GitLab Inc. Bill Staples

Chief Executive Officer & Director, GitLab Inc. (GTLB)

Appointed chief executive on 5 December 2024, when co-founder Sytse Sijbrandij moved to executive chair. Ran New Relic as chief executive from July 2021 to December 2023, and before that led Adobe's Experience Cloud engineering and Microsoft's Azure application platform. In May 2026 he published a letter titled "GitLab Act 2" that reset the strategy around agentic AI and announced an open restructuring; the June results confirmed a 14% workforce reduction and an exit from 22 countries.

On the record with shareholders

Earnings calls

  1. Q2 FY2027 Sep 1, 2026 Staples argued that this quarter was the first real proof that GitLab's three-part growth algorithm - more customers, more products, more consumption per customer - compounds rather than merely adds up. Record gross bookings, net ARR up more than 40% and first orders more than doubling came, he said, from a sales organisation rebuilt over five quarters under CRO Ian Steward, with account-executive capacity up about 30% and productivity per rep up about 10% at the same time, which he treats as the hard part. The strategic claim underneath is that AI makes GitLab more necessary rather than less: as agents write more code, that code still has to be stored, governed and secured, so secure repositories grew 60%, pushes 50% and pipelines 40%, Ultimate reached 59% of ARR, and the connected lifecycle context GitLab has accumulated for a decade becomes the scarce asset - the Orbit beta, where roughly 80% of query volume arrives from external coding agents, is his evidence for that. The commercial expression of it is Flex, a single dollar commitment a customer reallocates monthly across seats and consumption products, which took more than $20 million from 130 customers in six weeks and lifted paid consumption run rate from $15 million to over $40 million against a $100 million exit target. He was explicit that the token bill is largely not GitLab's - Duo Agent Platform is model- and cloud-agnostic, so customers pay for context, governance and auditability rather than inference - which is his answer to the charge that a consumption business must carry structurally lower margins. Read the call · 13 quotes →
In their own words

Podcasts, interviews & articles

4 recorded appearances

2026

Tech Disruptors (Bloomberg Intelligence)
Podcast Tech Disruptors (Bloomberg Intelligence) · Aug 22, 2026 · 42 min

GitLab on Agentic Infrastructure, AI Controls

With Bloomberg Intelligence's Mandeep Singh, ten days before the Q2 print: he argues faster AI code generation raises rather than lowers the need for governance and control across the lifecycle, positions GitLab as the cloud- and model-neutral orchestration layer for coding agents, and confirms the move from pure seat-based subscriptions to a hybrid that prices agent work by consumption.

Watch or read →
GitLab Transcend - Keynote
Keynote GitLab · Jun 12, 2026 · 2h 18m

GitLab Transcend - Keynote

The full Transcend keynote, ten days after the restructuring was confirmed on the earnings call. Staples, chief product and marketing officer Manav Khurana and the product leads walk through the agentic roadmap with live demos and customer stories, including Mercedes-Benz.

Watch or read →
GitLab (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1)
Shareholder letter GitLab (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) · May 11, 2026

GitLab Act 2: A letter to our customers and our investors

The strategy reset, filed with the SEC rather than merely blogged. Staples announces an openly-run restructuring with a voluntary separation window, sets out ten "core beliefs" — software built by machines and directed by people, a generational rebuild of Git for machine-scale load, orchestration as the layer that turns agent activity into shipped software — and reaffirms Q1 and full-year FY27 guidance while deferring the cost of the cuts to the 2 June call.

Watch or read →