we're going to focus on going forward. I'll just summarize those three.

I'm happy to double-click if you want. But our three objectives for FY 2026 are win new customers, drive more value faster with customers, and focus on customer-centered innovation. This might seem very kind of blasé, kind of boring, if you will. But it's really a focus of back to fundamentals. I believe to scale a billion-dollar business at the 20%-30%, you know, year-over-year growth rates that we've been doing, it's really about executing the fundamentals really, really well. So that's the focus of the organization.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Awesome. You know, Brian, Bill just talked about the growth rates that GitLab's been posting. You guys grew, I think, about a little over 30% for the year. There's not that many companies in software growing at that rate. In Q4, you grew 29%. You're guided next year if you sort of squint about 24%. Can you talk to us about the themes coming out of the year Q4 from a business perspective? And what are sort of the key underlying assumptions that frame out that 24% guidance for next year?

Brian Robins
CFO, GitLab

Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, as you said, we grew last year 31% year-over-year, and we guided to around 24% for next year, and so as we entered this year, we only had really Premium and Ultimate. And as we went through the year, we added a number of new SKUs really to address some of the market demand, and so one is Dedicated. Dedicated is our single-tenant SaaS offering. It was really requested from us, from our highly regulated customers, to have a private cloud network so they could get up and running quicker. Two is our Duo products. We have Duo Pro, Duo Enterprise, and then also now it's private beta Duo Workflow. On Duo Pro, that's basically the code generation tool that allows companies to do some, there's a lot of code generation tools out there, but it does that to help software developers become more productive.

On Duo Enterprise, we're injecting AI throughout the entire software development lifecycle, just not in code generation. Software developers spend probably about 25% of their time actually writing code, but you have to plan, manage, deploy, test, secure. And so putting those AI features into the entire software development lifecycle is very important. And then Duo Workflow is agentic AI. And we'll probably get into that a little bit more later. And so these new products, coupled with our existing products, will expand our existing clients. We do that, you know, you know, pretty much every quarter we'll land new customers, and then we'll upsell those customers with additional wallet share. And so we put all that together, internal model. We rolled it up, you know, from a field roll-up perspective. We also got the leadership team together and looked at that, then also looked at some historical trend rates.

Those are the factors that went into establishing the guidance for next year.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Awesome. When we think about that bucket of new opportunities, Duo Pro and Enterprise, GitLab Dedicated, ultimately GitLab Workflows will come online. You have the agile planning product that's gaining some momentum. As we look at that as a category, when do you think, Brian, that starts to meaningfully impact the results? Maybe through the lens of NRR. Maybe NRR is not the right lens. NRR ticked down about a point this quarter. But as we look into next year, when does that class of new products really have the scale and have to drive overall growth?

Brian Robins
CFO, GitLab

Yeah. You know, as a company, you know, we guided to roughly $939 million. I think at the midpoint it is. And so for the, as a ratable business model for these products that make a meaningful impact to our financials, it's going to take a little time. And so it's built into our guidance this year. We believe that they're great growth drivers, you know, in the years to come. We're seeing good adoption of those, today. We're very happy with how we did in Duo, in fourth quarter alone. We landed some really big clients that we talked about on the call, CACI, NatWest, Barclays, and so forth. And so, you know, I think it will take a little time. The early traction's positive, and we're happy with what we're seeing.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. On the customer front, some, a lot of headliners there, including Anthropic and some of the others. Maybe a couple of follow-up questions before we get into the meat of the opportunity. You mentioned on the call that public sector is about 12% of ARR. How did you incorporate any sort of Fed spending uncertainty into the fiscal year 2026 guide?

Brian Robins
CFO, GitLab

Great question. You know, it's interesting. There's been a lot of changes with the new administration and, you know, the Department of Government Efficiency we're hearing a lot about lately. And so we are meeting with our customers on a regular basis. Obviously, what the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to do is what GitLab does. And so a lot of our customers buy our product because, you know, in three years the ROI is over 480%. Payback is less than six months. So this is really aligned with what's happening from a government perspective. And so right now, we didn't change anything from an assumptions perspective. We've gone through customer by customer by customer, looked at all the agencies. Our federal team is working very closely with them.

You know, there's really, until there's an update, there's really no sort of definitive thing that we could provide. It's something that we're watching closely.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Awesome. So Bill, let me just talk about I kind of taglined in my notes conviction in the opportunity. When we initiated Overweight last year, broadly what we saw was a highly innovative company that's targeting a market that's been frankly best of breed. And we saw opportunities for that to consolidate while driving a lot more automation and ROI for your customers. The skeptics on the story kind of believe that the runway is actually a lot shorter, that you know, there may be headwinds on developer seat growth. There's a notion that maybe customers already sort of self-selected into you know, GitHub versus GitLab. From your perspective, why is that line of thinking on the size of the opportunity for GitLab why is that misplaced?

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

Yeah. I mean, just building on the public sector question, I spent a week in Washington, D.C., meeting with some of the biggest government agencies, and while they certainly feel the noise of, you know, DOGE and concerns around that, the conversations were all around the seat growth and the opportunity for that. That's kind of universally true. I hear a lot about the worries around seat engineering, you know, capacity needing, you know, shrinking given the rise of AI. I think that's largely driven out of, frankly, engineers' anxiety when they see how easy it is to generate code. It may, you know, threaten their feeling of security around, you know, job security in particular, but for, you know, those of us who've been in the business for a while, this is a pretty common pattern.

As soon as those abstraction levels rise, you know, that anxiety of maybe my skill set, maybe my experience doesn't matter. But inevitably, what's happened in software is more software creators are, you know, come into the market nearly every single year, and more software is built every single year. The reason for that is software is the ultimate, you know, scale and leverage point for business. It is driven enormous productivity and efficiency gains for companies. It's opened new channels for revenue. And frankly, we've been constrained on engineering resource and capacity for the entire existence of software. I mean, think about it in terms of humanity. There's less than 1% of humanity who has the technical skills to write code today, and yet they reach six or seven billion people with smartphones and cloud.

And so this tiny fraction has unlocked enormous, you know, GDP and productivity for the entire world. Imagine when more people can create software because you don't have to know all those deep technical languages. It will create more software creators, and it will unlock even more code generated by humans and through machines. And, you know, to us, that's really exciting because more software creators means more seats. More code means more demand for our platform because you can't just take code and have it unlock value. You have to run an entire software lifecycle. You have to manage the quality of the code, the security of the code, the privacy, compliance. You have to govern it. You have to version control it. You have to do all the things that GitLab does really, really well. Whether it's created by humans or machines, same thing is true.

We see that as a virtuous cycle actually for AI to drive more platform demand for us. Of course, we're going to participate in the AI code generation and agentic services approach as well with our Duo Workflow product.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Awesome. Let's talk a little bit about the drivers of growth. Maybe starting with Ultimate. Pretty interesting time on the Ultimate journey. Just hit 50% of ARR. So Brian, to what extent has price increase on Premium nudged customers to implement in fiscal year 2025? And then ultimately, what do you think the mix of Ultimate gets to do?

Brian Robins
CFO, GitLab

We as a company think Ultimate's a great value proposition and that every company should use Ultimate. One of the things though, we don't actually compensate the sales force on Ultimate versus Premium. When we go in, it's really a consultative sales approach, and we find out what's best for the customer. We're trying to solve their problems and trying to get them very good time to value and positive business outcomes. We're happy with Ultimate since it's over 3x the price of Premium. How well it's done, as you said, it's 50% of our total ARR today. You know, people primarily go to Ultimate for security and compliance. Security's on the top of everyone's mind.

When you can actually shift security left in the process and actually allow that to happen at the same time people are coding and managing and deploying, it just speeds up the cycle times. And so that's one of the reasons why people go to Ultimate. You know, it's difficult, you know, I sit in every forecast call, and it's difficult to know how many people went from Premium to Ultimate because of the lower price differential. That is happened. I would say more on the periphery. But the majority of the reason why people are going to Ultimate are for security and compliance.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Is there any detail you can provide us? Because that is another question that we get: is that it sounds like Ultimate's doing really, really well. I get a lot of questions on the Premium subscription tier, where the sort of trend lines are around seat growth. Obviously, there's a migration impact that's happening, directly from Premium to Ultimate. But, what's the, you know, maybe excluding the migration impact, how do you feel about the trend lines of seat expansion on Premium?

Brian Robins
CFO, GitLab

You know, when you look at, I'll give you a couple of different data points to answer the question. And so, you know, by default, when you set a net ARR target for your sales team and they can get there through Ultimate and Premium, the more U ltimate you sell, by default, the less seats you're going to sell. So there's sort of a mixing going on. You know, this quarter in particular, as you know, in our dollar-based net retention rate, we break out the percentage contribution from seats, tier upgrade, and increased customer yield slash price increase. And this quarter in particular, the seat component was 75% of the dollar-based net retention. Premium seats this quarter net adds was the best it's been in the last six quarters. And so we had a very positive seat addition this quarter, both in Ultimate and Premium.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

That's great. That's great context. Talking about the category a little bit, when we think about the software development lifecycle, it's one of the best playgrounds, I'd argue for AI, one of the top two or three, best playgrounds for customers to prove out AI in their organization. So the innovation cycle is progressing rapidly, and the category is, you know, sort of in real time making a transition from code assistants to agents. Do you think this focus, this sort of innovation cycle we're in sort of changes the customer buying psychology, which I think frankly for the last 18 to 24 months has been around ROI consolidation back to more of a traditional best of breed approach? What are your sort of thoughts about the innovation cycle and how it impacts customer buying behavior?

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

Yeah. The rapid innovation that's going on right now, in particular in the code creation space, is where I see it most. You know, I think everyone was excited by Copilot and what it brought to VS Code originally, and then it was Codeium, and then it was Cursor, and now it's others, you know, that are emerging. It's really exciting, and it's exciting to me because it's innovating on the software creation experience in ways that we haven't seen for a few decades, and it's really, you know, what teams are doing are taking the power of generative AI, putting it in the coding context, and experimenting with new patterns for how to, you know, how to author software faster. I will note, you know, we make $0 from software, like software creation part of the lifecycle. So there's no revenue at risk for us.

In fact, we believe because it's going to raise the abstraction, make software easier to create, and more software will be created, it actually just drives more demand for our platform. So we don't see it as a risk. We see it as an opportunity as well. And so we have a Duo Pro product that's similar to those other, you know, code creation tools, brings AI into the context of the IDE for Git, you know, with GitLab support. And, you know, we'll participate in that phase of software creation as well. But, you know, ultimately, I see that software creation layer as more of a commodity. You know, VS Code, which has been the number one tool for many years, Microsoft decided to make open source and charge $0 for.

You know, they really see VS Code, and I think large, more largely GitHub as a channel for customers to bring customers into their Azure and other platforms. And so, you know, the monetization that we're seeing in early startups in that phase are really just passing on the cost of tokens and the AI that needs to drive those experiences. The cost of tokens is going to go down over time. The monetization potential of those tools, I think, goes down over time. And still, you will see numerous startups experimenting and trying new things, so we want to participate in that. Ultimately, though, I think it, the benefit for us is it's just going to create more engineers and more code that need to be managed through a software lifecycle. And that's really where our defensive mode is. That's where our IP is.

That's where, you know, customers, enterprises, and public sector need the guarantees of security, quality, privacy, compliance that you just can't do with a code creation tool.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Absolutely, and talking about, you know, agents and what GitLab is doing on the agent fronts here, the offering here is GitLab Duo Workflow, which you're currently in private beta. Can you describe what GitLab Duo Workflow does in terms of unlocking value across the entirety of the software development lifecycle and any sort of early customer feedback on.

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

Yeah. This is where things get, I think, really exciting, you know, and it's a new approach to software engineering. So we spent a lot of time talking about Duo Pro, which is the in IDE, the developer experience creating software. That's Duo Pro for us. Duo Enterprise, as Brian mentioned, is we take AI and we put it in, inside of our application. So as you're creating issues or you're managing code merges or you're reviewing security vulnerabilities, you get the benefit of AI in those tasks in the application experience to make better decisions. What Duo Workflow does is kind of take this a step further and essentially creates what you think of as like autonomous engineers, machines who know how to do software engineering, and they'll be specialized. So for example, we're running this internally. Our own engineering team is using this internally.

You can take a bug, you know, or an issue, and today you can assign that to a human and say, "Hey, please go work on this bug." In the future, you'll be able to assign that to an agent. The agent will read the bug just like a human would and decide what to do with it. For example, right now we're assigning accessibility bugs to our agents. The agents take the bug report, they read it, they go find the code where the bug is, they'll go create a code fix. They may even queue that up for a review by a human or automatically run the tests around that code block. If the tests pass, they can then queue it up for, you know, packaging and deployment.

Every phase there, the test, you know, running and test reviews, the merge, you know, the code merge reviews, the deployment, those are all specialized agents that work with each other to move, you know, the software throughout the lifecycle. At any point, the organization can say, "No, I want a human involved here to make sure the right things are happening," or they can allow, you know, the automation to continue. That's a really exciting unlock because a lot of code, a lot of software development today is very, you know, detail-oriented, mundane tasks like accessibility bugs are a classic one where they're very, you know, tedious bugs to go fix. We're actually seeing our agents fix bugs at a faster rate than our human engineers can today.

It allows our engineers to go focus on more strategic, more creative projects and not have to worry about those kinds of bugs. We're going to continue to, you know, test out use cases. We have many others that are in private beta that we'll get customer validation from as well. But ultimately, this is about unlocking an augmentation to humans that can take on a lot of the, you know, menial work for engineers and just augment the engineering team and accelerate software development.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Awesome. Maybe a couple of follow-ups to point because that sounds super exciting. When you think about like the timeline, like in terms of timeline to GA, any sort of color you can provide there. But more importantly, and I think we talked about this on the callback, when you think about the GitLab customer base, are you guys going to get sort of first shot at bat at sort of, you know, their sort of agentic journey, meaning they'll wait for GitLab Workflows before something from a private startup comes up and tries to pitch them on? What sort of your underlying assumptions around how the customer base is going to anticipate and perceive GitLab Workflows?

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

Yeah. There's a bunch of things there to unpack. You know, the first thing I would say is, as I went out and visited customers, it's clear like AI is on every single customer's mind. Even those who a few quarters ago would say, I was skeptical, I didn't think we'd ever embrace AI, privacy, compliance, you know, we're worried about these things. They're all now actively exploring AI strategies, which is really exciting to see. I think it's a huge opportunity. Everyone sees the opportunity. I would also say no one knows quite yet how to measure productivity, and no one's locking in on an approach because the space is moving so fast. There's new tools, new approaches coming up all the time. It's really kind of a phase of experimentation, and we're participating in that. We're innovating. We're learning from, you know, competitors.

We're part of that process. One of the changes that I've asked the engineering team to make, and it's driven out of both customer feedback as well as frankly team member feedback, is we've had an approach of going broad as a platform because we wanted to be the most comprehensive platform and then slowly going deeper. And we're actually going to inverse that now. So we're actually going deep and being quality and complete in our delivery, and then we'll go broader. So for FY 2026, we've picked three areas we're going to go deep and drive high-quality results in. And those three align with our go-to-market motions and where customers tell us there are value. The first one is around core DevOps. This is our bread and butter. This is where customers land in Premium.

And we want to make sure we've got to continue to have an awesome place for customers to land into the business and secure, you know, against churn or contraction in the years to come. The second is security. And this is obviously driving a lot of growth for us with the Ultimate upgrade path. Customers, as Brian mentioned, go to Ultimate primarily for security and compliance. We want to strengthen that competitive advantage we have and drive even more upgrades from Premium to the Ultimate capabilities to take out multiple other competitors. Then the third area is obviously AI, and we want to land with high-quality, complete products, not just with Duo Pro and Duo Enterprise, which are in market, but also this Duo Workflow capability that I just talked about in the FY 2026 timeframe.

But the major theme here is let's go deep and deliver high-quality products that are monetizable and drive value and expansion for our business, rather than go broad and shallow. So that's a bit of a change in strategy. And to your, you know, the other part of your question, we're entering private beta now. We're intentionally keeping it small to have high-quality, you know, connections with customers and get the feedback. We're validating both the, you know, value of the Duo Workflow product, the product-market fit of that, and the willingness to pay. You know, Duo Workflow is likely to not be priced in our traditional manner just because there's not a human, seat to price on. And so we're going to be experimenting there with, you know, what's the right way to monetize it, what's customers' willingness to pay.

We'll move to public beta in the summer timeframe is our current plan. And then, you know, depending on customer feedback and all those things I mentioned, sometime in the winter, we should be able to hit GA.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Awesome. Let's take what you just said. I'm sorry, go ahead, Brian.

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

I was just going to say to the question about why GitLab customers should use GitLab first, this would be a great opportunity for you to talk about the knowledge graph in context.

Brian Robins
CFO, GitLab

There we go.

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

to actually help solve that.

Brian Robins
CFO, GitLab

Yeah. So one of the things that's unique about GitLab, and it's really, I think, one of the technical notes we have, is we have the platform advantage. And, you know, if there's one thing that AI is fed on, powered by, it's data and context. So we're building out a knowledge graph that whether you're in our Duo Pro product and coding or Duo Enterprise and one of those lifecycle, you know, application experiences, or it's an agent, you know, autonomously working on your software, it's fed by this understanding of all of the connections across the lifecycle for the task at hand. So you can imagine, for example, if it's an agent or if it's a human looking at code, it can not only understand that code, but it can also understand the issues against that code. It can understand the security scans against that code.

It can look at where's this code going to be deployed, and it can bring that context in to make better decisions on behalf of, you know, the owner, and that's something that, you know, the startups that are building those code creation tools, as an example, would love to have, but they don't have because, you know, they're really just focused on code creation, and maybe they have context of the code that they're working on, but not the broader organization, the compliance, security policies, governance, and all the artifacts that we manage on behalf, so that's a really powerful thing that was going to ultimately drive higher quality responses for AI for our customers and therefore a best-in-class AI product.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. That's a great point. Great callout, great callout, Brian. Let's take what you just said in terms of the priorities going to next year and the tweaks and refinements to strategy to the sales organization. So this week you announced Ian Steward as your new Chief Revenue Officer. He'll be starting over the next month. When you look at the changes that are going to be implemented across the go-to-market and sales this year, what does that look like?

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

Yeah. Let me start with Ian and then talk about the go-to-market organization. You know, first, you'll continue to hear from me, the characterization of what we're doing is really focus on fundamentals, back to fundamentals. And that's really why I hired Ian. I looked at a number of profiles, you know, people with great resumes and very large billion-dollar businesses as CROs to early, you know, up-and-coming, you know, strong performers. And we landed on Ian because he represents someone who's very strong on fundamentals. He stood out in that regard. Both his personality and character, he can command a room. He can obviously sell directly to CEOs, CTOs, CIOs. He's done that and has a great executive presence. But really his operational and analytical abilities were unmatched against every other profile that I personally interviewed.

I got a lot of help from the board on this as well as management team. And I'm excited by it because a leader who can perform against all of those characteristics is, in my opinion, the kind of leader we need to scale beyond a billion because he thinks deeply about the customer and business outcomes we need, but then maps it back to individual contributor success and productivity that we need and is an operational animal to help drive that scale across the organization. So really excited to see Ian come in. And with regard to the go-to-market changes, it's really about, you know, doing what we already do, but doing it in some cases in a more focused and disciplined way. So I already talked about kind of objective number three in this customer value-focused innovation.

But I'll say objective one is really about new customers. Obviously, we've been landing new customers for a while. Every quarter we have more new paid customers. But if you look at the growth rate there, it has slowed down in recent quarters. And as a company that's striving to grow at 20%-30% over a billion, we've got to bring new customer cohorts in every quarter. And so we're intentionally going to focus on new customer acquisition. We've got incentives aligned. We've got new offers for customers. We've got now dedicated resources on customer acquisition, and we'll be scaling that up throughout the year. And, you know, with the intention of, really bringing in more new mid-market and enterprise customers where our upside is the highest. So that's really a refinement and kind of more focus on customer acquisition that's going to feed long-term growth.

And then second is around our customer value realization and expansion motions. If you go back two years, you know, GitLab really had a one land SKU, which is Premium, and then one upgrade path, which was Ultimate. Now we've got not only Premium to Ultimate, but also Dedicated, also Duo with Pro and Enterprise and Workflow now coming this year. And so there's multiple paths for customers to see more value and for our business to grow. That requires a customer journey that's a little bit more sophisticated, clear sales plays, and a clear way for our go-to-market, you know, machine to execute to drive that expansion. We already have the bits and pieces there, but I believe, again, focus on fundamentals to make that acceleration go is going to be key to continuing to scale revenues at 20%-30% over a billion.

That's objective number two, really a refinement of what we're already doing, but, you know, with more focus.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

Awesome. And the last, you know, 25 or 30 seconds that we have, if you look at where GitLab stands as approaching a billion-dollar business, growing, at the upper decile of software, still trading at a discount to some of your peers going at the same rate, what gets you most excited, Bill, about GitLab, the opportunity ahead from here and, from an investment, perspective? Why should investors get excited about the GitLab opportunity?

Bill Staples
CEO, GitLab

Yeah. My first day was the earnings call a quarter ago. And I remember sitting on the call and as we were talking with Sid and Brian. Brian, I think, was the first one to call out GitLab is a generational business in the making. It's got all the elements, you know, world-class product, market-leading product, competitive moat with an awesome, you know, platform approach that's very broad and now getting deeper. It's poised to benefit from the AI wave that's already here and growing fast. And it's an awesome company with a culture and with talent and people to match. So, for me, it's, you know, the most exciting time of my career, having spent 30 years kind of building similar software. I can't imagine a better place to be.

Sanjit Singh
Executive Director, Morgan Stanley

You seem to be fired up. It's very exciting. We're out of time. Thank you, Bill and Brian, for giving us an update on the GitLab story. Thank you very much.

Brian Robins
CFO, GitLab

Thank you.

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