Going Founder Mode on Cancer

Summary

Welcome to The Century of Biology! This newsletter explores data, companies, and ideas from the frontier of biology. You can subscribe for free to have the next post delivered to your inbox:Today, we’re going to study Sid Sijbrandij’s incredible journey to cure his own cancer.Enjoy! 🧬Sid Sijbrandij is an information maximalist.On October 14, 2021, GitLab, the business he had started in his upstairs home office in the Netherlands only ten years earlier, went public. GitLab started as an open-source collaboration tool for software developers. Sid led its transformation into a massive application that tracks every stream of information in the software development lifecycle.GitLab makes a great product. Businesses of all sizes use it. But GitLab is arguably best known in the business community for something else: it is one of the largest fully remote companies in the world. With over 2,500 employees and a $6.4B market capitalization, they still don’t operate a single in-person office.Achieving this required doing things differently. One example is a cultural norm that Sid refers to as “radical transparency.” Consider the GitLab Handbook. Now totaling over 3,000 pages, the handbook is a central repository (updated and maintained with GitLab’s own version control system) for every piece of company information you could imagine. Not only is it available to all employees, it is publicly hosted on the World Wide Web for all to see.Sid developed a complex information processing system (GitLab’s unique operating culture) to scale the development of a complex information product (GitLab) built for creating and maintaining complex information products (software).It’s safe to say that Sid really likes information. But on November 18, 2022, Sid got information that absolutely nobody wants.He had cancer.Sid had a lot to lose. At this point, he was a self-made billionaire entrepreneur who was happily married to his life partner of over 25 years. Suddenly, the six centimeter mass gro...