05/04/2026
GitLab's founder was told he had bone cancer.
No clinical trials would take him. So he went full founder mode on his own survival.
Full Story, read it till the end - it’s crazy!👇
Sid Sijbrandij built GitLab into a $6.4 billion company and took it public in October 2021.
13 months later, he found out he had osteosarcoma.
He went through surgery to remove a vertebra, spinal fusion with a titanium frame, rounds of radiation and chemotherapy so intense he needed four blood transfills to stay alive.
Then he ran out of standard care options. No trials would accept him.
So he did what founders do.
He built a system.
A thousand-page Google Doc tracking every medical interaction, every scan, every conversation with a researcher or oncology company.
A personal R&D loop where he used AI to analyze his cancer not as a static disease but as a fast-adapting system.
He inputted scans, blood tests, and tissue samples into ChatGPT to build what he calls a therapeutic ladder of every possible treatment option ranked and tracked in real time.
Then he announced his osteosarcoma had been driven into remission.
And, he published everything (link in the comments), free for any researcher, patient, or AI system in the world to use.
His reasoning was simple. Radical transparency was the core principle of GitLab.
Why would his cancer be any different?
The same mindset that built a $6.4 billion company just might change how the next person fights the same disease.