 Hey, Ruben. Thanks for getting in touch with me. We're going to talk about remote work. You had some questions. Maybe you want to introduce yourself quickly. I'm the CEO of GitLab for our viewers. What do you do? Yeah. Thank you, Sid, for taking the time to chat with me. I am an entrepreneur. I'm funding a new company. Before this one, I was a founder. I went through IC. I was a software engineer. But I started as a freelancer, like a remote freelancer from Cuba. Wow, sorry, from Cuba? Yeah, I'm from Cuba. You made that work from Cuba? From, like, they have not so far as internet there? Yeah, so I did that for two years with a dialogue model. Wow. Respect. Yeah, it was very interesting because I couldn't say to my clients that I was from Cuba because they would say, like, the internet is bad. I'm not going to work with you. They'd also say that that might be illegal in the US sanctions. No, because I was working for companies not only in the US, outside US, using, like, freelancer.com, like a website. But it was very interesting. But that is how I started with the whole remote work. And then here I came to US. I joined Google. It was like my team was fully distributed. I was in the calendar team. And I was in the Android. I was here in Mountain View. iOS was in London. And designers, PMs were, like, in Sri Lanka, like, Sri. So it was, like, the whole, like, distributed team. Very cool. So then, right now, I'm trying to help, like, remote companies. I want to be something new. And I am very passionate about remote work. So I want to help and improve that, like, promote more, like, these two companies in some way. And that is why I have been reading a bunch of books, like, handbooks, or, like, GitLab, and Zapier, and both of these companies are very transparent. And then I just, like, send in an email. And you were, like, kind to, like, say, yeah, let's spend some time. Cool. How can I help? Yeah, so I have, like, a few questions here. Like, first of all, I want to start, like, congrats with your last funding, front of funding. It's great to see that. But something that came to your mind, you mentioned a few interviews that your challenge, like, getting, like, raising money as a remote company, right? How was this time, like, what was the difference? First of all, thanks for the congratulations. And I think as your company gets bigger, investors can focus more on the financials instead of the team and the product. If you raise your first money, it's almost, it's based on the team, like, who are the people? And what is their idea? And then at a certain point, it's based on product market fit. And then as you get bigger, it's more and more based on what are the numbers? How fast are they growing? What is the revenue? What is their margin? And how is that projected to go out to increase in the future? So it becomes less relevant. Now, there's still a worry that it might not scale. So like, well, maybe it works at 100 people, but not at 200. And they'll just keep upping those numbers as you go to company. But then we could alleviate a lot of those concerns by pointing at, like, hey, people here, they clearly know what to do. They clearly know their title. They are able to onboard fast and get effective fast. And we can point them to how we do it and to data points. And that addresses a lot of their concerns. So it was less, it gets easier as you become bigger to fundraise as a remote company. I see. Because you have the numbers that help you with that. Yeah. And at IPO, people stop caring. As you become a public company, people care even less about the product and everything else, and they care even more about the numbers. Yeah, that's good. So I just have a question on the day-to-day operations, like toolings, and how do you manage communication, for example? I saw in the handbook that you have the issues, like using GitHub issues first, and then e-mails, and then chat. That is the priority that you guys give. How do you handle that in general? How is that working? How do you know? Where do you need to use? What do you need to use at this time? Yeah, that's hard. Finding the right format. I think we use Slack more often than we intend to, like then as, for example, in the handbook. I think where it's good is if there's free-flowing thought, like, OK, have it in Slack, but as soon as something gets concrete, make it into an issue and allow people at times to achieve it, make sure there's a record of what happened. So yeah, you have to kind of switch between the media. And there's some parts of our company where people are using Slack for things that should be in issues, which is not great. And it's not allowing for asynchronous communication. And Slack becomes one long meeting, which is not good. But all in all, yeah, we use those differently. I think we're using e-mail a lot less than before. OK, so how Slack is working when you have a bunch of different time zones difference? Like you have some people in the team in different time zones, like how the real time chat works? Yeah, it's horrible. It's the end of distance, but not of time zones. Time zones are still very much a thing. And it makes it hard. It's the hardest on the team members in Asia-Pacific because we have most people, most team members, and most users and customers in American Europe. We tend to gravitate towards that. The prime time of overlap between the West Coast and Central Europe, that hour is blocked for our functional group update, our team call. But it's been a struggle to include the people from Asia-Pacific. They have their own company call that's at a better time, but it's missing some of the announcement that the people announcing stuff are not on their call, and it's a much smaller audience. So if you have, please tell me how to solve it. But yeah, people have to stay in sync with the schedules of their children and the son and everything else. So we can't have a company schedule. So it's a very hard problem. Yeah, time is like something hard to... So you have been seeing all the remote companies that have been using the same thing that you're trying to do, it's going more like asynchronous communication with you guys. Yeah, issues, asynchronous, and recording more. Like, we're broadcasting this. We've got a couple of viewers here now on YouTube. Thanks for watching, people. And that's really important. So we do record a lot of meetings and then post the broadcast either public or if it can be public posted in the appropriate channels internally. And for that, you use YouTube. It's a private channel or something. YouTube or we have a Zoom call that's recorded. Okay, okay. Just random thoughts. How do you guys deal with bad internet? Like, you offer any bad Wi-Fi, you have any... Yeah, so most of the time, there's a person might have bad internet, but there will be other people online. So it's not like at an office or if the internet's down, like the whole company's down. So that's better. We do tell people, like, get good internet. The company pays for it. So you can, like, expense your internet costs. I used to have even two uplinks. I stopped that. We got great web apps here in San Francisco. And if not, I'll fatter with my phone and be able to go online like that. The point where we're weak is when we have our summit every nine months. 350 people in Cape Town. And then it has to be good. So we need big uplinks there. We're starting months in advance all the time with, like, requesting extra uplinks and we're bringing our own equipment and we went from first-no equipment to then access points. So I think next time we'll bring the entire network infrastructure ourselves. Yeah, yeah. That is a good idea. Also, you need to figure out why it's a good place to, like, be in the whole team and also say, good internet. And then, like, you can have your network. What about, like, hiring? I've been, like, coming from Cuba, the first thing that's coming to my mind is any legal, like, constraint for, like, giving up to hiring, like, if you have a new candidate that is, like, super talented but is for a new country that you didn't hire before. How do you guys assess that? Yeah, so we have people in over 40 countries. Not in all the countries we have an entity. We have an entity for a small portion of those countries. But for the vast majority of our team members, because they're not evenly distributed, if they're from a country that we currently don't have people in and no entity in, then they start as a contractor. So in lots of countries, we hire them as contractors. A new country is not a problem. We do have an exclude list. For example, we cannot hire people in North Korea because there's US sanctions against them. And there's a couple of other countries where the risk for us is too high and we're not hiring there at the moment. And those can be found on our jobs page. Yeah. And sorry, I'm going to motion the details because I'm trying to get there. That's fine. As a contractor, the way that you compensate them is, like, salary and equity. And also, it's easy to do that as a contractor. Yeah. So there is, well, it's not easy, but we do it anyway. So it's salary. Sometimes a bonus, depending on your function, for example, sales, that's common. And equity for every single person that joins the company. Equity rules differ per country. So we have significant costs to make that happen. But we thought it was really important to, well, it is really important to us that everyone can kind of profit, participate in profiting from if we become successful as a company. And I think we could have easily said, like, no stock options for people outside the US. They're less familiar with it. But that would be a really sad sight. If you have a successful outcome, suppose we become a public company, and then all the European people are empty-handed while the US people made a big gain in worth. So we're doing it. It's painful, but luckily we have a great finance team who says, yeah, we're going to make it happen even though it's hard. Yeah. And always I'm thinking around a new startup that's trying to be distributed or remote. So from that angle, how would you guys did that when you were small? When you and your co-founder are maybe two more engineers and you don't have this big team of legal people like finance? Yeah. So up to 20 people, I did everything that wasn't building the product or selling the product. I should have stopped that earlier because then it became unmanageable, but it continued a bit too long. Our first employee was a person who lived in Serbia, Martin. And his dream was to one day come to the Netherlands. And only years later, we could make that happen. He's now living in Amsterdam. We have, by the way, we have something called the Right to Immigrate. If you work for a year at GitHub, you can immigrate to the Netherlands. And we can make that happen wherever you live. So we made it happen with, I remember the first time I had to send money to Dmitri. The only way to get there was to Western Union money transfer. I went to the office and they said, oh, I want to wire from the Netherlands to Ukraine. Is this someone you know or someone you met over the internet because they were so afraid that it would be a scam? So that's how he got his first paycheck. Paid upfront because he didn't trust me that I'd actually send him the money. Yeah, yeah, I know what is that. Western Union is very common in all countries. But I want a hiring. How do you know? What is the process that you guys do to know that that person is going to be good working for home? Because that is like a big challenge, right? Yeah, we're not specifically testing for it. We do ask people whether they're comfortable working remotely. And they can work from home or in office. If they prefer an office, we'll pay for it. So but it's working from the location you prefer, not necessarily home. But whether they're comfortable with that, most people say, look, I'm cool with it. I can just easily do it. I just want to make sure that I'm not second class citizen, that I'm not in some satellite that people still think of me. And then we're like, yeah, well, guess what? We don't have an office. The CEO is working from a location without anybody else there. And then it's not a problem. We just hire for people that are effective, that can motivate themselves, that can organize themselves. I think you should do that in any company whether you have an office or not. And then people can be successful everywhere. I think it doesn't require a special type of person. We have all kinds of people, introverts, extroverts, a wide diversity of people. And I think it's fine. So yeah, for what I'm hearing, it's like you don't interview for that particular thing, but you interview for like manager of one person, how people like to say. Yep. Any tips on how to do that? How to interview. Yeah, how to test that person is good for being manager for himself. How do you test that skill? Yeah, for him or herself. I think what I look, were they successful in past jobs? So you talk about what they did before, you talk about like, tell me a situation where you successfully completed something without a lot of guidance. And then go into that, what was the result or the outcome, how did they do it? OK, so it's just like, how about your past experience? How do you manage something along? And for example, for developers, we give them an assignment from our real issue tracker. Like, hey, this is this is stuff we actually want to build. Please go build it. And then you can see whether they're effective at that. And you gave like one week or like a few days? Yeah, a few days, I think. OK, it's like a project. Yeah, we don't want to make it too big. It's for us, it's not about free work or something. It actually costs us like a lot of time to review it and give them good feedback. It's about seeing whether how they communicate, how they think about the problem. What about outside developers, like in sales or marketing? Do you also give like a small, small feature project? No, we do that less. I think we should do it a bit more in marketing. You could say, hey, if you're in product marketing, pitch this part of the product to me in sales, you can do a mock. In sales, it's common to do a mock sales session either with GitLab or if they're not so familiar with it, with the product they're currently selling. So I think that's being done as part of the interviews. Changing gears, I'm thinking like new companies that are building new founders, building like companies in a remote way, like remote only from your experience or when you were like starting building like GitLab, what was, if anything, that at the beginning you thought like, this is going to be a big challenge and it wasn't or the other way, this is going to be easy. You do like a remote company and it was a challenge. Yeah, so you wanted specific to remote things, what is easy, what is hard. I thought it would be very hard to kind of organize the social interaction in a remote company that doesn't happen naturally. And we do things like a team call and I thought it wouldn't scale, but now we're doing it with over a hundred people sometimes talking about engagements and babies and people passing away and happy and sad moments. So that's going really well. We're doing breakout groups now where we split people up in smaller conversations which is going well. We call them virtual coffee breaks where people just chat for half an hour, that seems to be going well. So all this social interaction could be organized. It's not particularly easy, but the fact that we're able to do it successfully and create those connections between people, I think it's remarkable. What seemed easy, but what was hard? I'll just answer it with stuff that's genuinely hard. Being people, we just switched to a new payment provider, ADP. Those stock options, that's not easy stuff. That's costing us a lot of money to figure that out for every country. Yeah, the legal frameworks aren't ready for stuff like this and it's painful. So far we've navigated a lot successfully but it's taking a lot of time to stay compliant. Yeah, that was something that another CEO from Sao Pio mentioned that was like the legal stuff around a remote company in general. I think there's a great opportunity for someone that starts a company that's like Stripe for hiring people. Like you found someone to live in another country, you just wanna pay someone and make sure the money lands in their bank account and everything is taken care of. That's what the other person also wants. Take care of those problems. I think Aachen did that very successfully where they supported every single last local payment system and I think that's needed for employment as a service. And there's companies doing it in the US but I think it like Trinat, I think it's really important to have a company that does it all over the world. Yeah, each country is different, series different, different taxes for different state, even inside US. Take care of that. And then just in the beginning, bill me a lot and then as you see that few people quit and there's few lawsuits, just give me a better rate over time. So do really good risk management instead of trying to be perfect, just do risk management and people pay more as they're the company or the person are a bigger risk. Yeah, that is interesting. That is for sure a big challenge for any like remote company. What advice would you give to like a founder that is starting like a remote company? I would say have a look at our handbook and try to copy as much as possible from it. It's creative comments like our entire marketing website. Yeah, that is a good advice. I was reading off that and it's like super useful, super helpful on the handbook. I would guess like the same thing would be for like work couchsons like something that would say like be careful about this when you're building a remote company. Yeah, I don't think there's just so much to say that I much rather have to go to the head book and read the 1500 pages that are there and then I think that's the best advice. And I think the world is catching up to this. I see like new startups that were accommodated. It's getting more popular to be over remote. So there's a lot of skepticism from investors but it's important. This is just, it's the future and this is gonna happen. There's gonna be really big companies being built like this. Yeah, I feel the same way. And what I've been seeing right now is like this is a sense of like startups like Gidlar, like both are like... So your envision is probably the biggest startup without the office right now. Like 700? 700 people and WordPress is also like hundreds of people and they close their HQ. Yeah, they opened their office in San Francisco. I think that you guys have similar situation, right? That you create an office and then you have to like close it because nobody was going there. Exactly. And what would you... When you were like building Gidlar at the beginning, right now for sure you'd be like a bunch of internal tools that you need as a remote company. When you're starting, what would be like a tour or a piece of software that you wish you had at that moment when you were starting a company? The current version of Gidlar, we build a lot of things, especially in issues in our planning software. We can like do roadmaps and things like that with ourselves in mind as well. So I think that really helps. I think Zoom is essential. It's so great of a video conferencing system. So those are two things that help a lot. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. You guys build a bunch of features inside Gidlar that not super helpful for people like the boards, both management, issue management. So you guys are sharing a lot with the handbook or the company. And I think it's super useful that you guys are very transparent, even like this channel. Getting my call and making it public is going to like share any answer that it gives to everybody. What... If you have any idea, what is the thing that we, when I'm talking about, we are talking about like passion or like remote work, like the community of all founders, what can we do to also like help other remote companies, you know? Yeah, I think it would be great if there's like an advocacy group. I toyed with that idea. I started remoteonly.org. We now talk about like all remote in Gidlar because I think it sounds better as a word, but having a all remote.org or something like that contains all the materials from all the different companies that organizes meetups around this that has a forum, I think that would be great. And we're willing to sponsor that, but right now we don't have someone at Gidlar that can spend half of their time on this. Yeah, I think a community that try to support each other and advocate that. Yeah, I think that can be like very interesting. I just have my last question, more like the future, like in general, like where do you see this space going? You already mentioned that you think it's the future, but like in 10, 20, 30 years, where do you want to see, or do you think there's going to be more jobs? Yeah, so I think, look, this is going to take over. Like I'm now in downtown San Francisco, there's in so much, there's like 80,000 people coming here to the Eastcott every day. I don't think that's the future. I do think people will come together, but it will be much more for a specific purpose. So I think it's going to become the default to run companies all remote. There's people all over the planet. There's people want the freedom to be with their loved ones or want to be flexible and where they are. And I think that's a great perk to give people without a lot of downsides. I think it institutes better processes in companies when you don't have that backup of tapping someone on the shoulder. You're going to work more nice than that. In 30 years, we'll have self-driving cars by that time. So I think it's really interesting to think about, hey, you could probably work and sleep in a self-driving vehicle. So it would, and you're still probably going to spend a lot of time transporting. And like in history, the time spent in transit has been pretty constant. So as we go faster, we just go to more places. So I could see a future where you're working or sleeping in a transporting vehicle. And then when you wake up or when your work is done, you're at a beautiful location with a couple of other people that you wanted to meet at that point. So where you're much more, where you're basically all the time in between meetings, but you're able to use that time in between meetings effectively. More efficiently, yeah. And spending a lot more time with friends, spending a lot more time in beautiful locations and having people open up restaurants and those meeting areas that are catering towards that. Yeah, I think that one of the things that is bringing me to this space is that phrase, that quote, that said opportunities, not talent is equally distributed in the world, opportunities are not. I think that these kind of like remote companies are trying to make opportunities also more like distributed around the world. Similar to what you say. For sure. A lot of our people are getting, have an opportunity to work at like a fast-going internet startup and they're getting more interesting job, they're getting better colleagues, they're getting a better compensation than they would get in their local market. And I think that's very, very exciting. Yeah, yeah. That's why I'm excited to work in general. And coming from Cuba, I want to bring opportunities to other places like Cuba. And Venezuela could use a bit and Jordan and like there's so many places where there's great people, but the opportunities aren't there. Yeah. And just like my last question was like, it's the same question like what is your long-term goal like with good lab? Where do you want to see good lab in like 10, 20, 30 years in from the business side and for like the company like culture, remote work side for both sides? Yeah. So in 10 years, we still want to be an old remote company. Hopefully by that time, we've been a public company for eight years where we're, we've become the default tool to do DevOps and on top of Kubernetes. We have more than a thousand people. We have worth more than $10 billion. We have more than a billion, a billion dollar a year in revenue. That's the dream. That's what we're trying to achieve. Yeah. I think you guys are going that path to just wait so far. So far so good. But it's a long way to go. Yeah, it's a lot of like challenge in the way. And another thing we're toying with is if, or what I spent time thinking about is that if remote, old remote is the future, then there's going to be more opportunities, but it is for specific skill sets. Like there's only 20 million developers in the world and there should be a lot more. There's an acute need for more people that have security training. So apart from the job being accessible, also education has to get more accessible. And I think right now, education online is making it more accessible, but you still need kind of the time to actually educate yourself. And during that time, you need income. So how can we offer education in a way that people can sustain themselves? And I think an interesting approach there, what I'm thinking about is, why not have people take out a student loan? And as they achieve their milestones, you give them give the money back basically from that loan. You give them 80%, only 10 or 20% goes to the education. The rest just comes back in your pocket as you achieve milestones. So you can sustain yourself and maybe your dependence. And that would open up education to a lot more people. Yeah, it's a good question that you are asking. How can we improve education outside the big companies, the big cities, and make it more democratized to everybody? Also just random thoughts. One idea I had before was more internship. When you're learning sometimes, the best way to learn is with a real-world problem, solving a real problem. And for companies sometimes, you need somebody to fix and solve this. There's a bunch of companies right now, they are trying to go and be more techy, in some way, more tech savvy, but they don't have the talent there to support them. So trying to connect them can be a good, I don't know, just like Mr. Mi. Now you mentioned that. Yeah, with internships, it's really hard. For example, with us, we don't have internships. We even stopped hiring junior developers. So we're only hiring junior developers if they already contributed to get lab as a product. But other than that, we don't have vacancies for that, because it's very costly to kind of educate them. We much rather spend that time to get someone from intermediate to senior. So any education company will have to deal with this. And if you want to run it on a very tight margin, which will be necessary to give a lot of money back, you'll have students from the second year, training the students from the first year. You'll have the people that are already in a job, still helping the people out that have been there last year. Also with job access opportunities, like getting them into a new job. And I think the real world experience you'll do in things like Upwork, like the Elan's Marketplaces, and contributing to open source projects. Yeah. Hey, I have my questions. I just ask you my questions. I have a few more to work. Cool. Well, thanks so much for the talk. Enjoy it. Thank you for returning the time and your experience. Cool. Bye. See you.