 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering GitLab Commit 2020. Brought to you by GitLab. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is GitLab Commit 2020 here in San Francisco. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, Ian Tien, who is the co-founder and CEO of Mattermost. Ian, nice to meet you. Yeah, thanks dude, thanks for having me. All right, so I always love when we get the founders. We go back to a little bit of the why and just from our little bit of conversation, there is a connection with GitLab. You have a relationship with Sid, who's the co-founder and CEO of GitLab. So bring us back and tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, thanks. So I'm X Microsoft, so I came from collaboration for many years there. And then what I did after Microsoft, I started my own video game company. I was backed by Y Combinator and we were doing the HTML5 game engine. It was very fun. And we ran the entire company off of a messaging product. This is a little while ago and what happens is that messaging product got bought by a big company. And it got kind of neglected. It started crashing, it would lose data. We were super unhappy. We tried to export and they wouldn't let us export. We had 26 gigs of all our information and when we stopped paying our subscription they would pay well less from our own information. So very unhappy and we're like holy cats, like what are we gonna do? And rather than go to another platform, we actually realized we have about 10 million hours of people running messaging in our own video games. Well why don't we kind of build this ourselves? So we kind of build a little prototype. We started using it ourselves internally. And because Sid was, this was 2015 and Sid was out of Y Combinator. We were Y Combinator, we were at an event and we started talking and I was showing him what we built and Sid's like you should open source that. And he had this really compelling reason. And he's like well if you open source it and people like it, you can always close source it again because it's a prototype. But if you open source it and no one cares, you should stop doing what you do. And he was great to kind of send me like this little email with like all the things you need to do to run open source business. And it was just wonderful and it just, it just started taking off. We started getting these of the wonderful amazing enterprise customers that really saw what mattered most was at the very beginning. Which was you know some people call us open source slack. But what it really is, it's a collaboration platform for real-time DevOps. And it really is for people who are regulated. It's gonna offer flexibility and on-prem deployment and a lot of security and customization. So you know that's kind of we started and GetLab was, we kind of started following we started following GetLab's footsteps. And what you'll find today with GetLab is we're bundled with the omnibus. So all you have to do is you know put like what URL would you like matter most on when GetLab reconfigure and you're up and running. Love that story. I would love you to tease out a little bit when you hear open source communications and secure might not be things that people would necessarily all put together. So help us understand a little bit the underlying architecture. This isn't just instant messaging. It's how is it different from things that people would be familiar with? Yeah, that's a great question. So how do you get more secure with open source products? And the one thing to look at I'll just give you one example is mobility, right? So in mobile today, if you're pushing them if you're setting a push notification to an iOS or an Android device it has to route through like Google or Android, right? And whatever app that you're using to send those notifications they're going to see your notifications. They have to, right? So you've got encryption and all that stuff in order to send to Google and Android you have to send it unencrypted. And you know these applications are not they're not yours. They're owned by another organization. So how do you make that private? How do you make it secure? So with open source communication you get the source code, it's in the extreme case like we have apps you can use and it's really simple and turnkey. But if you wanna go on the full privacy most security you have the full source code apps. You have the full source code to the system including what pushes the messages to your apps. And you can compile them with your own certificates. And you can set up a system where you actually have complete privacy and no third party can actually get your information. And why enterprises in many cases want that extreme privacy is because when you're doing incident response and you have information about a vulnerability or a breach that could really upset many, many critical systems if that information leaked out you really can't many people don't want ever to touch a third party. So that's one example of how open source lets you have that privacy and security because you control everything. All right, Ian walk me through a little bit the speeds and feeds, how many employees do you have? How many do you share? How many customers you have? Where you are with funding? So where we are funding is last year we announced a 20 million series A and a 50 million series B. We went from about 40 folks the beginning of the year to about a hundred at the end of the year. We've got over a thousand people that contribute to Mattermost. And what you'll find is what you'll find is every sort of get lab omnibus installations is gonna have a Mattermost that's gonna have the ability to sort of turn on Mattermost. So very broad reach. It's sort of like one step away. There's lots of customers. You can see it get lab commit that are running Mattermost and get lab together. So customers are going to include hey there's the ITK and agriculture that's got six times faster deployments running get lab and Mattermost together. You've got Worldline. It's got 3,000 people on the system. So you've got a lot of so we're growing really quickly and there's a lot of opportunity working with get lab to bring get lab into mobile and into sort of real time DevOps scenarios. Yeah and definitely one of the themes we hear at the show is that get labs really enabling the remote workforce especially when you talk about the developers it sounds like that's very much in line with what Mattermost is doing. Absolutely. Mattermost was remote first. I didn't actually know. We're probably in 20 plus countries and it's a remote team. So we use Mattermost to collaborate and we use video conferencing and issue tracking across a bunch of different systems. And yeah, it's remote first. It's how it's how we work. It's very natural. Yeah, Ian just give us a little bit of the insight. How do you make sure as a CEO that you have the culture and getting everyone on the same page when many of them you're not seeing them regularly some of them you've probably never met in person. Yeah, that's a great question. So how do you sort of maintain that culture? And one of the cons of the get labs pioneered is the concept of boring solutions. And it's something that we've taken on as well. What's the most boring solution to preserve culture and to scale? And it's really do what get labs doing, right? So get labs got handbook.getlab.com. We've got handbook.mattermost.com. And it's really writing down all the things that how we operate, what our culture is and what our values are so that every person that on board is gonna get the same experience, right? And then what happens is people think that if you're in a building you're gonna have stronger culture because it'll sort of like absorb and things. What actually happens is it's this little broken telephone and it starts echoing out and it's supposed to go in one source of truth that's everyone's interpretation. And when you have a handbook and you're forced to write things down it's a very unnatural act. And when you force people to write things down then you get that consistency. And everyone can go to a source of truth and say like this is the way we operate. Yeah, in 2019 was an interesting year for open source. There were certain companies that were changing their models as to how they do things. You started it open source to be able to get direct feedback. But how do you position and talk to people about the role of open source and still being able to have a business around that? So open source is, I think there's a generation of open source companies. So there's three ways you can really make money from open source, right? You can host software, you can provide support and services or you can do licensing which is an open core model. And what you see is categories of companies like a lot, you see categories like Elastic, like Hashi Corp with Terraform and Vault with GetLab that have chosen the open core model and this is really becoming sort of a standard. And what we do is we follow that standard and we know that it supports public companies, it supports companies with hyper growth like GetLab. So it's a very, it's a becoming a model that is actually quite familiar to the market. And what we see is this sort of generation, this sort of movement of, okay there was operating systems, there's Windows Server, well now there's more servers running Linux than Windows Server on Azure. You've seen virtualization technology, you've seen databases all sort of go the open source way and we see that as a natural progression of collaboration. So it's really like we believe collaboration will go the open source way, we believe the leading way to do that is through open core because you can generate a sustainable scalable business that's gonna give enterprises the confidence to invest in the right platform. All right, Ian, what's on deck for Matter Most in 2020? It's really, we definitely wanna work with GetLab a lot more. We really wanna go from this concept of concurrent DevOps that GetLab is really championed to say real time DevOps. So we've got DevOps in the world that's taking months and weeks of cycle times and bring that down to minutes. We wanna take all your processes that take hours and take it down to seconds. So what really people, what developers are sort of clamoring for a lot is like, well how do I get these, if I'm regulated, if I have a lot of customization needs, if I'm on premise, if I'm in a private network, how do I get to mobile? How do I get quicker interactions? And we really wanna support that with incident response, with DevSecOps use cases, and with really having a complete solution that can go from all your infrastructure in your data center to that really important person walking through the airport. And that's how you speed cycle times. You make DevSecOps available anywhere and you do it securely and you do it privately. All right. Ian, thanks so much for meeting with us and great to hear about Mattermost. Cool. Thank you, Stu. All right. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the coverage that we will have throughout 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE.