The editorial explicitly distinguishes Sijbrandij from the typical 'relentless builder' narrative, arguing he isn't performing productivity but wrestling with a terminal diagnosis and choosing creation. It calls out the usual LinkedIn-style hustle posts as 'cringe' to draw contrast with the gravity of this situation.
Sijbrandij's own blog post details the intersection of treatment, mortality, and the compulsion to build. Rather than retreating after stepping down as GitLab CEO in December 2024 amid his diagnosis, he channeled his remaining time into founding new companies, presenting building as an intrinsic drive rather than a career strategy.
Submitted the story to Hacker News where it garnered 376 points and 77 comments, framing it with the title 'Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies' — highlighting the juxtaposition of terminal illness and the irrepressible urge to create as the story's core hook.
The editorial notes Sijbrandij 'has been transparent about his journey,' connecting this openness to his broader character as the leader who built GitLab with a famously public handbook and open culture. His willingness to publish a detailed personal cancer account at sytse.com/cancer is framed as consistent with that ethos rather than a departure from it.
Sytse "Sid" Sijbrandij, the Dutch co-founder and former CEO of GitLab, published a deeply personal account of his ongoing battle with osteosarcoma — a rare and aggressive form of bone cancer. Rather than retreating from the tech world, Sijbrandij has been doing what he's always done: founding companies. His blog post at sytse.com/cancer details the intersection of treatment, mortality, and the compulsion to build.
Sijbrandij co-founded GitLab Inc. in 2014 alongside Dmitriy Zaporozhets, who had created the original open-source project in 2011. Under Sid's leadership, GitLab grew from a scrappy open-source alternative to GitHub into a publicly traded company — IPO'ing on NASDAQ in October 2021 at roughly $11 billion. In December 2024, Sijbrandij stepped down as CEO, handing the role to Bill Staples and moving to Executive Chair — a transition shaped in part by his diagnosis.
The Hacker News post carrying his story hit 376 points, a strong signal that this resonated far beyond the typical startup founder narrative. The community response was notably thoughtful — less "hustle culture" cheerleading, more genuine reflection on what drives builders.
There's a particular kind of story the tech industry loves to tell about founders: the relentless builder who won't stop no matter what. Usually it's cringe — a LinkedIn post about working through a vacation. This isn't that. Sijbrandij isn't performing productivity; he's wrestling with a terminal diagnosis and choosing to spend his finite time creating things. That distinction matters.
Osteosarcoma is not a common cancer. It's most frequently diagnosed in teenagers and young adults, making Sijbrandij's case relatively unusual. It's also aggressive — five-year survival rates vary significantly depending on whether the cancer has metastasized, ranging from roughly 60-70% for localized cases down to 15-30% for metastatic ones. Sijbrandij has been transparent about his journey, a stance consistent with GitLab's radically open culture. GitLab famously operated with a public handbook, public issue trackers, and public company metrics. That same instinct for transparency now extends to something far more personal.
The reaction on Hacker News is worth examining because of what it *didn't* become. These threads often devolve into debates about work-life balance or toxic hustle culture. Instead, the dominant thread was one of genuine respect — and curiosity. Multiple commenters noted that the impulse to found companies during cancer treatment isn't about grind; it's about agency. When your body is subject to forces entirely outside your control, building something — anything — restores a sense of authorship over your own life.
This resonates particularly in the developer community because so many of us define ourselves by what we build. The question Sijbrandij's story implicitly asks is: if you had sharply limited time, would you still be writing code? Starting companies? Or would you do something entirely different? There's no correct answer, but the honesty of the question is rare in an industry that usually deals in abstractions.
To understand why this story carries weight, you need to understand what Sijbrandij built. GitLab wasn't just another DevOps tool — it was a bet that the entire software development lifecycle could live in a single application. Source control, CI/CD, security scanning, deployment, monitoring — all in one platform. That bet, made when the conventional wisdom said best-of-breed tools would always win, turned out to be prescient.
GitLab now has over 30 million registered users and is used by more than half of the Fortune 100. The company pioneered the all-remote model before COVID made it mainstream — operating with 2,000+ employees across 65+ countries with no headquarters. The public handbook, which runs to thousands of pages, became a template that dozens of other companies copied.
Sijbrandij's leadership style was unusual for a tech CEO: methodical, transparent to a fault, and deeply process-oriented. The company's IPO was one of the largest for an open-source company, and it validated a model where giving away the core product and charging for enterprise features could sustain a multi-billion-dollar business. When he stepped down as CEO, it wasn't a surprise to those following closely — the succession had been planned, and Sijbrandij had been gradually shifting focus.
What was perhaps surprising was where that focus went: not into board seats and advisory roles, but into new company formation. The specifics of his new ventures are shared in his blog post, but the pattern itself is noteworthy. Serial founders who've had major exits often become investors. Sijbrandij chose the harder path.
This isn't a story with a "migrate to X" takeaway. But it does have implications for how we think about the tools and platforms we depend on.
GitLab's transition from founder-led to professional management is now well underway. Bill Staples, the new CEO, comes from a product background (previously at Adobe and New Relic). For teams heavily invested in GitLab's platform, the strategic direction is worth watching. Founder-led companies often make different bets than professionally managed ones — more willingness to cannibalize existing products, more tolerance for long-term investments that don't have immediate ROI. The question for GitLab users isn't whether the platform will continue to be maintained — it will — but whether the pace of bold, opinionated product decisions will change.
More broadly, Sijbrandij's story is a reminder that the tools we build our careers on are made by people with finite lives and complex motivations. Open-source projects survive their founders; companies sometimes don't survive the transition as cleanly. GitLab's radical transparency — including transparent succession planning — may prove to be its most durable contribution to how tech companies operate.
Sid Sijbrandij's post is worth reading in full — not for business insights or startup advice, but because it's an honest document from someone navigating the hardest thing a person can face while refusing to stop building. The tech industry will move on to the next trending repo and the next funding round. But every now and then, a story cuts through the noise and reminds you that behind every `git push` is a person with a limited number of them left. That's true for all of us. Sijbrandij is just more honest about it.
Thanks for posting this. Happy to answer questions!
I think you’d find Dr. Richard Scolyer’s story really relatable. He’s an Australian cancer expert who, along with his colleague, is using himself as "patient zero" for a world-first treatment for his own brain cancer. They’re basically doing the research and the treatment in parallel to fi
There's a crazy story in here where Sytse invested in a click chemistry cancer research startup (Shasqi) in 2017 and ends up becoming a customer six years later.I sincerely hope it works out for him.
The linked post about his treatment is basically a vanity article; low in useful information, but high in vague assertions and platitudes. There's also a link to a post griping about the red tape someone experienced while trying to self-treat their dog's cancer that's weird. I clearly
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This is the most supremely motivating post I've seen in a long time. I know what it is to be diagnosed with cancer, being rushed to surgery - it's amazing how quickly the medical-industrial complex can move once you've got a diagnosis (at least in Australia). I had a short period of c