 My mic working, it should be. I see some people all joined. Feel free to mention in the chat what you like to see out of this. I'm sure you have a chat window, so Q&A window. It is 11 o'clock and I expected to be starting the live stream right now. However, I don't see Vlad. I do see that the chat is awesome news. So we can, oh, Vlad is here. He's trying to get in. Hello to talk. So Vlad, I'm on the queue. Hey. You were second to go. Yeah, I can hear you fine. Have you been waiting for long? No, it's just, it's got me joining as an attendee. I thought it was going to have me join with my camera. Yeah. Right now it doesn't allow you to humor. No, I think it's got me as a normal attendee. Yeah, I think I just promoted you to a panelist. There we go. Magic. We're one minute late, so let's get started. I'm Sid. I'm the CEO of GitLab. I'm joined by Vlad. Vlad, you want to introduce yourself and maybe what you do. Sure. I'm the CEO and co-founder at Turtle. So we make it really easy for startups to find freelancers all over the world and for freelancers all over the world to work with us based startups. So we're both run a remote first. Or as I like to call it now, all remote, like everyone's room. And Vlad, I want to discuss something. So I say, take it away and we'll keep an eye on the chat. Sure. So I thought we'd both start off and just talk about how we got started for remote work. It's been around for a while, but I'm guessing we both had untraditional starts. So Sid, do you want to maybe start? Yeah. First person I hired was in Serbia. I was in the Netherlands. I said that I'm working there. My co-founder was in the Ukraine. So we started working remote and I ended up hiring a bunch of people in the network and I had a single desk at home. And I like invited them in and they came for three days and then they kind of started working because all the tools were there and why not? We never kind of discussed it, but they kind of started to work from home. I continued until we joined by Combinator and they said that works for engineering, but not for sales and marketing. So we got an office in Soma and the same thing happened. The Hayden, the salesperson came in for three days and I started working from home. We never discussed it, but like, why come to the office? It takes an hour each way to commute. And then only benefit is that you sit on video calls the entire day. What would be interesting, but slightly distracting. And I think we were just in that spot where video cards, like internet connections got good enough and you had like blue jeans and our own, which make it easy to do. And I kind of continue and many executives joining were like, oh, this is worth a few weeks. They were like, well, my life certainly improved. And guess what? I've learned to communicate with my words and built reports. And I think the trick is a lot of video calling. How about you? Pretty similar in that I just kind of fell into it. I mean, my mind started a lot sooner though. I was in undergrad and I had a internship that turned into a part-time job at a company called Merkel. And they were also in kind of early to the game with, hey, we don't care if you come into the office or bill some hours from home. And I remember sitting in a, actually in a more mundane class and undergrad. So I hope none of my undergrad professors are watching. And I remember logging in and billing a couple hours during a more boring lecture. And I was like, wait, isn't this work? So that was kind of my first exposure to remote work. And then both companies that I've started Darwin apps and turtle, we wouldn't have been able to become real companies if it wasn't for remote work. Just the price of talent in the U.S. has gotten so insane that unless you take the traditional route of VC funding and hiring people for what the average salaries are in New York and San Francisco, it's impossible to compete while there's great talent over the world that you can tap into if you can forego a traditional office. Seems like a small size for great talent. Well, it's, I don't think it's a sacrifice. I think it's, I find it more enjoyable. Yeah. I get more done in a day. And I, now in a normal meeting, I like hated that we're not collaborating in a group, but there's someone taking notes and that someone after that, our meeting has to compile the notes and then we have to agree those were the notes that I have the Google Doc in front of us and everyone can see what's happening right there and then. Yeah, I agree. Async for this nature of remote work is better even if applied for an office work, like whether you're sitting across from a desk on video calls or simply in a room together and you're logging everything versus being in different rooms. There's a lot of benefit to it. And I think we both are huge remote work proponents. So I was thinking to make this interesting. Maybe we could both chat a bit about cases against remote work or at least this is that we've heard. Let's do that. And by the way, actually, thanks for mentioning my voice was strange. I hope that's fixed now. The case against remote work. I think it's really hard to run a hybrid company where you have part remote part of the people remote and part of the people at the office. It tends to be that the people at the office keep doing what everyone else does. They're not taking any meetings, not taking notes, not doing video calls. When they do join a video call, they join with like the whole table so that you have like bad audio and you can see the faces of people clearly. So that's really hard. If I had a company that was like 80% co located, I would not allow 20% of the people to work remote is already for us. It's really hard to enforce these standards. I can only imagine how hard it is to enforce standards. If you're hybrid and standards, I mean, like every meeting has a Google doc, every meeting starts on time, things like that. Yeah, I mean, those sound like great standards, whether or not you're remote or not. I hear you on the difficulty of it. I think it's something that that work as a culture has to fix though, because it'll be much more difficult for people to transition fully in house to fully remote versus being able to hit some hybrid in between. I think it'll just fundamentally make the ecosystem more difficult to add or move remote if you can't cover the hybrid piece. Yep. I do think it will be a case of like creative destruction. Yeah. I think it's, I think we were lucky to like build a new company and build it all remote. I think that it's going to, there's going to be lots of things that are going to get started this way. And at some point you'll have to change, but I think, I think we'll see the trend that a higher percentage of startups will be all remote until most new companies are there, and then startups take 10 years to mature and then 20% of the companies is all remote. And then the big ones will start changing, but it's going to be, that's going to be a big, big change. Yeah. I did think of a couple of cases. So, I mean, the obvious ones to me were anything close to birth and death. I think birthing people remote, very difficult. So some things in the medical profession, especially those that involve kind of high touch, as people get sick, et cetera. I think that's very difficult to do remotely. You need the human touch. That said, things like even cancer screenings, et cetera, being able to send those over remotely to review. I don't see a case there. So then I tried to find some other cases against remote work before starting this webinar. And there was some that seemed a little silly, like IBM forcing everyone to move remote. That seemed like just a control tactic. Some that start to make more sense, like Apple, where they're an incredibly secretive organization, and the theory is they keep everything in-house and it's less likely for things to get out questionable, but starts to make more sense. And then there were some that didn't really add up to me and just started really bipartisan. It was actually the Andreessen Horowitz podcast, the last one that came out last week or so. And Ben and Mark both go on there. And they really just said they think Silicon Valley will keep getting stronger. They didn't say remote work will not happen. And I think that there's a tendency in the community to kind of be incredibly bipartisan today. It's like either you're totally for remote work or totally against remote work. What I think Ben and Mark were saying was you will keep hitting collisions in Silicon Valley and it'll still be an epicenter for collisions. And at the same time, other areas might become stronger. And at the same time, remote work will become stronger. And I think that's kind of the stance that we have to take to embrace remote work culturally and inside of our own organizations. Otherwise, it's going to keep being this like, yes remote or no remote one way or the other sort of thing. There is something to being in person. I tend to have lots of dinners with people. There's something to breaking bread together, to having, sharing a meal, increase a setting, that's great. We bring the whole company together every nine months, get lab contribute. And it's a great experience. Something happens in your brain when you've been in person with someone else. And we should not underestimate the value of that. I believe that very high bent with exchanges, mostly where people riff on each other, that is still hard. Like playing jazz together is very hard, remote because of the latency. I think there's something else to be said for like working on ideas together. When we come together as an executive group, every quarter and we come together in person. If you're remote, it's like really hard to interrupt someone, to add a thought or something like that, or to show how you're supportive or not. There's all these known verbal clues. I think you get 80%, but you don't get 100%. And I do think that there's value to meeting up in person. I think that will keep happening. I think where collaboration tends to be hardest is between companies because you need more trust. So for that reason, I totally agree that Silicon Valley and specifically San Francisco will keep being the epicenter. Everyone in our company that regularly has to deal with external parties, either lives in the neighborhood or flies in. And that will not change. There is something, our brains do something when you've met in person with someone else and I think that will continue being the case. I'll even give an example. Turtle at this point is a much smaller company than GitLab, but the reason this live stream is happening is because we happened to be at an event in San Francisco and I tweeted at you and then we ended up hanging out for an evening and organizing this. That would not have happened if that was a remote interaction. Totally agree. Yeah. I think we'll share a recording. I just made a note. It should be on a YouTube channel, either a YouTube channel GitLab or GitLab unfiltered. So on the note of kind of taking the benefits of in-person and the benefits of remote work, I think our lens of looking at it is we've always basically been 100% remote. We just naturally fell into it. How can a company that's not remote today, you know, let's start with the small startup and then let's move our way up to companies in FANG. How can they start motivating either their teams or their leaders or, you know, just the org in general to start adding remote? Yeah. I'm not an expert at that because I've never done it. I guess one way to do it is to have like a remote day at the company where no one is at the office. Before you do that, of course, convince everyone or not everyone, but try to convince people about the case for it and how much time they'll save and all the other things. Get your tooling in place. And then after you're able to function as a company, being remote at least for a day, then I think it's time to make sure people are not missing out. So if you have an all-hands, make sure there's a camera there that records it and someone that relates questions that are asked from other people or have telepresence robots. We have one in my home here. Things to make sure people are not missing out. People don't come to work because they like to commute. People come to work because they don't want to miss out on relevant information and career opportunities. So it's very important that they hear everything. And I think in most companies, there's a lot of relevant information you cannot get in another way. When we, for example, were fundraising, we had a fundraising channel. You had a play-by-play of like, we had this meeting with a VC and they said no and they said yes and et cetera. Normally that's only done informally and you have to kind of catch the CEO coming in back from a call and then ask like, hey, how did it go? If that's the case, people come to the office because they carved that information. Yeah. I think that's a great reason for coming in and meeting with your team. More often, I've seen some bad reasons like being there because they think that they have to. I think if you're seeing anything like that in your organization, you should just call it out and recognize it in yourself. If there's a good reason for being somewhere, embrace it, run with it, repeat it. If it's a bad reason and it's just the way that things have been done, potentially it's worth calling out and stopping. Yeah, it's crazy how many companies, even companies that are very recent and very well-run in many other regards, still value input. I know output is hard to measure, but that has to be the thing. If you start measuring people and hours worked and who stays late, it's very dysfunctional. Yeah, and there's a question that came in that's pretty relevant to what we were just talking about. I think maybe we can break up the discussion a bit and answer some of the questions throughout. Yeah, make sure you repeat the question. Yeah, so Andy Tiffany asked, I joined a bit late, so not sure if this is already been discussed, but what are your thoughts on the importance and frequency of in-person gatherings and off-sites? Maybe we did cover being 100% remote, doesn't replace getting together and having either executive level or company-wide off-sites and gatherings. I don't think we got into detail as to tactics for that. So what should the frequency be? How should you think about it financially? Without having a formal office and the equipment and rent and all that goes into it, there's obviously a bunch of budget that can be left over for things like this. So Sid, how do you think about it? And then if there's anything that you don't cover, I can jump in. Definitely do it. We do it every nine months. We found that the ideal frequency for us, we do it for a week. People have to come from all over the world. So if we do it shorter, it doesn't jive with the travel time for people. We try to make it worthwhile. You don't come to Sid's presentations. We can do that every day. We do that every day. There's a presentation from a certain department in the company about what they're up to. So we don't do that. There's an opening ceremony. Then there's lots of excursions. Then there's an un-conference for a couple of days. And then there's a closing ceremony. That's it. Only the opening and closing ceremony, people sit down and watch someone on a podium. So that's crucial that you make it about meeting the other people, sharing meals together, doing stuff together. But otherwise, it's super expensive. We now are also inviting people from outside the company to them. We're even trying to sell tickets publicly. I want to make it about more than just a company, because it started to be more than a million-dollar spirit event. And then when things are bad, people start looking at that line item. Now, things aren't bad, but you always have a rough quarter every once in a while. And I want to make sure that the benefit is more than just the team members. For individual groups that need high bandwidth decision-making across different things, it makes sense to bring them together. The costs are not only monetary, but also we see productivity dip by half in that month. We do half of ourselves. We do half of the feature shift. We're just shocking, because it's just a week. But like the prep time, the downtime afterwards, people taking vacation in the location, and just people getting sick traveling, it's really costly to travel, mostly because of productivity. Flier flu, right? Yep, the flu. Flier flu. Go ahead. I wonder, though, like, I mean, it does get expensive, and I do bet that those productivity drops happen. But I wonder if we look at it over a year. You know, not over that month's productivity, but over a year's productivity, I would bet that it looks the other way. And then on the cost perspective, a million dollars a lot, no matter how you twist it. Like, that's a line item that needs to be looked at. But if you're at a smaller company, whether you're an employee or a founder, I think we have to recognize just, like, what the costs are of office space, two hours of commuting each way. I mean, if you have high level talent, two hours of commuting each way on its own for a week's worth of time or a month's worth of time. So organizing an excursion where, you know, you're paying five, ten thousand dollars for a small group or ten, twenty thousand dollars for a small group is typically less than a month of rent for real office space. Yep. Of course, like, the commute time mostly accrued to the individual, not to the company. It's their benefit. Our budget for the event is three thousand dollars per person for travel and the location. We get to go to great places. We're pretty flexible. So we ended up in, like, South Africa and Greece and beautiful sites. And, like, even companies that are co-located and still do off-site, for them there's less travel, tends to be less travel involved. But imagine that, like, it's not something you need because you're remote. It's just a bit more expensive because you're remote. But the need is there anyway. And our attendance is 90%. So people really do want to be there and they think it's useful. And I guess for the, for less of the off-sites and gatherings and more on just, like, formal meetings, what we do is we get together about once a quarter. We do goal setting for that quarter. Monthly meetings can still happen remotely, but in person as executive quarterly gatherings. What is your frequency for the executive gatherings? I think you said monthly? No, every quarter. Every quarter, so you guys also do a quarter. Andy, I hope you answered your question. If there's anything else, you can just follow up in the Q&A. Go ahead. I was going to say, I was hoping that, you know, we could find something in remote work that we disagree with. Making it a little interesting for the audience. You know, we both have strong opinions, I'm sure, on certain things. So I'm not sure if we'll get there, but I thought we'd give it a shot while we're live. Is there something that you have a strong opinion on that is unpopular relative to remote work? That's a good question. I'm not sure. I see that you don't believe that 40 hours a week should be the norm. Oh, I think I have something. I've had so far, I know some digital nomads that are absolutely doing fine, but so far in GitLab, they haven't been very successful. Now, sample size is like two people. But people that travel the entire time to new locations that they want to explore, they tend to not do really well. I can see people like staying somewhere for like seven months at a time or something like that, but if you travel to Bangkok for a month and then Singapore for a month or something like that, that tends to not go well. And I think one of the reasons is you're continually hanging out with backpackers that don't have a day job. So it starts becoming really hard to get the discipline to work enough hours and put enough focus in it. That and your regular commute becomes an irregular bus trip or flight or backpack journey or something. So you're adding the commute logistics to it as well. I've seen similar things happen with some freelancers on turtle that are nomads. So yeah, I think it's one of those good in theory hasn't worked in practice yet sort of things. Yeah, I think there's a few people who manage it, but they tend to stay longer per location. Yeah, agreed. Someone asked how we deal with all the regulatory and financial nuances of running a business internationally as a startup. I think you're referring to like people and hiring people and that is hard. There's no fixed answer. We have entities like we incorporated in I think more than six countries now so we can put people on our payroll there. But we also hired people to resellers. We also have a lot of people that are contractors and you have to kind of dive into the specifics for each country to determine like what is the risk of having people there like how many people you have there what business you do there and also like the local law obviously. Yeah, I think that's a great question that's going to apply to more and more startups as it gets easier to even a two or three person team might be in two or three countries. Are there any services or anything like that that you've used that help you kind of navigate the waters on how to work internationally? Yeah, we have a bureau whose names escape me but they help us like look at the risk of every single country I've used for example manpower as a payrolling service in Serbia to hire Madin but it's a bit of a patchwork. Yeah, I hope that gets better. Just as kind of like video conferencing and all that has gotten better I hope the infrastructure for global work gets better. It's a massive part of remote work. Yeah, I want to strive for employing people. Yeah. Then there's another question from Hasan on how can you control lazy employees in remote work? I think that's an easy one. I think it's in office. You shouldn't have lazy employees. Yeah, well it's the same thing like I think in an office you can be well first of all I'm lazy like every every talented person should be lazy and not want to do any work but I think what he's referring to is people that are just not producing results and yeah you should manage underperformance and that means telling those people that they're not producing enough and if they're trying to coach them to improve the situation if not suggest they seek employment elsewhere or let them go. And I think that's the case everywhere. I think using kind of people showing up as a proxy for doing work it doesn't make a lot of sense. You can show up every day and be the most enthusiastic person and then still not produce a lot. So our number one value is results and I think being remote forces is to focus on that. Yeah, and I would say there's a certain word in there. It says how can you control lazy employees in remote work? Whether or not they're remote I wouldn't look at it as control I would look at it as objective and goal setting and if they're hitting those objective and goals everything's good and you don't need to correct otherwise you do. The moment that you look at it as control is the moment that you start measuring if someone shows up at nine has their butt in a seat and then leaves after five. And there's another question when we get together do we pay for travel and hotel? Yes, we do pay for travel, accommodation we do fun stuff like we go to vineyards, we climb Table Mountain it was a lot of great things. We even pay 50% for your significant dollars. So if you want to bring them along and they're interested in GitLab then you can bring them along. And on our kind of ROI and costing question Tammy posted a really nice link in there. I haven't seen that before but there's a nice link in the chat that lets you kind of calculate what your remote work ROI is to the employer and to the employee. So that's a cool reference. Thank you for that Tammy. As a junior deaf it's hard to find remote work someone remarks. Yeah, totally agree. I think there's a couple of things maybe training is easier in person I'm not sure but also because remote work it's kind of an employer's market right now like it's a lot more people wanting it than employees willing to offer it. So companies tend to go for more experienced developers if they can so they don't have the overhead of training people. So as a junior deaf it is I can see that it's harder to find a remote job. I think also there's lots of hybrid companies that just where it's hard for them to train you if you're a remote and even at GetLab I think training is one of the harder things you really have to go in video calls together and do things like that and if you just stay in chat the whole day then it's not going to go well. I don't have any special tricks to find remote jobs obviously you can search for them and there's just multiple websites for them but I wonder if Lab has an opinion. Yeah I think there's a more fundamental piece of what he's asking there so as a junior deaf I think it's it's just harder to find work than as a senior deaf so I would focus less on the remote piece and more on how to both present and level up the skills to appear less like a junior deaf. Whether you find a senior deaf to pair with and the two of you can collaborate on projects together and you can do more of the execution and the senior deaf can help with more of the strategy and kind of the sales part of it or eventually getting to the part of playing that senior deaf role yourself at the end of the day you have to be able to self present and deliver as a junior double low and you can't do that remotely find other collaborators that you can do that with and there are plenty out there. Yeah and do like courses read Martin Fowler's refactoring book like there's lots of things you can do to make yourself better and yeah junior in the end you want to be able to just remove it from your title. And get on Twitter like people want to help you like there are senior that will take you under their wing especially if you look like somebody that's promising like there are plenty of humans all over the world that want to help you so get your name out there. See we got a couple more in Sam asked a really good question there Sam Rubel asked how much do you consider a remote employees location cost of living when setting their salary I think maybe we can think about this first in the U.S. and then internationally as well I think this is a really difficult question internationally. Yeah so we have our global compensation calculator maybe someone can post it to the chat just google forget a lot global compensation calculator and one of the factors in that is the location factor and it's not about the cost of living it's not about but it's about the market rate we want to pay kind of at or above market and the market rate depends on where you are so we want to we factor that in and we have different rates in different regions in the U.S. but also different regions also in the in the world I think all in all there's a couple of hundred locations in our calculator. Yeah I think for us it gets a little more difficult because we kind of you know we hold this fundamental theory that it doesn't matter where you're born or where you're living your skills to determine your income not your birthplace so for us we I don't think we have a perfect formula for it yet it's one of the business challenges of turtle in general to figure that out right now we pay very similarly no matter where somebody is more than what a senior dev in the U.S. would get so we simply don't take on devs in the U.S. because we can't compensate them in the same way that we think they would expect and deserve. Finally we found something we disagree on this is awesome we're paying local rates I put a link in the chat you can also Google get lab paying local rates and that's for five reasons if we pay the same rate around the world we'll have a concentration of people in lower wage regions because get lab is a better deal to them so we won't be all across the world which we want to it also means many times the market rate is correlated with cost like San Francisco highest pay but also highest housing prices so it's a really bad deal on those high wage regions it also leads to it just costs us more money if we start paying everyone our highest rates our compensation costs would increase greatly we'd be able to hire way fewer people and our business model wouldn't work there's also if you pay people above market rates it's kind of golden handcuffs they cannot even if they don't like the company and want to leave they might stay because of the financial incentive which is something you also don't want you want happy people unhappy people that are just biting their time and yeah if we start paying everyone the lowest rate we'd have nobody in the US we need people in the US there's a lot of customers here there's a lot of people there's a lot of customers here we need to support and we do a lot of work in the public sector so we think it doesn't make sense I think the fairness argument is the thing is as remote works becomes more popular all the salaries will start getting equal but I think this is it's a market and I think fair in a market is market rate I guess I want to pay at our above so we never want to be lower than market and many times we're above market that's fine but not based on the role not on the location yeah well I think by saying at or above you're already kind of cutting into the arbitrate like a bit into it I think if anybody have a chance to click on those links those are five awesome reasons have trouble arguing with those one for one I would just say it's an incredibly difficult conversation and it's timing how does remote work eventually impact cost of living in different cities and how does just globalism in general impact cost of living global cities I think it would be like answering is capitalism good or bad there are definitely bad parts to capitalism and capitalism has also lifted a significant portion of the globe from poverty so there's both sides to the equation I think there's all these five reasons individually are great I still do believe that it shouldn't matter where you're born you should have the same opportunity that might mean that you should move to a different area at some point in your life but I think long long term things will settle as we become more internet work and as other cities simply rise I think that will become less of a difference Eugene asks how do you onboard new employees how do you share the learnings as a remote team well onboarding we do with the help of a pretty big template so I shared that and it is all like the tasks you have to do but also a lot of people have to do for you so if you can see what's still coming and whether people helped you did what they had to do for you sharing lessons we double every year in headcount so at the end of the year most people in the company are new they've been there for less than a year so it's really important that we write stuff down so we have a pretty extensive handbook it's more than 1500 pages and many times when we learn something we write a handbook or the documentation of GetLab or somewhere else but we tend to write things down and if you look at our handbook you'll find that there's a lot of the answers you might have joining a company are already answered Tammy just put a question into the Q&A there so Tammy asked how transparent are your organizations in determining salary for example Buffer has a transparent salary calculator she's all about the calculators today awesome I like calculators too Buffer's calculator first calculator was an inspiration for us our formula is a bit different I think better but have a look at our global compensation calculator and that for us we don't share people's individual salaries because they go up and down based on performance and we think performance is something between you and your manager that's not the business of the whole rest of the company and we want to we want to have that be a safe place but we do have a calculator like if you know where you live and your experience factor then you know how much you're going to earn so the calculation is our San Francisco benchmark for the role your location, the level like are you junior, intermediate or senior your experience factor that is kind of a minus to plus 10% within the role the contract type you have the company or contractor and what country you live in yeah I think Buffer did an awesome job making it insanely transparent I don't know if another company has come close yet or ever will I'm sure that there were probably problems with being that transparent too I've looked at the literature and the company is doing that and it tends to not end super well yeah how we do it is individual to the freelancer they will know exactly the rate that's being built to the customer and the rates that they're getting and why there's a specific delta and we manage that delta based on the developer's experience so if a developer can self manage it doesn't need any help with translation or anything like that they will get the highest rates and we will have the lowest margins and if they need a little more help behind the scenes from a CTO type or a chief product officer type or sometimes with language we will make a higher margin because we have to do more work so if Turtle has to do more work we take higher margin if Turtle does less work we take lower margin there was a good statement by Andy Tiffany for many companies trust is more important for remote work as a more senior dev you've had the opportunity to build more trust and stronger relationships that can lead to remote roles I think that's very accurate for hybrid companies it tends to be the people who work remote are people that have already proven themselves either at the company or somewhere else but they have a stronger relationship and that's why they're allowed to work remote and you mentioned Yahoo earlier or no IBM no longer letting people work remote I think for many companies our work from home is kind of code for I'll be taking the day off without taking a vacation day and as long as that's the case remote work will always be kind of looked down upon yeah and I also just you know I want to avoid three terms in general in my life but one that I do like a lot is manage up if you're working from home if you're working remotely if you're a junior dev or in any case like set expectations for what your team or your manager should expect from you meet those expectations and make sure that you publish meeting and setting those expectations don't expect that from other team members or from your managers I think that's a very junior way to approach things so someone asked how do you manage contracts now luckily we have handbook slash contracts which are linked and lots of our contracts can be found on there for a contractor we just pay a monthly rate for their work so we say hey you're going to help get like going to work on this this is this is what will pay you every month so I think on that we can jump to one of the things that we might disagree on the 40 hour thing so I think in the same way that offices are a left over from the industrial revolution that we need to rethink I think 40 hours a week is in the same category I don't think that humans are only effective in 40 hours I don't think that work relationships should start with a very brief interview and then all of a sudden you jump into a full commitment I think there's a lot of value to 10 15 20 25 hour arrangements especially for people that might be dealing with something in life that means that they can't make work the number one thing for a specific point time yeah we have very few people working part-time we're not it's possible we do we do allow it but it's infrequent and I think in a company a lot as a company grows more and more of your costs are kind of overhead costs communication costs like bringing people up to speed so that they can do their job and there's kind of a law of diminishing returns as you get bigger it kind of costs more time to just keep up to date and I think therefore in a smaller company it's easier to work part-time and contribute the larger company gets the more overhead the more those like those hours count suppose the overhead is five hours of just keeping up to date if you work 10 hours 50% of your time is wasted it's not efficient anymore I'm not sure it works like that exactly but I do think that's a component I do think I don't think it's a so much about the hours I think it's about flexibility and there's someone left our company today today is his last day his name is Job and he wrote a post on Medium maybe someone saw it and can link it in there he's like starting helping other companies go remote.com right exactly but I think he also touched on a time when he needed to be there for his family and that was just okay and he could just focus on that so I think people care less about the hours but care a lot about the flexibility if you have a life event that pops up that you need to take care of you want the company to support you I think that is really important to us and we're trying to be as generous as we can there I guess I'm just wondering why can't companies set something up where hey for the next six months of the next year I'm going to go to 25 hours a week I feel like you can transparently have that conversation adjust a salary based on that or an hourly rate based on that and have that work 25 hours a week can be covered in 2 or 3 days a week if you want it to but you're right on if you already have that covered in flexibility there's not really necessity for it we just look at it more from the freelancer perspective we have the average freelancer in turtle works 25 hours a week and makes double their local income in total alright let me pull up I don't think we have any and he asked a question in Q&A biggest challenge is GitLab is encountering today that can be attributed to remote working wow I'm going to cheat and tell a bit about the historic things historically fundraising was hard in our B round we got lots of no's and almost no's because people didn't think we'd be effective and people think we didn't make a good acquisition target because it's harder to acquire the employees of a company if they're spread all around also hard is hiring some execs some execs say look I don't see this model working for me so you diminish the pool there the great thing is you have a lot more people to choose from and there's some execs that say look I want to move somewhere else but I do want to work for a Silicon Valley type growth company so it helps too today I think we still have a bit of skepticism people asking like hey can you open like a customer experience center or something like that but I think it's it's more manageable how do you promote working someone quit last week and he said look I feel lonely I moved to a new city I have very few friends here and with GitLab I don't gain any friends in my city because there's nobody else here that makes a lot of sense the lonely piece is really I think unsolved and important I use a service called Spacious and it has restaurants and office space during the day I love it, it's cost effective when I feel lonely or bored or unproductive at home I walk down to one of their office spaces that said I think there's a lot of opportunity for companies like that to build a community aspect of it and I think people and communities can start taking it upon themselves outside of just traditional work organizations to build that community aspect of things and for example at GitLab we have like a travel stipend we give you money to visit colleagues or even like my home in the Netherlands you can stay there for free we want people to be able to travel and visit other people so we've got about five minutes so we'll field any other questions that come in while we kind of cover one last topic so please feel free to add questions in Q&A or in the discussion to the right there thought we'd talk about what does remote work look like in five years and let's try to avoid the obvious of how much it's possible like the whole VR and AR thing like we know connectivity is going to get better we know that equipment and video is going to get better what does it look like culturally what does it look like globally and what does it look like from the Oregon individual perspective by the way I don't think VR and AR are going to be a big help I don't see that happening maybe that you can have more of a sense of presence but I'm I'm slightly skeptical I think it's going to get way more popular for startups I'm seeing it already in the white combinator batches that the percentage of old remote companies is increasing and I expect that to continue so there's going to be more of a people saying we're old remote or we're co-located but I think this we're remote first but not really I think that's those people will have a harder time and people are going to pick sides hopefully it will be embraced by people that care about the environment that people care about spreading opportunities equally throughout the world because it's great for that and it's going to be more known like right now there has not been a New York Times article about and I think that will happen and ironically we'll even have a big conference where we all get together or all join the same link together I think it will be an in-person conference ironically yeah I think the part that you mentioned on it hasn't been written about and organizationally it just hasn't been thought about that much I think we've got the better part of a century how traditional office orgs are organized and I just don't think consultancies or management organizations or simply seasoned executives have really thought about if offices didn't exist, if traditional work didn't exist how would we build this from the ground up and I think thinking of it that way is more likely to tell what remote work looks like in five years what would organizations look like if they were formed remote first and commuting and offices weren't part of your original conversation compensation to how much money you have to set up a home office or to use a service like Spacious or WeWork or one of those if you needed to come into an office once in a while so I think seeing orgs and individuals help other orgs do this will create a lot of thought leaders in this space and will create a lot of infrastructure that doesn't exist today I also hope that we're successful and that someone gets the idea to make a great business case by studying our handbook because I think it's one of the few instances where you have a public handbook with complete version history where you can see the evolution of the fast growing startup How long has GitLab been running that? Since 2015 or something It's probably hard to keep up and do but once you get going I think that's incredibly powerful It's an unnatural act but so far so good Unnatural, I like that Well, we're hitting right up against 1150 I don't see any other questions in Q&A or in the discussion If there are any last minute questions please feel free to paste them in now Otherwise, Sid, any last points? No, I think this was great, Vlad and I gladly do this again Thanks everyone for listening in and for your questions We really enjoyed the experience Thanks everyone for joining in and thanks, Sid, for doing this Thanks, Vlad