Thank you everyone for joining us at Needham's 25th annual, Needham Growth Conference. My name is Mike Cikos, and I'm the covering analyst for the infrastructure and analytic software sectors. I'm very pleased to announce that we have with us, the CFO from GitLab, Mr. Brian Robins. Brian, thanks a lot for joining us today. We definitely appreciate it.
As far as the format here, so I have a drafted list of questions that I prepared for GitLab, but you guys should have a Q&A chat function on your side. If you have questions you wanna lob in, please send them through. I'll try to get that to management while we have them on the line here. With that out of the way, thank you again for joining us.
Maybe to help level set, I imagine most people here are familiar with GitLab. If you could just walk through the basic value proposition for customers on GitLab's behalf. What problem are you solving for customers? Then we'll go from there.
Awesome. Thanks Mike. Thanks for having us. Thanks for everyone joining us today. We're happy to be here. The easiest way to explain GitLab is to use an analogy. GitLab is a single application that allows people to create software better, faster, cheaper, more secure. It's a single application, so it's a platform. If you think, the analogy I'll use is back when I've traveled basically my entire career.
And before the iPhone came out, when I wanted to go on a business trip, I would actually pack a bag of electronics. I would take my Walkman, the big yellow one that you would strap to your arm when you went running. I would take my Garmin GPS for directions in the rental car that I would use, 'cause there wasn't Uber. I would take MapQuest just in case it wasn't working.
I would have to take all the phone chargers. I love taking pictures where I'm at, so I'd take a camera as well. The iPhone came along, and all that was integrated into a single application. The user experience of music, photos, entertainment, booking hotels and everything became so much easier and seamless, and it saved people a lot of time.
GitLab is the iPhone for software developers. We basically bring all the application in for the developers, for operations and security to create their software. With that, we've shown great business outcomes and good time to value, and that's what we are and why we've grown so quickly.
Great, and I'll cycle back to some of those comments. One of the things that's actually brought to me pretty frequently is the fact that GitLab is described as this open core platform. Maybe again, for some of the generalists or people who are newer to the story, can you help us think through what the company means when they describe themselves as open core? What is that open core really alluding to?
Yeah. Anybody can write code to our platform. We have contributions from customers, the wider community, and then obviously internal as well. We aren't closed source, which means only GitLab can actually write to the platform. We're 100% open source, you today, Mike, if you wanted to, you could go on and say, "Hey, I would like to recommend these changes," and then it would go through a QA process, and then if accepted, it would be added to our platform. You would get access to that as well as all of our customers.
Great. It's actually one of the things that we specifically highlight when we're talking about GitLab, the idea that you have, I'm trying to think. Like this network effect, this dual flywheel, however you wanna phrase it. From an R&D perspective, you have your own in-house guys that are working on the platform, while at the same time you can leverage your customers as far as how they wanna drive the bus.
Or what they're thinking about from a feature and functionality standpoint in augmenting and making that platform more robust over time. I appreciate you going into those comments on the open core. Another question, again, in the interest of thinking about the industry more broadly, you guys are this DevOps platform, right?
For historical context, or maybe the way that the market has been for some time now, it feels like organizations have strung together a number of different point solutions or pulled off their own DevOps tool chain. How has that tool chain historically been constructed? How is it GitLab is streamlining this process or improving on what it had been previously?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. We call ourselves DevSecOps because we have a great security offering as well. You know, we sell into three personas. The developer, we land with a developer typically 50-100 licenses. It's within a division department, then we'll expand to another division department, then another one.
Then we'll change personas and sell to the Ops team, and then eventually to the security team, and that's, you know, typically when there's an upgrade to Ultimate for our advanced security features. If you think back on sort of how this all got started sort of years ago and how people used to create software, everybody would basically bring their own tools, and none of the tools were integrated. It was sort of BYO DevOps, bring your own DevOps.
Mm-hmm.
All this stuff we brought together, and so there are several tools within organizations. Organizations said, "Wow, this is just really chaotic and we can't do this." Then they went to a best in class DevOps. They basically said, you know, in every stage of the DevOps platform or in the DevOps process, you know, we wanna choose what we see as the best in class within them. Then it evolved to, well, now that we have sort of what we believe is best in class at every different stage, we should string all that together and basically create a DIY DevOps platform.
Companies that have all these point solutions, they actually have an organization internally that's responsible for writing basically all the APIs, all the interfaces, and basically bringing those together to try to make them work in conjunction with one another. GitLab is the last evolution of that, where we basically have brought all that together in a single platform, one code base, and basically fully orchestrated across the entire platform. That's sort of how the evolution has taken place.
On that final point, right, you were talking about, the orchestration of that workflow on your platform. Maybe to really drive it home for the audience, but can you walk through, the benefits to customers, right? I think about developers as being just a very, it's an expensive, use of capital to have developers in my organization. So by, whether it's productivity, efficiency, but, like, what are those key benefits that you are driving for organizations and customers with GitLab?
Let me use another analogy just because analogies are easy to use.
Go right ahead.
In my life, I've drafted several S1s. This last S1, I required every bank to use Google Docs. I had not met anybody at the company in person. I, you know, didn't meet anybody, you know, at the board in person. We never had a meeting in person during the S1 drafting process. It was done 100% virtual. The only reason that we were able to do that is 'cause in Google Docs, it's a system of truth, right?
Everything is actually, you can tell who made what comment when, how things were taken off. Everybody can work in the document at the same time. You have new version control issues. Prior to that, I would do it in Microsoft Word.
In Microsoft Word, I spent probably 50% of my time being the air traffic controller, cutting and pasting certain sections of the document, sending it out to various people, making sure I actually had the latest and greatest in the version that was, you know, the single source of truth, if you will.
Each people, functional owner, legal, HR, auditors, external counsel, internal counsel, you know, had to review that on a constant basis to make sure that it was the latest and greatest and reflected all the comments. With GitLab, you know, everybody can be developing code at the same time.
If you think about historically the way code was developed, you would basically, you know, if you think about code, you would want to put your developers in a locked room for a long period of time, not change the requirements, and then get the code and hopefully have a great product. We went to more agile development and so forth, the development processes have changed.
Historically, they would develop code and they'd say, "We're done. Boom, we're gonna throw it over to ops, and we'll throw it to security." Security will go through it and say, "We got eight or nine vulnerabilities," they'll give it back to the developers. Developers will go through it again, they'll have to throw it back to security and ops.
Everything took so much longer because as you're writing code today, if you have a security vulnerability, it actually tells you right then that you need to make a change. If you need to make a change, it actually changes all the code with that vulnerability, opposed to having to go back into every single individual one and making the change.
The ability to have version control, single source of truth, you know, sort of called delegation of authority on who does what, when, and where, and having the ability for everybody to work on it at the same time is, and that's where the value comes to companies. That's why a company like Goldman Sachs can go from a two-week re-release cycle to a two-hour release cycle, T-Mobile from months to days.
CARFAX, you know, one year after implementing GitLab, increased their software builds by 341%. By removing those point solutions and using a single platform to do that, it's more efficient, engineers are more productive, and the quality is much better.
Thanks for that. Another big item that's constantly being brought to our attention is the idea of competition, right? When a company does choose to use GitLab, and you were talking through those evolutions of the DevOps market and how software has been developed up until now, are there more common point solutions that GitLab is replacing? Can you talk to as well who you're most commonly seeing or replacing out there in the market today?
Yeah, absolutely. Do you hear a little... Is that banging noise on your side? Or-
Yep, that's the radiator behind me. I apologize. I'm in the office today. I'm sorry.
No, no worries at all. I didn't know it was on. I was, like, looking around my room, I'm in a hotel room. I wasn't sure if it was on your side or my side. Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, we love to talk about competition. You know, GitLab, you know, is just over 1% penetrated in the market today. You know, our guidance for the full year this year is a little over $400 million in revenue. You know, we estimate to be a $40 billion TAM. We're just over 1% penetrate. If you look at us and GitHub combined, you know, GitHub recently released what they're doing in ARR, we're under 5% of the total market. It is a really big market.
We're very early innings in it, and the people who have gone on the platform have seen the efficiency and cost savings that can happen. Because it is such a big market, when we go back and look at all the deals that we pitched within a quarter, approximately 50% of them, there's no competition whatsoever. As we go through all the Salesforce notes, it's not like we're competing against, you know, an XYZ company. In deals that we see Microsoft, it's less than 20% of the deals. When we do see Microsoft, our win rate is almost identical.
You know, we, you know, it's more of a, you know, evangelical consultative sales approach to tell them why a platform's better than point solutions, trying to understand what their pain points are, you know, talking about how we can drive some of those business outcomes. The top three names that we do see, I would say our number one competitor is DIY DevOps, right?
Not a company, it's the philosophy internal around DIY DevOps. I'd say our number two competitor is our free product. We have a really good free product, people use our free product. When you look at companies, named companies, the number one company we run up against is Microsoft, that's in less than 20% of the deals. Bitbucket is second, Jenkins is third.
Awesome. Awesome. I did wanna highlight as well, if I think about, I guess a conversation on GitHub, I appreciate you saying that you see them, let's say, less than 20% of deals, right? On the most recent earnings call, Microsoft did discuss how GitHub is now north of $1 billion in ARR.
I think from investors' standpoint, there's a, there's a concern or thought that if Microsoft is proactively starting to size up the, what GitHub is, are they becoming more focused on GitHub and trying to drive that to become larger over time? The question for you then is, are you seeing them more frequently today versus three months ago, six months, one year ago? I wanna highlight, like if you said that you're seeing them in less than 20% of deals today, has that been relatively consistent or is that edged up or down? How do we think about that?
Yeah. No, absolutely. It's, it's been relatively consistent, so we've seen no change. You know, if, you know, you can go Google, and I think there's some whisper numbers on how big GitHub was when they were acquired. You can then sort of extrapolate where they're at now. We're growing, in my belief, far greater than how they're growing.
You know, they were, you know, much larger three years ago and, you know, you know, where we were three years ago, so I'm happy with the progress that we've made. You know, it's, you know, I've been in businesses where it's a winner-take-all market. This isn't a winner-take-all market. You know, it's a really big TAM. You know, there can be two leads in the market.
You know, what we do is, you know, the things that we can control, right? We continue to enhance the product so it's a good user experience. We, you know, we have a very high Net Dollar Retention Rate. We have customers from seven years ago that are still expanding with us today. You know, those things that we're doing are sticky to the customer. They're showing good ROI on their end, and that's the stuff that we can control.
To further highlight the GitHub competition, right? I'm just curious, you said that the win rates are relatively consistent whether or not GitHub shows up. The question from my end is if you are competing with GitHub in a deal, and let's say the customer decides to go with you, are there certain customer requirements that typically percolate to the top which makes you the one that ends up getting that deal? Like, how should we think about it from a maybe the platform itself of what you're offering customers? How does that differ?
Yeah. Happy to go through that. You know, I think, you know, in some of our larger deals where there was a long RFP and a long review process, one of our larger customers I talk about on a regular basis who has, you know, well in excess of 10,000 licenses deployed, was on Azure GitHub. They were looking to do a digital transformation, they did an RFP, and basically evaluated a number of different solutions.
After a nine-month technical evaluation, they chose to go off of GitHub and go onto GitLab. You know, technically, in that particular case, they viewed us as a better solution than GitHub, one of which they were already on. Technically, we believe that, you know, we're the most advanced platform for the full DevSecOps process.
We have very good, you know, security features and so forth. But the difference between, you know, us and them, we are open source for primarily closed source code. They're closed source, we allow anybody to contribute to our platform, whether it's our customer, the wider community, you know, or our internal team.
You know, we are basically agnostic to where we're hosted on. We can be hosted on GCP, AWS, or Azure. Some of their features are Azure only, you have to be on Azure. Because we are neutral, there's no vendor lock-in. All we sell is one platform for DevSecOps. And, you know, in their case, they have Power BI, they have Azure, Microsoft Office, Lync. They have a whole suite of stuff.
There's a number of reasons why, you know, people choose us. You know, I think I'll go back to the results that we're driving within our customers. The ROI that they're receiving, you know, sort of the main reasons why customers stay with us, you know, why we get picked up is from a technical perspective.
Great. Great. If I move over to end market demand, right? It's interesting almost across my entire coverage, most folks are talking about elongating deal cycles, budget scrutiny obviously, a tighter environment.
The last two quarters now you've come out and noted how GitLab is actually seeing its sales cycles compress or that sales velocity accelerate, right? Can you just build on what is driving that and how it almost feels like you guys are bucking the trend in that respect? Why would that sales cycle be compressing versus the typical elongation we're hearing about from a lot of other folks?
Yeah. Thanks for that, Mike. You know, the preparation that goes into earnings calls today is far more than a public company CFO of another large company. You know, with the 3rd quarter, 2nd quarter and 3rd quarter we delivered, historically you would never go do all the work that you do in preparation for these calls.
Two quarters ago, that was the number one question coming from analysts and investors. We went to go do the work to say, "Hey, what is sales cycle has done?" And they actually compressed just a little, and then we did it again last quarter.
you know, there's, you know, the need for a platform, the awareness of a platform, the willingness or the desire to save money and become more efficient, the ability to release software quicker. These are all the reasons why people are moving to a platform. you know, because we do, you know, 90% of our revenue's ratable, you know, if we close deals three days shorter or five or six or seven days shorter on average than the quarter before, it has very little to no impact on the financials. you know, but we just wanted to comment that we were seeing that they did shorten it a little again.
I also noted that, you know, the first meeting I have at the beginning of every quarter is with my CMO and CRO. It's no presentation, no data. It's just like, "Hey, based on all your customer calls, all the deals that you did, what trends have you seen this quarter that were new versus last quarter?" During it, they noted a couple things that towards the end of the quarter they were seeing more people involved in deals for approvals than they've seen previously.
That's a subset of deals towards the end of the quarter. We are starting to see some of that. In second quarter, when asked, "Are you seeing any impact on the macro?" The answer was no, right? All the metrics look great, the results are great, so forth.
You know, this quarter, our third quarter that we reported out and we said, "Hey, there's a number of watch points in the business that we're actually watching now 'cause we are feeling stuff." I feel like if you're a mission critical software platform, and you have this time to value in business outcomes with a well-documented ROI, it doesn't take months and months and months and a lot of professional services fees to implement.
The purchase price is relatively low. All of those are great attributes to be resilient. You know, where some companies felt it, you know, end of first quarter or second quarter, we didn't feel anything. We felt it more in third quarter. I believe all companies will feel it. To the degree that they feel it will be different.
I think we're super well positioned. We haven't changed our messaging. The number one objective at GitLab is growth, we'll do that responsibly. We have two main levers on the business, or sort of things that we look at. One is pipeline, you know, I have really good visibility into pipeline, you know, a quarter or two, three quarters out.
You know, with most of the revenue ratable, you know, the, the quarter in front of me is sort of easy to know about. If I see anything happen in my pipeline, I can go adjust headcount. Since we've been adding so much headcount, really around capacity and R&D, you know, that's the first area I'd focus at to actually make sure that the margin profile continues to be positive.
As you saw this quarter, we added $46 million of incremental revenue year-over-year, and we did that for $2.3 million less in operating loss. In that number included incremental G&A that was slightly over $2 million, hotel cancellation fees that was slightly over $2 million, and in public company expenses, it was slightly over $2 million. On an apples basis, we delivered $46 million incremental revenue quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, and we did that for, you know, roughly about $9 million less in loss.
Right. Right. Thank you for walking through that. I know, I guess we were, we were touching on that end market demand piece, right? You were saying how maybe that subset of customers that was coming up as far as increased deal scrutiny and, again, introducing more managerial layers for that deal.
The question is, what does GitLab have in its court, to help, I guess, either fend off, or better educate customers to ensure that maybe it doesn't get lost in the wash? Like, are there learnings from this past year that should help you better navigate if this is our new normal, how do we think about that?
You know what? It's, you know, I think the sales messaging has changed slightly.
Mm-hmm.
Pre sort of macro issues, it was, "Hey, you know, adopt this platform, better user experience, software out quicker, happier developers, you know, here's all the things that you can do." I think it's changed more to an ROI discussion.
Mm-hmm
... on, you know, you can, we do something called a VSA, it's a value stream assessment, where for some of our larger deals, we'll go in and basically do an assessment of, you know, based on what you tell us, if you choose GitLab, here's what we think your results will be. You know, that is catching, you know, resonating really well with CFOs, right?
You know, I know if in this environment, if you brought me a big ERP proposal that took 9-12 months to implement and costs, you know, $1 million, you know, plus on implementation fees and $2 million, you know, commitment on the, you know, on the software itself, you know, I'm just gonna ask like, you know, tell me how that improves where we're at today versus having all these other solutions that we have. How much will I save and, you know, what's the impact? You know, we're seeing that as well, and the good news is we have a good story behind that for our customers.
Great. I'm seeing we actually did get a question in here from one of the listeners, I guess touching on this point, but the idea is given the macro pressures that are out there, I know we're talking about, let's see, the sales cycles, but are there pressures on the size of the deal or contract durations?
Yeah. Great question. Thanks for that. Contract duration's interesting. You know, we historically, prior to me being at the company, we compensated our sales team on multi-year deals where we did multi-year cash collections. It's hard to believe, but just a few short years ago, interest rates were really, really low. When you invested that capital, you hardly got any money, you know, back.
Because we put so much feature functionality into the platform every year, we're able on renewal to basically give less of a discount. Mike, if you came, you signed up, you bought, you know, a couple hundred licenses, maybe you negotiate a 10% discount.
In a year when you renew, because there's, you know, additional feature functionality in there, and you're getting the business outcome, we'll say, "Hey, we'll do a renewal, but we'll do a 5% discount, not the 10% discount." When we went and did the analysis, the multi- the incentive for the sales organization basically caused us to have 25% of our total billings were multi-year.
We collected the cash up front, but in order to do that, we had to discount the deal to get that done. I made a decision to actually push for one-year contracts. We actually get requested by customers for longer contracts. But you know, we have actually pushed for one-year contracts or 'cause we had such a high gross retention rate.
Our average contract length now across the entire company is 14 months. On contract, that's probably a little contrary to what you may be hearing from other companies, but that's the decision we made. Our multi-year billings is, you know, went from 25% down to 12%, and now below 10%. That's great.
You know, we had enough cash on the balance sheet then, it was over $200 million, and, you know, we still haven't spent a lot of the money that we raised during our IPO. You know, there's no need to do early cash collections and lock people into long-term contracts. What was... There was another part to that question?
I'm trying to think. We went over potential pressure on contract duration and deal sizes. Deal sizes as well.
On deal sizes, we showed this in our S1. It was a cohort chart and how cohorts over years have expanded. Every year, the sizes of deals are getting larger and larger. The initial purchases, you know, back when we were a younger company, you know, people were buying in small increments, but we're actually seeing, you know, bigger deals.
If you make a choice to move to a platform, you know, UBS is not our normal cadence where we land and do a wall-to-wall implementation. Typically, we're landing small and expanding. I haven't seen any major differences in the trends there.
Great. another thing that's been spoken about, and I don't wanna bias your answer in any way, so I'm just gonna answer the question cleanly, but it's really around the preliminary guide for fiscal 2024, right? The question is, if you guys offered that fiscal 2024 revenue growth outlook and then the free cash flow target for fiscal 2025, what really provided management the confidence to offer those targets in this market?
Yeah. So, you know, the free cash flow one was the easy one, right? You know, quarter-over-quarter, we're continuing to show great operating leverage in the model. I have been very consistent in my messaging, saying the number one thing is growth, but we'll do that responsibly. If I see growth slow, we'll adjust the headcount accordingly. We know we have a great product, a great market opportunity, but we wanna be responsible how we do that.
We have not changed as a company on how we operate as a private company, as a newly public company with almost $1 billion on our balance sheet, and people saying, "Grow, grow at any cost," or as a public company in today's environment where people say, "Get profitable immediately." We have not changed one bit on that.
We've been very consistent there. When I look at my long-term model, we get asked a lot about being, you know, when we'll be break even. One, we wanted to provide greater clarity to that in this market. As I just mentioned, quarter-over-quarter, we added, you know, roughly $46 million of incremental revenue and did that for a lot less.
I know how we're trending, and so wanted to sort of provide some guidance on that. You know, I do realize that, you know, you know, we have a great gross margin, but if you look at some of the other cost categories, we're higher than what some of the benchmarks are. I thought it was important to give you, as well as the investors, some insight to when we'll be free cash flow break even.
You know, just to let them know that we'll be responsible with the money we have and how we operate. On the revenue side, you know, because a lot of our revenue's ratable and, you know, we have a well-known, high Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate, you know, it's easier to actually look to see what it's gonna be.
We debated this internally a lot and, you know, about half the companies gave soft guidance. At the time when we pulled that together based on the ratable nature of the business, based on what we are seeing in the market, based on our book-to-bill to recognize what we saw in professional services and so forth, we wanted to give some soft guidance that we thought that, you know, 40% was roughly in line with what our expectations were.
Great. Another comment specifically on the revenue growth dynamic, but there's this implicit message that management then has line of sight to this target if you're putting it out there, right? I know you're talking about whether it's those retention rates you're talking about or the deals that are coming online. In this macro backdrop or let me rephrase it. How did the macro backdrop weigh as far as assumptions that you made when thinking about that growth target for next year?
You know, you basically, when you make. You know, when you model that out, you take into consideration all the data points that you have, right, at the time, and you make some assumptions on basically what you're seeing in the marketplace. You know, we are a extremely transparent company.
We like to say we're the most public public company out there, in the sense that we have a handbook that has over 2,000 pages, and Just Google GitLab handbook, and then whatever category you wanna do, whether it's benefits, expenses, budget process, our, you know, 10-year view on the market, whatever you wanna do, you can actually go Google that and see it. We're just trying to be transparent and tell, you know, what we're seeing, based on the time that we actually made that decision.
Great. Great. I know we're drawing up on time here. We have a couple more client questions that I wanna get out there as well, since they did come in. The first, I guess it's coming back to the go-to-market, but is there any additional incentives to the sales force as far as SaaS deals versus term or on-prem deals?
Not at all. We don't differentiate on price to the customers, nor do we set internal sales targets or spiffs to sell SaaS versus self-managed. We, you know, really have tried to remove the friction out of the process to make it as easy as possible for a salesperson to find out what the right solution is for the customer and not to drive something by, you know, a commission schedule.
Great. Another question which is pretty relevant right now, but it's the idea of the AI code completion tools like Tabnine as an example. The question goes, if something like GPT-3 base code completion becomes more relevant to DevOps purchasing, what is GitLab's plan to attack that opportunity?
Yeah. Absolutely, you know, we are working on stuff like that. The number one premise at GitLab is a single application platform for the full software development life cycle to basically increase productivity and, you know, get a better ROI.
You know, you know, ChatGPT is exactly, you know, one of the things that, you know, people are doing to do that. If you Google GitLab handbook AI assist, it's all the documentation of what we're doing around that internally. We have AI currently today in our product, to continue to develop that to make developers more productive.
Great. Another question that, doing a little bit of jumping around since we are shy on time, but I did wanna touch on GitLab Bronze. I know it's an older package that you guys had offered, right? The company previously retired it, and now you have these two tiers between Premium and Ultimate.
Can you discuss, and maybe, I know it's backwards looking here, but the strategic rationale for retiring Bronze, as well as what that transition was for customers who had been on Bronze. Is that behind you at this point, or is there still some play in the model from that changeover?
Yeah. Absolutely. When we looked at the tiers we had, we had four tiers. It was Free, Starter/Bronze, which was $4, Premium that was $19, and Ultimate that was $99, all per month per seat pricing. The $4 tier just didn't really make a lot of sense, so we deprecated that tier and allowed the users, upon renewal, to do three things.
They could go down to our Free product, they could upgrade to Premium, and if they decided to upgrade to Premium and they had a certain amount of licenses, they could do it on a tiered scale, or they could defer the decision for a year and then make the decision in a year.
When you look at, you know, and the amount of ARR that we had roughly on that was approximately $20 million when we made the decision. When you look at that ARR and what happened over time, two-thirds of them actually upgraded to Premium, and a third of them went to Free or aren't using the product anymore. You know, we... It was above our expectations.
We are almost through that process. We aren't completely through the process. We have roughly about $4 million still on that tier and we'll continue to go through it. Because, you know, most people took this gradual step up, it didn't have really a big impact on our financials, but it's made it, you know, a lot clearer just to have Free, Premium and Ultimate.
Got it. Two other items there. The first, I just wanna make sure, if we're talking about that $4 million or so ARR that's still on the Bronze tier, is that really those customers just haven't come up for renewal yet so you're waiting for that process? Or is that in relation to maybe those customers that upgraded to Premium on that tiered scale that you're talking about? How do I think about that?
Yeah. You know, we didn't basically deprecate it and say, "Everybody, regardless of contract, you have to make a decision today.
Right.
You know, people were, Let's say if they're just on a year contract, but they signed three days before we made the announcement, five days, six days, you know, it's a little over a year and a half where we did that. They would have a year from when they signed.
Mm-hmm
... go a year out, and then maybe they deferred for a year.
Sure
... you know, could potentially be up to two years, for them to get off that, get off the product.
Got it. Got it. Okay. We just have a minute left here, so I'll put it back in your court for the last word. If there were one or two things that you really wanted to stress to folks that tuned in today, what would you have them leave with, whether it's focused on 2024 or thinking about the company more broadly?
Yeah. Well, thanks for having us, Mike. Really appreciate you hosting us. You know, wanna thank our customers, the wider community, and also all the team members that work so diligently to make the company what it is today. You know, GitLab is in a great spot. It's a huge market. We're really early innings in the market.
We, you know, have really great metrics and well-documented use cases with return on investment. You know, we believe every company, regardless of vertical or geo, has to become a software company to remain competitive, GitLab enables people to do that. We're super happy with where we're at and the results that we've had. You know, it's a pretty simple company. We have, you know, Premium and Ultimate, it's not like we have to go create another product.
We just have to continue to execute, and we've been very consistent in the messaging that, you know, the number one objective at the company is growth, but we'll do that responsibly. We'll continue to try to show operating leverage in the model and provide a great solution to our customers and potential customers.
Terrific. All right, we'll leave it there, thank you very much to GitLab and to everyone for tuning in. Thank you.
Thanks, Mike.
Take care, guys.
Have a great day. Bye now.
You too. Bye.