 Hi, I'm Sid. I'm co-founder and CEO at GitLab, and I'm here with Dominic. Dominic, maybe you can introduce yourself. And before you do that, this call is going to be about remote work, remote management, communication, and team spirit. Take it away, Dominic. Yes. Hi, my name is Dominic. I run a blog at knowHQ.co where I'm trying to teach founders and managers on how to build remote company. And it's highly insightful to talk to people like yourself, Sid, who kind of went through building a large-scale remote organization to learn how they did it and how others can replicate that success. Cool. So yeah, thank you so much for doing this. It's always kind of very insightful when we do this. And kind of what's very special about this call is that whenever I'm talking to new founders who are just building a company, they're always saying, oh, we want to make it work like GitLab is making it work, or like Zapier is making it work. But GitLab is also, it's always kind of the number one example. So maybe to start with a bit of a loaded question is how did you get here, or what did it take to get here? Yeah, I think when we realized that we were going to be remote, we tried to accommodate for it. So for example, we have, we try to make sure that we're intentional about informal communication. Want to make sure that we stimulate informal communication because that tends to get lost if you're remote. And examples of that I can give, another thing was that our values are very conducive to working remote. And I can give examples of that. And maybe a third element is that there was a skepticism from our investors where the remote will work. So from a very early start, we were kind of forced to articulate how we were accommodating for remote. And that helped to maybe spread the word a bit. And maybe that's also why we're one of the better known remote companies now. That's really cool. So when exactly did you feel like this is the time to go remote and what was kind of the decision process behind that? Yeah, we're remote because people stop showing up. In the beginning, there was no office because it was me in the Netherlands, Martin in Serbia and Dimitri in the Ukraine. Later on, I had two desks next to each other. But the Dutch team member who just joined after a few days, they just didn't show up because they could just work from home and everyone else was doing that. So it was natural. And then after I culminated, we got an office. But even also there, like salespeople came in for a few days and then they just one day like they didn't bother because it wasn't needed. So we've always had the tools and the processes so that you don't miss out. You don't miss out on information and career opportunities when you're remote. And I think people don't necessarily want to go, want to commute. It's just that people don't want to miss out. So if you don't feel like you're missing out, then it's okay. And a company will naturally become all remote. Cool. What was your biggest issue early on when everyone started not showing up? I'm assuming maybe you were so prepared for that scenario. What were big issues in the beginning? The biggest issue was investors. One investor we really would like to have as an investor in a company said, look, you take all the boxes. I believe in everything. The remote thing we've not seen before. It's a risk. And very articulate. I'm not saying it's not going to work. I'm just saying that it's a risk and we don't have to take a risk. We can just invest. We have a limited number of investments. We can just invest in a company that doesn't have that risk. So they weren't even dismissive of remote. They weren't just saying, hey, it's not going to work. It's just why take risk when you don't have to. So make perfect sense from their perspective. But of course we were sad. Do you feel like that has changed today? I heard from other founders that they kind of had a lot of issues three, four years ago with raising money when being remote and today that might look a little bit different. Yeah. Investors today see it as a plus. We have some early investors that were skeptical who are now like, I'm scouting for companies who are all remote because they have a much easier time attracting and retaining talent. Do you feel like it might be a reason for that too? I'm sure it helps. Cool. So that was in the beginning, probably like a few employees being remote, but now you're scaled up a lot more employees. How has that evolved over time? Like nowadays, how do you handle communication? How does everyone stay in the loop? How is that happening at Gidler? Yeah. I think one of the ways to kind of know what's going on in the companies are group conversations. We have one four days a week and there's a deck. You can pitch to it yourself and then it's 25 minutes of Q&A or shorter if the questions run out. I think that's been a great way to kind of show all the different things going on at the company. So everyone has a feel for what's happening. I think the handbook has scaled really well. It's now 3000 pages and whatever the activity is, it's a good starting place to kind of find out what you want to do or what you want to do. If you want to make a change, that's a great place to change it. I think what hasn't scaled well is our breakout call. So we're trying different things there and the idea is to give people kind of 20 minutes every day where they just hang out and talk about their life outside of work with a diverse set of people. What is working is team socials where you hang out with your team, but I'm really afraid of teams becoming isolated from each other. So I would love for there also to be a cross-functional group of people you interact with frequently. Mm-hmm. Do you feel like being in quotation marks limited to these communication tools? Let's say chat and handbooks and video chat. Do you feel like that's difficult or that there are issues that you wouldn't have if everybody was in a big office and just hanging together all the time? No, I actually think it's more effective. If I compare the video calls I have with people with in-person meetings. Every video call we have, we have a Google doc on the side. It has the questions that we should discuss. It has the notes, the follow-up actions, and having that in real time is such a benefit. It's like a real time magic whiteboard. Now we do have to type that ourselves, but it is an amazing thing and I really miss it. Also we don't spend a lot of time kind of, we don't have people late for meetings. We start on time, we end on time. It enforces a discipline that's just much more effective. So I don't see it as a downtime. I think it's great, except like obviously it's still meetings so it can't accommodate for time zones. I think time zones are the bane of our existence and we try to do as much work asynchronous as we can to accommodate for that. I know that a lot of people at GitLab are also in the US, everywhere in the US, but you have people all around the world. To come back to these time zones, how do you overcome that when you have meetings crossing the US, Europe, Asia? How do you put a bigger meeting together? Yeah, so the solution is to not have the meeting and two of our top three values are conducive in that. One of the values is transparency. So we write things down. You don't have to kind of shoulder tap someone and ask them. The other one is iteration. We take small steps really quickly. If you take a small step, you don't need to coordinate with as many people. You have a six month project, you better make sure everyone's aligned. If you get it out in two weeks, you can just go ahead. If you're really off, you can compensate the next two weeks and steer it in a slightly different direction. We kind of already talked a little bit about that, but how do you promote good, healthy company culture and people talking to each other outside of work when everything's limited? Again, in quotation marks, two video chats. And we talked about the breakout call already. We talked about team socials. Another thing we do is coffee chats. If you join GitLab, we require you to do 10 coffee chats. We schedule 25 minutes with a team member, but you don't have an agenda. You can talk about work or things outside of work. We also do try to get people together. We do local meetups. We do a company-wide meetup. We pay for travel if you visit other team members. So we try to make it a social experience. So you talked about team retreats. What's usually happening when you have such a big meetup in your background right now? Yeah. So we've seen a lot of other companies who do death by PowerPoint, where you have to sit through hours and hours of presentations. So don't do that. We have an opening and a closing event, but the entire rest is excursions. We go visit new places together and an unconference. Subjects put on the agenda by individual contributors, groups of no more than 15 people discussing that without a presentation. And what do you see as the biggest benefit out of those team retreats, usually for socializing or is it also team building that people get to know each other? People get to know each other. People get to know more of each other outside of work. And they realize that they're surrounded by a whole lot of people who are on the best behavior. And sometimes that gets a bit lost if you're just going back and forth in chat. Right. I feel like it might be a quote by Andreas Klingler who said that kind of remote is for iteration and meetups and face-to-face time is for innovation. Do you agree with that? I think it's a false dichotomy between iteration and innovation. I think if you look at the really innovative things that have happened, they have not been a big top-down plan. They've been people iterating their way out of a maze and just ending up at a different thing than they expected in the beginning. And what's also a big issue what people have told me is kind of having these breakout ideas like just coming up with it with a quick idea or a quick innovation. Do you feel like that's an issue or do you do anything to promote just like random brainstorms, ideas, innovations? I think it's happening enough. Like for example today, let's call it the brain fart about the monitoring. We just started a recording and Eric and JJ are going to upload that or they maybe already uploaded that. We just put it on YouTube on the GitLab unfiltered channel. So there's enough ways to kind of write up an idea. We get an issue tracker with over probably 10,000 feature proposals. There's no lack of ideas on how to improve things. Do you feel like the GitLab is always very transparent also with this meeting and as you said everything's recorded and gets uploaded or written down? Do you think that's a crucial part when there are so many people and everything's remote that everything is transparent? I think it helps. I think the hardest thing about remote is not so much the remote part but the time zone part because of time zones you need to go asynchronous and to go asynchronous you need to start recording so that you can time shift when it happens with when people view it. And so when meetings are happening what are usually the cases where you would prefer a meeting face to face over written down or chat? I think in person, I would contrast in person with video calls. I think anything work related can be a video call. I think in person is great to break bread together to get to know each other on a personal level to kind of free a little bit. Any meeting that has like an agenda which most meetings should have and where you're do not taking I prefer a video call. So you already touched a little bit on having an agenda. What are your tips or your advice on making meetings more efficient especially in a remote setting? Start on time. Have the questions in there on time. Start answering the questions ahead of time. Like frequently we have like only half of the stuff we need to discuss in the meeting because asynchronously before the meeting people are putting in questions and answers. Lots of links to like here's where you can find more information. So don't just give the answer also teach people how to fish where this was located in the first place. We find it really helpful that people put in their questions and we go in that order through the meeting. So if you want to ask something it's always a bit awkward in remote meetings like raising your hand to things like that and you get like the highest paid person to ask more questions. It's a democratization if it's just in the order in which the questions were asked and then yeah kind of intense the answers below that and also if it's a meeting with seven people and there's just two people going back and forth spin it out of the meetings they have solve this with the two of us. Do you ever feel like you're losing a bit of flexibility because you can't just call anybody in a meeting right now? I can. I did. I called Darren four minutes before this meeting started. Right but you're not sitting with a person in the office and can say hey everybody come in like somebody might be in a way different time zone and asleep. Yeah so async is hard but like in a thousand person company it's easier to it might take more than four minutes to get through someone's desk. Right. So I think it's really flexible yeah and we can solve for time zones. Time zones are hard. Right. So let's change the topic a little bit and get to hiring. That's kind of set. Before that Darren I think wants to add something. Yeah I was just going to say that Sid and I are about 3,000 miles apart right now and he was able to bring me into this meeting probably a lot more quickly than if we were in the same colleague located space he doesn't know what floor I'm on he doesn't know if I'm already in a meeting. Right. He can just slack me and if I'm available I'm able to jump in. So I think in many ways it's actually easier. You know if they're not available they're not available but. And at the Facebook headquarters you take about half of your meetings over video call because it takes too much time. It takes 10 minutes to go between offices. Yeah that's a great point. And you spend two hours a day in a bus to get to the headquarters. Yeah. Yeah come through this. It's a ridiculous situation. Come on we can all see that. Definitely. The thing is better. Just have to accommodate for it and like if there's no if there's no dock attached to a meeting I will I will join the meeting and I will shut down the meeting one minute in and I expect all of my everyone in the company to do exactly the same thing. So people's time is really valuable and you should take it very seriously if you make a demand on that time. And that's not only limited to remote companies right like in in the best in the best case every company should do that. Exactly. Remote forces you to do the things you should be doing anyway earlier and better. Right. Yeah that's something I hear a lot that remote companies do things that large companies should do but they do it a lot earlier and they have to do it too. Exactly. Out of it. Right. So yeah the second part is more about hiring. That's another bigger problem that a lot of early stage companies have because you you put a position out and it's not only available to people in your city it's not only available to kind of people who are ready to move to that city it's technically available to the whole world. So a lot of companies get a lot of applications on every position. How what could you suggest to filter? Let's say you have a position out there and you get a thousand applications from all around the world. What do you usually do to filter some of these? Yeah first let's note how amazing that is right. Most companies have the problem nobody's interested. Right. If filter gets it's very regularly you look at people's resume you filter first step on that then a screening call and then an interview process with four to five calls and then references. Is that how a standard hiring process as GitLab would look like to? Yeah and at the bottom of most job families you can find the exact information and how many rounds of interviewing there will be. Right. Are you testing for remote readiness at all or attributes that you could attribute to a good remote work? No we regularly hire people who've never worked remote before and we haven't found any problems. What's important is people are a manager of one they can manage their own time they don't need someone to tell them what to do on a day-to-day basis but they can they're disciplined about that and they can handle a higher level of kind of input from their manager. Is that something that you actively look out for? Is it something that people can kind of learn on the job and grow into? It's we're not doing a good enough job filtering on that yet but I don't I think we want to hire people who already have demonstrated that. And what's kind of more of an administrative question is people don't know how to hire remote employees so what's the case maybe it has changed over the years at GitLab but how are people actually hired at GitLab are they contractors are they actually hired locally and what would you suggest to start up maybe 2030 people to how to do that? Yeah so we got entities like companies subsidiaries of GitLab Inc in companies where we have a lot of team members so 80% of our team members are working regular employees in 80% of the countries in which we have team members people are contractors. Interesting and then there's the second kind of issue which is especially if you have multiple entities with kind of taxes hiring people in different states especially in the US especially early on how did you figure those things out and what is maybe the number one quid which you found which you would suggest to every new founder to look out for? So in the beginning in the US we dealt with it to Trinet they're a co-employer and it makes it easy to hire people in all kinds of states it wasn't a big deal and we've got a great benefits program and paying like 10% extra but it's worth it you kind of if you have more than 100 people you probably should take it take it on yourself again but it was a great benefit and there's more great companies now helping with that like gusto they now do payroll as well as benefits right and I don't I don't think there's a yeah you should look into the local laws and regulations and things like that but I don't think there's any major caveats we had very few problems with all of this okay just make sure you're you're a good employer you do think so good employers do. And maybe for just some additional more general questions is there a big issue at GitLab in terms of remote working which you in in your mind still weren't able to solve to the state something kind of big that still had a thorn in your eye? Um remote things we haven't solved yeah time zones like we do that group conversation every day at a fixed time and the people in Asia-Pacific cannot join that so I want to make sure that our group conversations start like being at different times but we found before that if we start shifting the time of certain events the attendance drops dramatically because people can no longer fit it into their day so that's that's a big problem still to be solved. And do you feel like after all those years that you had a really bad experience with remote work where you felt like it would have been better if we would all sit in an office somewhere? No really I think that um digital nomads that stay at um kind of backpacker hostels have a super hard time being disciplined about their work so I'm skeptical of that but I'm I'm supportive of of nomads um we have people and uh okay we just talked about someone who's traveling America in RV I think makes total sense but if you surround yourself with people that are partying day in day out that that's not conducive to getting work done. What do you do at GitLab to maybe promote people having a more structured day and not just going partying all day? That's none of our business it's just that it seems hard but people should make their own choices we'll judge them our number one values results we don't care about how many hours you work or how you work we care about your output we're gonna measure that. So do you do anything to make sure that your employees don't overwork or get burned out which is often an issue for remote workers? That's a great one so the only time a manager is allowed to inquire about how many hours you work is when they suspect you're working too many hours. Okay and what happens if somebody works let's say 15 hours per day? Well that's ridiculous but even working eight hours a day you can get overworked it's not just about the hours it's also about motivation lots of other things but managers are responsible for kind of the reports and if they suspect someone is not doing well working getting burned out or working too long hours it's a conversation and there's different things up to the point where they mandate time off but that hopefully you can get you to earlier have a conversation and many times it's a misunderstanding of the manager not realizing what workload they were demanding or miscommunication leading to kind of a lack of motivation or especially new team members thinking that they should work crazy hours because they did that at the last startup. Is that still a big issue for for GitLab to have people kind of overworked and burned out because you know might be a change from having a commute and being in office from to just working from home and having it accessible at all times? I think that like work-life separation is an issue if you work from home so I think that's that's something that a lot of people in the company are struggling with. I do not think that we have a lot of people burning out I've seen way worse things at other startups but at our global get-together the two most popular subjects in the un-conference were one lack of motivation and second burnout so yeah this is this is stuff we talk about and that we use those global back gatherings to discuss What's your best advice for remote workers to keep that work-life balance if they have a home office for example? Yeah make sure if you if you have that luxury make sure it's a separate room at GitLab we don't force you to work from home if you want to work from an office we'll pay for that so if that helps you we'll pay for it you can only find an office space pretty close by so you don't have to commute long. A lot of people who it's their first time remote working they first do the office thing so that their family gets adjusted to it because it's it's hard for people to realize especially for children but even for spouses that hey you're home but you're working so that's something that builds over time and then also enjoy the benefits of your kids boarding in on a meeting and distracting you it's the best distraction in the world. What's for you as also a remote worker what's the best benefit for you being remote in kind of location independent? I get more done I think there's just a natural inefficiency to kind of traveling between meetings and the scheduling and all the other things to take I regularly have in-person meetings and I regularly get about half the efficiency out of that that I get from virtual meetings and there's there's yeah there's just freedom I give in gelab if a meeting isn't interesting to you you just go do your email or Facebook on the side you're the boss of your where you pay attention and it's it's not shameful to say oh I I wasn't paying attention can you repeat the question that's so legal. Right I think that's a common common view that remote workers tend to have more responsibilities and more kind of being their own manager than a co-located worker do you see kind of the same thing in your team. Yep and I think it's the future of work like you want you want highly talented people who can take responsibility for their own job doesn't make sense to have like project managers that ask people where they are and then tell them to do more without like helping them and coaching them and doing those things so no project managers know you have to pay attention to this meeting stuff let people be the boss of their own time and hold them accountable for results and it's it's amazing to see how that's not happening at other companies it sounds this sounds very obvious and then you look around at at almost every other company and then not doing this effectively. Yeah I agree when you kind of in your company what's your kind of tool stack specifically to remote work you said you have you have a handbook but when you're doing meeting when you're communication communicating what's kind of the tool stack that you use. Use Slack, use Google Docs for those meeting notes, we assume for video calling it's amazing then we use Google issues to plan use Google Earth and Git Google. GitLab merge requests to do our code, GitLab issues to plan things, GitLab appics for portfolio management and GitLab pages to store things like our website and our handbook. So would you would you even say that GitLab is now more than you know version control and all the the other sectors and more also a tool for remote companies? No I think I think GitLab is still it's a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle it's a single it's a DevOps platform delivered as a single application all the way from planning what you want to do creating that but also packaging rolling that out monitoring and securing and defending that so we're GitLab as a product is not is not tied into remote and 90 plus percent of our revenue is coming from co-located companies. Right what do you think about I think a lot of these tools that you mentioned are very kind of standard in remote companies a lot of them are using them they weren't specifically engineered for remote work they just really they work really well for that use case what do you think about specifically engineered for remote work tools that are coming up now? Yeah I'm intrigued let's see I've seen a lot of like virtual office tools we have virtual meeting rooms and stuff like that I don't think that makes sense yeah we're going to meet in a URL like people get that that it's not a problem they're trying to solve a problem that doesn't need to be solved there's cool new startups like Tendem we're trying to integrate more and so let's see how they do we have very curious people at GitLab so I'm sure some people will check it out and I will not hesitate to tell other people if it's if it's good. Do you feel like there's still one one tool missing in kind of a workflow of a remote company something that would be nice to have on a day-to-day basis? It's a great question I don't think so I think the video calling has been searched so bothersome so the last missing piece was Zoom we're now hitting the limited bit of Google Docs like at like a certain amount of people you cannot edit anymore you see too many people are viewing this document so I hope they kind of up that limited bit. Yeah that would be a nice limit to lift. So yeah for for kind of closing up as the last question what would be the number one advice you can give to a new fresh company that's just starting out and it's looking to build their team fully remote? Yeah read our handbook and copy from it would you please? That's a great great answer yeah that's it from my side in terms of questions thank you so much for for taking this I think it was very insightful and I think it's it's also something that can help a lot of people who are as I said just starting out now building a small remote team to kind of knowing what's getting to them because there aren't too many companies out there especially at your size who are being remote and kind of pioneered this whole thing and figured these things out and kept the hard way so this was really a really nice talk and thank you very much. Yeah thank you and we hope old remote becomes popular not in the least because it hopefully will spread opportunity a bit more equally around the globe thank you. Yeah thank you.