 Can you hear me? I cannot hear you. Oh, I'm sorry. My audio was off. Nice to meet you, Beno. How are you? I'm good. Let me pull up a few things. Just a sec. I just had my wife suddenly had a back pain that felt really bad. It wasn't kind of a back pain. It was something else. So we were weirded out. So we just came back from the hospital. But luckily, it's a sprained muscle. And there's nothing serious. It's very painful. The sprained muscle. It can be painful. This one was one of the nice painful ones. But it's good to know that it will be better. You're comfortable with the livestream? Yeah, why not? Cool. Let me throw it on there. YouTube or GitLab unfiltered? Yeah, so we're here today. I'm Sid. I'm the co-founder and CEO at GitLab. Beno, you want to introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Vanu Antal. I'm a leadership psychologist and an executive coach. And I work with startup co-founders, manage conflict, and create synergistic relationships. And today I want to talk to you about your co-founder relationships a little bit. Very cool. Yeah, we met at, I think you noticed I was at Amoconf earlier this year. You got in touch. And let's talk about that. I'll have you ask the questions, I guess. Awesome. Yeah, I was just curious about your story, the founder team story, I think, your co-founder imagery. And how did you guys meet? Yeah, so Dimitri started GitLab by himself while he was working at a company. And over a year, 300 people joined the effort and contributed code. I only saw it a year later. I saw it was a heck of news post someone posted it. And I thought it makes so much sense that something that I, as a developer, used to collaborate is something I can contribute back to. Everything I used was open source. And this made sense, too. But you didn't know him personally. I did not know him. So what I did is I said, look, I can see that you can run GitLab yourself, but nobody had GitLab as a service. So I started GitLab.com. And I sent him an email like, hey, I'm starting GitLab.com. I hope you don't mind. Like, you're not going to get anything. But I hope you're OK with it. It's open source. And I figured I didn't need his permission. He sent a very polite email back, like, no, it's open source. You go for it. And I'm so glad you're making GitLab more popular, which is very, like, open-minded. Like, you could have a lot of people that would say something else. And to sketch the situation, he was living in the Ukraine as he is now. But like, his house didn't have streaming water at the time. Like, he was not making an insane amount of money enough to live on, but it was basic. I didn't have a ton of money. I ended up putting $100K in it. But I had to keep working full-time in order to pay someone to work on GitLab. So I kept working full-time as a consultant. And I paid Maden, who lived in Serbia, to work on GitLab. I was living in the Netherlands. So three countries quite far apart from each other. For a year that continued, until he tweeted, Dimitri tweeted out to the entire world, I want to work on GitLab full-time. Quite unusual to, like, post it to the entire world. Like, he was employed and everything. I saw that. And by that time, I've gotten a couple of big companies that said, we're running GitLab. Can you add some features to it? And I was like, well, we're kind of running GitLab. But calm, we're also kind of figuring that out. We weren't that good. But when I saw that, I was like, hey, I can pay Dimitri and then we can start making those features. So I sent him an email like, hey, I saw your tweet. How much do you want to earn to work full-time on GitLab? And he named the number. And I went to the local Western Union money office. And when I said I wanted to wire money from the Netherlands to Ukraine, they were like, do you know this person? Or is this someone you met over the internet? Or quite skeptical because a lot of scams going on. And at that point, my mental image of Dimitri was like a pink mob boss because that was his avatar everywhere. It's like a GTA character. And I've never seen a picture of him. It's really hard. I don't know how he looked like. No, I didn't even know what he looked like. After that, I really asked for a picture. I got a picture with him with sunglasses on. Like, he was quite, he liked his privacy. So at a certain point, we were working together, I think, for a couple of months. We were like, we should get together. And we had the perfect venue. There would be a real conference in Poland, in Krakow. So we got an Airbnb there. And we would be there a couple of hours ahead of him. It was his first time traveling internationally. And we had a bit of a problem because the Airbnb, it didn't have good water. So they switched us to another place. And I left a voicemail on his phone, like, hey, they switched us. This is the new address. He arrived at the airport. He checks his voicemail, but his credit runs out for his mobile phone because he had a prepaid phone. He checks his email via the free Wi-Fi, but there was no email. And he proceeds to go to the place. And then the place is closed. There's nobody there, not a sign, not a thing. And he likes panics. He's like, whoa, I'm finally supposed to meet these people. And they don't show up. Like, what am I going to do now? So he starts walking, he heels down in a taxi and tells the driver to bring me to a hotel. But the driver doesn't know what a hotel is. He speaks only Polish. So they hail down like a pedestrian who explains to the driver what a hotel is, brings him to a hotel. He checks in, calms down a bit, checks his email. By that time, he has a couple of emails from us. We're actually in cars driving around the city trying to find the guy because, like, why didn't he show up? We know his flight land. So we get in touch. And I think Martin and Karen, their car, got there first. Karen waits outside in the taxi. By that time, it's kind of late at night. And Martin goes in like, oh, we finally found you, come. And he's like, what, come? Like, I'm finally here. I'm finally safe. I don't want to come. Like, I'm done for now. So actually, it takes like 15 minutes. I'm like, we got beer and pizza. It's for real. It's all OK. And he joins them. And that's how we first met in real life. Well, that's his story. And we proceed to have a great couple of days doing a lot of sightseeing in Krakow. And it was a great conference. And did you start working on it full-time as well? At some point. Not initially. Yeah, not initially. OK. Did he continue living there? And then you moved to the United States? Yeah, he continued living there. At a certain point, he lives in Krakow, which is 100 kilometers from the Warsaw in the Ukraine. So at a certain time, it got a bit too dangerous there. So he lived in Utrecht, my hometown, for a year. We missed each other by a week. Because at that time, I was emigrating to the US. So in 2015, I moved to the US. He lived in Utrecht for two years. Now it's a bit more quiet there. So he moved back. So you always had a remote relationship, co-financially? Yeah. And actually, our entire company is remote. We're an old, remote company. 460 people in 47 countries. And it was like that from the first day? Yep. Blow it up that way. Awesome. So how was your relationship? Like, how did you build your relationship remotely working on how did you manage work and also the conflict? Is it you think it's an advantage or disadvantage? I think it doesn't matter that much. I think you do the same things. You've got to make sure there's regular communication. So to this day, we call every single week, make sure that when there's something important, he gets like a heads up. He doesn't feel in the misinformed or like I think surprises are like really bad. So you want to make sure there's never surprises. If something is important and you're thinking about it, you give him a heads up. And yeah, a regular cadence of communication. How would you describe your relationship? Yeah, it's a couple of things. First of all, I think the most important thing is that we're co-founders. We have started this and we want to bring this to a good end together. At a certain point, during my culminating, we said ahead of time, we're not going to raise external money because the odds of being successful decrease of a successful outcome, of course, the average, the median out, while the median outcome goes down, the average outcome goes up. Like it can be very big. And at the end, we decided to do it. But he said, look, my commitment is for 10 years. So because we wanted to bring it to a conclusion together, we said, OK, well, let's aim for becoming a public company in 2020 so that in 2021, when it's 10 years for Dmitri, we have achieved that kind of milestone together. And we're still on track for that. We actually put a date on it recently. And so then you kind of have a shared understanding of the values in the company, like we're very result-oriented, we're efficient, we'd like to iterate, and we'd like to use boring solutions. A lot of the values are things that we shared together. And we had our thinking evolve together. At a certain point, we went from being basically an alternative to GitHub to being a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, a lot broader scope. Our scope has kind of grown tenfold over time. And that wasn't intuitive. And that started with him saying, I want to use, well, he didn't even say anything. He just made his own CI solution, continuous integration solution, a testing framework. And we never talked about it. I kind of let it slide, like he can do whatever he wants. He's a co-founder. And so far, his hunch has spayed off. And at a certain point, someone contributed to that and then joined the company. And they said, let's integrate the two products. And first, Dmitri told him he was wrong. And then they came to meet together. And I told them they were wrong. And we ended up doing it. And it was the best thing that ever happened. It turned out that a single application that does multiple things is a way better user experience. So we kind of changed that paradigm together. And then we doubled down on it. So yeah, we're co-founders. We're also, there's a hierarchical relationship between us now. I'm the CEO. And he's a fellow. A fellow is kind of a parallel career check in engineering. And it would be equivalent to like a VP of engineering, except the person is an individual contributor. OK. And last, I don't want to forget, I also consider us friends. We've done adventures together. We will always like to hang out together and have a drink, share a drink. That's good. So you still come together frequently? How many times a year would you say that you would meet in person? Yeah, not a lot. We had our first headquarter in San Francisco in Soma. And he was, he thought it was such a, it was a pretty nasty part of San Francisco. So he really didn't like to come there. We now moved to a different part. But it was kind of interesting that a person close to a war zone was kind of scared by it. So you didn't like Soma? But it was the corner in Soma with the most police reports found. It wasn't great. And he doesn't like long flights. So it's harder to come to get together. And that's unfortunate. But we tried to see each other at least once a year. That's great. And how do you guys manage conflict when you're in conflict? What would you say your ways of dealing with conflict, your way in his way, and how does it fit? Yeah, we've had very little conflict. I'm sorry to disappoint you with that. That's great. Why was it disappointing? It makes you do examples. What do you think is helping you not to have that much conflict then? Yeah, I already mentioned like the heads up, like no surprises. If you know something is going to be contentious, talk about it upfront. Talk to all the options, put all the information on the table. Have people, you don't want to have like, this is the answer and just handed that to a person. It's like, this is the problem. And I looked at it these ways and these are the options. And I think we should do that, but I'm open to your opinion. Focusing what a person had, what you should do in life is the Venn diagram of what you're good at, what you would like to do, and what is contributing to society, or in this case, the company as a proxy for that. And having those conversations is really important. Yeah. And you guys both are good at that, I assume. I think I'm good at having that conversation, like structuring the conversation. I think he's good at, he's one of the lowest ego people I've ever met. So he puts the interests of the company ahead of his own interests. So that's a really commendable thing and it makes a lot of things a lot easier. And how did you know to come up with that structure and being proactive about these things? Was it intuitive to you? Or did you learn about this somewhere? Or did you see a role model of people doing it this way that you knew that this was really important? Yeah, so if you're referring to the dual career track, which we haven't get labbed in multiple, like people do it, it's a thing in many organizations or it's become more common in engineering organizations. What you don't want is the Peter principle where you kind of the only way for a great engineer to advance is to become a manager. And then you lose a great engineer, you have a bad manager. So some of our engineers' success are really great managers. Some of our engineers are contributing an enormous amount of value, but they're not managing is either not what they want or the appropriate thing wouldn't be the skill that they're comfortable with, et cetera. Lots of reasons and there needs to be an escape valve. And that escape valve is the dual career track. And that's expensive, but we think it's really important. And let's go a little bit with the remote work. The whole company is your work right now. Where most of the employees located. Yes, you have a team page. So if you Google GitLab team, you can find a map. About half is in the US and the other half is spread around like 46 different countries. All right. And what are some of the main advantages of having a remote workforce? I think it forces everyone to focus on output instead of input. So we're very results focused. We don't allow managers to talk about input, like how many hours you put in, unless we're suspecting that someone is working too many hours. But other than that, the focus should always be on the output. So we don't compete by staying going to work sooner or staying at work longer or not taking holidays or stuff like that. We try to avoid that and we try to give good example as executives taking long holidays. And I think the output focus is really important. I think because it's harder to kind of shadow someone and kind of learn from seeing them work, you need to write down more. So we're really good at that. And I think in the end that creates a lot of efficiency and makes it easier to change things because it's written down so you can change it. Yeah, I could go on for quite a while. That's great. Thank you. Do you have any advice for people just starting up? They're responding to a company and make specific advice for them to create a good foundation for their relationship going forward? Yeah, a couple of things. First of all, it won't be new, but make sure you get to know the person before you. Just like you did? I think we got to know each other's work, which helps. And I think it's frequently better to kind of fall in love with each other's work and then build a relation based on that and fall in love with the person and then try to build a business. Friendships based on business tend to last longer than businesses based on friendships. Another thing is set expectations correctly. If you have three co-founders and it's not clear who's the CEO, that tends to be, that's a problem. That's a big flag of that. You avoid a very hard conversation. Have vesting. So vests into the company so that if someone needs to be let go that they don't keep owning a fruit of the company even though they worked there only for a year. Just do the standard vesting four years, one-year cliff. Have cadence in conversations. I talk with them every week and it's like my easiest agenda. You could easily think, ah, I'll just skip that call and look, it's a special relationship and you should invest in it. Co-founder conflict is a big problem in many companies. So make sure you spend the time and it's great if there's not a big agenda because there's more time for informal things that come up and that can be sometimes the most important things. Have those conversations. Great book if you want to read it, Crucial Conversations and blame-free open sharing conversations about the hard subjects. Great. Thank you, Sen. This was great. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. All right. Bye. Bye. Thanks for watching, everyone.