 Well, I'm here so Feel free to ask any questions. Oh, I thought that was that was somebody here asking. Yeah, sorry It will be a bit noisy back here, but I might open despite that no problem So since we're all newbies we're all new get labbers said what's what's some advice you can give us to Hit the ground running as hard as we can Um Don't stress out like many people report that the onboarding it feels overwhelming So don't put yourself under too much pressure to immediately get everything etc There's a lot to read there's a lot to do you make lots of mistakes you've got lots of feedback So don't don't have the feeling that you you got to be at a hundred percent immediately That would be my advice maybe a bit counter-intuitive and maybe not what you wanted to hear, but It's it's a long game here. It's it's not it's not the short game. I had a question I was just wondering how you decided or how anybody decided on the in every process for engineers where you kind of like work on a feature Versus doing the typical whiteboard question Shantel you're breaking up a bit. Maybe you can put your question in in chat She's quick. How do you decide the interview process for engineers work on a feature versus a whiteboard? It's one of the great aspects of of get live being open source and that we can do that and we think it's Much more relevant like to test the actual job skill instead of a whiteboard in your time at get live You'll be doing exactly 0% whiteboarding and you'll be doing hopefully a lot of feature development So the more that we directly we can test the skill the better also Hopefully we we like to think that it leads to more diverse hires Because the whiteboarding tends to be technical test tends to test for like typical computer science skills Like big O notation questions and things like that We turn not all that relevant to you to most of your day-to-day So we like to think that it it lets people that are that don't have a typical computer science path or Also compete on an equal playing field and by the way If you don't want to make a feature and you want that interview and people can opt into that Which it's not for the free labor that we're doing it. It's actually costing us a lot of time to review those things Yeah, I don't know if my connection is okay now It's okay now. Okay. Yeah, it's actually one of like the more unique Processes I've ever seen and I think probably the better one I've told a lot of my friends about it and I think it makes things a little bit more like equitable and Reasonable especially given like what our jobs are so I thought it was great. I hope that we can also do it in other departments I look forward to sales people actually having to do a sales call. We're not there yet So I have a question if nobody's gonna jump in How's it going said nice to meet you How long was it from when GitLab launched to when it went into YC and then what was it that got you into YC? So the open source project started in 2011 the commercial company GitLab comms started in 2012 YC happened in 2015 so quite a while Well guys in YC were the organic adoption of GitLab We made a really good installer for it and that caused lots of people to install it so I During the interview, I know there were only 10 minutes so the laptop and on my screen I had a printout of all the logos of the companies using GitLab I was like even if I can if I totally mess up at least you'll see all the logos using GitLab And that's what got us into YC The enormous adoption of the open source project Thanks I'll hop in here said if no one else has a question I guess kind of obviously as GitLab's continue to grow the problems and challenges that we're facing continue to change What would you say is kind of At our current stage like the biggest challenges and obstacles that we're we're facing now as we continue to scale and grow either from a product or sales perspective or You know anywhere within the organization the two things that are top of my mind is GitLab comms reliability and Getting enough sqlows to Feed our salespeople so sqlows our leads in larger companies We want to make sure that that we have enough we're striving in the end for for 10 per salesperson Per month and we were very far away from that. So scaling that up with more strs and Our quickly growing inbound is is the goal The people you see moving behind me are visiting that place because we're moving so they have to sell it now. So They'll be judging Doesn't come with me or the monitor. So I think That's cool um, so because I'm New to the the commercial side of GitLab like I've always used it before starting here. Um, just on get up get lab.com or um, a deployed version of it that uh, some of the admins I was working with before used it. Um, What what is it that what like what's the For our clients What is it that drives people like what do they like about GitLab? What what what do they like about it more than our competitors Yeah, you should you should ask them. Uh, I hope that what they like more is that they get the entire DevOps lifecycle in a single application So we got solid source control that is competitive, etc but you The nice thing is you push your code and when it thinks like other DevOps you can You can quickly Do all the other things you set up testing set up Uh, performance testing security testing, etc um Right now that is I'm not sure that's the reason many people are using GitLab But I think it's going to become more and more important and we're already seeing it with ci that people are using GitLab Because it has ci that they're only using the ci even with the with the github integration and as we as other Parts of GitLab mature you're going to see that more and more. Okay. Yeah, we use github in Jenkins But we use GitLab for the security testing. We're going to see stuff like that in the future Mark mark you want to talk to your question I think he has connection problems. That's why he's writing them in chat. Okay. Cool. What do you see is the big It's spotty, but give it a try mark. I'll give it a try So I see a lot of competition out there What do you see is the big one and Any acquisitions on the roadmap? Yeah, thanks for that. Um, so the big competitors for us right now are github and Atlassian um Bit of a version control focus Um cloud b slash Jenkins is getting more important In our future competitors might be the public clouds AWS with their co-star product microsoft with their visual studio team services um I'm not very concerned about competitors I do think we need a public cloud strategy But we made a good start with our partnership with google and we'll keep it's on our radar. We got time there um We don't we don't need to be super concerned. No one else is making what we're new making But it's a very obvious idea and and people are expanding in scope and going after the same same thing Nice startup like for example harness.io totally trying to do the same thing as us Not that they're copying us. It's just so obvious that this is needed um, so we got to keep Uh The pedal to the metal and go as fast as we possibly can so there's no there's no need to look left and right There's the need to look To the future and get there as fast as possible make sure we fix all the problems and auto devops Make sure that everything really works make sure we ship complete devops Make sure then we make it really easy to use make sure we got good metrics and can can help people use more of the products and that's what we should be focused on The competition is is not doing anything worrying I'm not hearing we're losing customers because of specific features. If so, we we hear that we make the feature But that's that's not the worry. The worry is stopping shipping. So we've got to keep shipping as fast as we can An acquisition We see in the future Um, there's all kinds of nice nice things around matrix It's a federated chat Project i've i've been in damage with them. They're they're cool. We were Closer to an acquisition at a certain point, but now they're probably going to do an ico There was a team in greece From mist.io We were close in acquisition. They were talented people could be our new configuration team But they they found other financing We're doing it as it makes sense I think gymnasium was a really really nice one very talented team Very good products that they were able to integrate like was the best in class dependency scanning product And i've been very very impressed with how fast that team integrated and started shipping for leap and everyone else has done an amazing job there So if If all acquisitions work out as gymnasium, I'll do 15 tomorrow But uh, but we gotta we gotta be careful and and make sure it's a good fit It's a it's a good team and and the price is reasonable I have another one if nobody else does Um, is there anything that you list about like the culture whenever get lab is lost? um, yeah for sure, um the The team calls were just 15 people talking about their day. Um, so that was quite nice. Um You get to know everyone in the company There's less layers of management between everyone Um Other than that everything has gotten better Our values are better. They're better defined people know them better people act on them more People talk about them more The the people that are here as we grow we get better and better We're able to attract better and better people the diversity is better We have people in more countries more different more different backgrounds The summits keep getting better like I can't believe we're going to Cape Town with 400 people Yes, Kirsten. Yes, uh, I'll thank Paul for the budget. Yes, I will. Um, Kirsten sitting Right next to me and she's uh, apart from her EA duties. She's organizing Cape Town And she she made me miss burning men this year by organizing it during that time The the product keeps getting better, uh, so that's really exciting Our users keep getting like more and better and more enthusiastic and they keep paying more per user um, so Most of the things are getting better But yeah, there's there's some charm of a small company that it's it's hard to recreate And of course we're trying to do that and we're iterating on the team calls and things like that. So Um, I think what's really important is that you don't say all those things will go away and it's okay But did you just keep keep trying to to keep as much as that as you can? I have a question So when I was researching the company Even, you know in the interviewing stages Uh, I saw one of your interviews where you told the story about Dimitri tweeting about how he wants to quit his job and work on git lab full time And then you reply to him uh, something around You quit your job. I'll you know, stay in my job and pay for you to work on git lab full time And in in that way you were a sort of a first person to invest in git lab, right? And I wonder what what filled you with such confidence You know about the product to to to do that basically Yeah, I was afraid to the gut feeling, you know a sort of uh decision Yeah, so thanks. Thanks for the question. Yeah, I was the first investor in in git lab. I put About a hundred thousand I'm not even going to say dollars and euros because I'm not sure exactly how much but about that kind of money in the company as it got started and The confidence came from I saw the git lab project was a year after it was launched. It was 300 people I had contributed to it and I thought it made a lot of sense Like it made a lot of sense that something you collaborate with is something you can collaborate on It never made sense to me that github is closed source um Actually, most people think github is open source. So like that tells you there's some Uh, there's some energy there um Then I was like, well, is it any good? I was a ruby on reels developer at the time So I opened up the co-base, you know, I was like, wow, this is like eomatic ruby on reels This is pristine. This is exactly how you should do it most of the time. There's some kind of um It's your hobby. So you're going to do hobby things. You have this new pattern You want to explore or this new feature dependency injection method Or you you got some kind of an framework idea. So you're going to in the framework effect Most of the time it's kind of messed up This not this dmitri camp is very clean and very easy to contribute to And that was that was very encouraging. So I was like, okay What's what can I add to this? I saw two things like the documentation was a mess And there was no way to try it out. There was no there was a demo server But there was no like gitlab.com. So I thought I'll make gitlab.com And then I uh And I I cleaned up the documentation But I want to test my ideas. I did ask or show hacker news like hey, I'm making gitlab.com This is the beta put your email here And then it in trend. So I went down start baking pancakes And then I had my phone with me and I checked hacker news Another time and I saw like wow, it's on the homepage. So I was like to my to my then girlfriend and now wife I was like, Karen, can you finish up baking the pancakes? As you know what time it was so Half an hour later. She was bringing me pancakes So I was glued to my monitor trying to answer all the different questions And hundreds of people signed up for the beta and I thought this is going to be great We're gonna this is going to be like sales force. This is a sass thing. I'm going to make so much money and and and and make it like really Uh a competitor in the space a year later. Nobody was paying almost nobody was paying for gitlab.com We had all these self-hosted clients that were interested. So then dimitri tweeted and Hired dimitri and we transitioned to helping those self-hosted clients um, so that was uh The initial investment and our and our big pivot So I have a question regarding hiring so as we are Scaling that fast and we are bringing new hires like each day So from your point how we can ensure that our core values remain the same and do we actually aim to do it Yeah, thanks for that Anastasia. Um, yeah, the core values Stay the same like everything in gitlab is always in draft So we got like three four merge requests on the values just this week as far as I can count So that's going well. They're always in draft. So they're always changing But we got to make sure that the people that sign up are aligned to the values as they are at that time Um, so that's important and and I understood from barbie that we made a few changes to how we How we get feedback from interviews that we kind of start rating people according to our values And we're going to get better at that. But I think it's already At a good stay because a lot of people that end up interviewing with me say I It's amazing how much people talked about your values. Uh, that didn't happen in any other company. So already doing a good job, but We're going to do an even better job in the in the future um And it greatly improved like the initial people that joined didn't really know what their values was because Nobody knew we hadn't written anything down. Um, so so it's It's getting more defined as we go along What are those values originally come from sid? It's a collaboration and you can you can click on the edit this page at the bottom If you look at our values page and click on history, uh, but you'll see that a lot of the edits are are from me But uh, sorry man, what was the uh Like what was the the progenitor did the inspiration for for that because they they're pretty I mean the whole credit thing is is a pretty solid idea that has been built upon But uh, but where did that originally come from? Yeah, so we kind of wrote down at a certain size. I think 30 people or something but You can find exactly when we did that we started writing them down like 13 things we cared about many things I cared about and I instituted in people and uh, I think we had like 13 values and then we I tested people my coach was like 13 values too much like I tested another person I tested myself and we could get to like three so was too much and we We with my coach john ham. We we kind of Worked it out what the hierarchy should be what the top level value should be and we uh, we made that thing And then I think I called it something else. I think I called it some stupid word And I think it was Karen my wife. We said hey that also spells credits and I'm like Thanks That's awesome good story I'll ask another question Do you ever uh, code anything outside? Well, Obviously in git lab for the repositories, but Do you ever like code up something on your own like A game or just something for fun as a side project? Thanks I'm not the world's best programmer. I got into it pretty late and uh, I quickly uh I worked at the identity and I quickly evolved to be more of a project manager. Um So I'm not the best I like to I I do a lot of handbook edits and and I like to tell myself that it's kind kind of like It's it's it's process. So instead of of making code. You're you're you're you're writing a process which has some similarities to code like obviously there people are not computers. Uh, but um writing down processes really helps to to make things function better And just like you can have clean code you can have clean processes that they don't That that are composable and or foregone all to each other and that are efficient, etc So speaking of the handbook, how much of git lab success do you attribute to a handbook being a being in a You know distributed remote team a lot, um I'm not Like a percentage or anything? Yeah I I I won't dare to call it percentage a lot more than Probably the the people around me. Um, I think it just solves so many Problems that companies that are scaling struggle with um The um I've been in a lot of other companies and what happens is that someone has an initiative and then sends by a powerpoint to the entire company Like now you have to do this or that but it's It's pretty clear that they haven't thought about how that Coincides with all the other processes happening in the company and then six months later everyone forgot about that presentation Is just back to doing it the old way um Here that's not possible. You're forced to kind of make a handbook change So you got to think about how it how it how it works with all the other things going on in a company And it's you don't forget about it new people get trained in it as well um I got a lot of people not recently But I got a lot of people that say that the best part about their onboarding experience that everyone was so open to questions That they're friendly and and it's okay to ask questions I like to think that that's because a lot of questions are already answered by the written documentation So there's fewer questions to go around so people will be nicer and responding to them Um I think it makes remote is very hard to pull off and it makes remote Easier it makes us more efficient. Um, so yeah, I think it's a big part in our In our success and especially as we scale We're not hiring a person per calendar day That is like more than a hundred percent growth. Most companies Experience extreme problems when that happens with onboarding with culture I'm sure there will be problems, but the extent of the problems is much lower than is normal for a company growing so fast. So I'm quite I I like to think that the handbook has something to do with that Oh and as for the for the for the do you code like I try to use auto devops last week So there's a video of that on our youtube channel if you want to see me struggle with our own product Yeah, it's kind of it kind of makes me think about, you know, just code documentation You know, if you're learning a framework or something like that but instead of, you know learning code you're answering and getting answers about Being in the company. So it's pretty interesting. I think it's really cool Uh, I'll have been I have another question and it kind of speaks to I guess the the long-term vision That was kind of laid out in In the handbook about eventually where it should be the ideas to have everything be read write not only You know code but also books and movies and and those types of works and I'm familiar with the story of the martian and how that was kind of a Read write scenario where the the author is getting feedback from He would adjust the story. I guess how does like how does that long-term vision of of read write on everything play in and where do you see that Unfolding I guess Yeah, so we we've seen now what read write can do with code like from we went from not having a lot of Open source projects and and being very hard to contribute to them to like this this Cambrian explosion of of tools and open source for For many projects it's becoming the default And everything you use you can take and improve and I think that's so empowering it's it's like From the britannica encyclopedia to wikipedia if there's a mistake if there's something you can add you can contribute to it I want to make sure that everyone can contribute to everything if I watch a movie I can be a big fan of the movie, but the best thing I can do is I don't know make a costume and go to comic con um I want to be able to to contribute to that movie um And and that right now you can get A second on the dvd. It will also have a directors cut. Why why isn't there A hundred cuts on there from all the all the people who participated. Why is it? Why is this curated? I want to curate it experience, but I also want to be able to contribute and and to add to it and uh I think it's going to happen. I think it's going to happen to movies to music all the all the major cultural expressions And one of our early investors was astin kutcher And he he gets it. He he thinks the same. It doesn't make sense that an album is remixed by like two guys in the studio for for a month There's other people that can contribute and that can can kind of jam with them um and We're not going to go to movies straight away and the nice thing about gitlab is that A lot of people can use it and embed it in their product So i've been encouraged by like o'reilly media taking gitlab and make using it to to make their books the best technical books in the world um there's a A french thing. It's on our application at the bottom of our application space that is trying to like Help to write laws laws right now is like an apollo Mostly a ministry just writes the law and if a politician wants to do something They have to kind of go to the ministry for help for writing their law It's very hard for for the general public to To kind of even make a suggestion. It's a very close process. I don't think I think the the the process of our our democracy should also be open to contributions Uh, we're taking it one step at a time our iteration. I'm I'm very excited about bizops. It's a project at gitlab That makes data engineering easier um Data engineering is not using a lot of version control yet. We think that will greatly help everyone to contribute I'm very excited about Jupiter Ingrid lab jupyter comes from ipython notebooks And it's a way to kind of keep a lab journal if you've ever used math lab or mathematics. It's similar to that And if you not it's it's kind of you can say like do this do that and you kind of see the result in line So it's it's like you're talking to siri. Uh, but you you got a lot of what happened and um It's um, I think that's that's that's a big revolution. That's all the all the data Scientists all the machine learning people are using that right now. It's very hard to integrate with version control But I think we can provide a step change. So Dimitri is gonna Going to do that this quarter. So those are those are the starts working with with data in in gitlab It should go bigger. There's a site called git book. I know the founders Um, it should be easier to contribute to a book when I now find a misspelling in a book I have to like send an email to the offer and then say on page this of this edition this sentence. This is like that's ridiculous So so we're getting there and it's a very exciting market I also like like annotations like what genius is doing formally rap genius With annotating things like adding adding to it not by changing the text itself, but by giving context I just read the korean Truce or the accord that was signed with like genius in it to to elaborate on all the terms. It's so much better Uh, I got so much more context That's that's something we should be probably get into maybe not right now But but that's that's the idea everyone can contribute to to any any digital product I think it will be a lot of fun. I think we'll get better car designs that way. I think we'll get better movies better games um Instead of watching tv we can contribute to tv. Look at look at what wikipedia did How much better it is how much more expensive it is how much more Value it creates Want to do that for the for everything that we we touch and and with 3d printers and everything Maybe digital products are not even the end Quiet the answer. Thank you I think on a satire k asked the question in chat Will there be another office that could serve as a place for git labbers to meet up and work together? Well, there is no office and we're now at our experience center. We're going to rename it to the boardroom It's not a place where git labbers meet up and work together I think where that's happening the world the most in the world right now is in denver I think there's some people in the same co-working space there Um the ideas we're not against it um If people are kind of in the same location by coincidence or because they recruited each other It's cool to hang out. There's a step in to kind of Have a have a meet up together, etc We really want to avoid feeling Making people feel like they miss out if they're not there And that's why for example, here is a beamy So you can log in you can drive around You can see what's here And people kind of I think many people expect like where's everyone like it's really just sit there Like kirsten is here now, but that's because the the realtor came by today Otherwise, it's it's just me it you're not missing out. There's not some some some hq where people are are Doing all kinds of things everyone on the same level so If people in europe it's an external space because they don't want to work from home That's fine with us, but there's not going to be an office. There's never Well, not unless we change it, but for now the plan is never to to have an office um Because as soon as you have the office you have the people in the office that have access to more information that that have That have an advantage to the people that aren't at the office And we want everyone to be on the on the same playing field And it's it's super hard to make people that work in an office write down their conversations and commenting issues and record their conversations and All the hybrid companies really struggle with that and i'm i'm sure i'm very glad we don't have that problem So, uh, antony, how how has the first few days at get lab been? What's good? What's what's what's stuff we can improve? um Let's see so onboarding was Fine, um I think I did stress out a little but just because um I wanted to be doing work already. Um Right, uh, I think that's a I think that's a that's a natural reason to be stressed out. Um I think it's probably a little different. Um being on the security team because there aren't I have like some Big goals that you know, I'll be iterating on For the quarter, but there it's not Where I I imagine there's a sea of tickets for developers engineers coming on board to kind of There's already like a priority around them to start tackling Um, so it's been pretty good. Um so far I've been getting so many robo calls on that Phone line we got be me calling in right now Um, yeah, so I don't know. Um I guess one thing that I'm uh Haven't had a chance to sit in on is uh because I didn't have the engineering interview of um going through a feature Is kind of seeing uh What some of the engineers processes around that are? um So that's something that um I'm kind of curious about um still um, but otherwise, uh the fact that Two-thirds to 75 percent of All the questions that Get asked like have a answer that is a link to the handbook. Um is very different from um So many places that I've worked. Um that's been um a real change Cool, what's typical stuff that's not in the handbook Um, it's it's usually not that it's not in there, but that it's out of date so Like what is the current uh Policy for Um, oh, I I know one, um benefit that my last company had was um They had a small stipend for like gym memberships um, but what the current you know way to sign up for that or you know Provide what you need to provide you to provide it to like that was never up to date anywhere. Um, and that's kind of thing that um It is just there in the handbook and constantly being updated by everyone. Um, it's a very very different um very Very apparent commitment to communication that um that that happened that way Cool. Thanks. Anybody else wants to chime in? Hopefully also something bad Because I'm sure bad things happen. But if you don't feel comfortable share sharing that that's uh, that's a problem I like that sort of the tie-in with what you were talking about anthony is um I'm hearing a lot of the mvc so rather You know say you have a whole page on these benefits and You know you somebody's like, oh a change, you know, there's a change in the gym membership policy. So Here what's great is like you can go in Get it done and it's in that part of it's finished rather than Oh, no, we have to put that off because we're redoing the entire page and That we're gonna like finally push it in three weeks so that's something i'm i'm starting to see um a lot of and um Takes a little getting used to because you know, it's atypical from You know like anthony you were talking about uh from other companies So but I like that approach because you could just get it done and you know, it's up to date If something needs to get done you just take care of it Um, so I just wanted to say that that's an interesting philosophy and maybe uh, you could talk a little bit about You know the reason for That mindset for everyone to have. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for that question. Um Yeah, mvc stands for minimum viable change And uh, it's inspired by minimum viable product It's the way that when you start it started you just want to get something out the door We think it doesn't end when you started that started we think it's something that you should keep Doing because why did you why do you do an mvp? Why do you get the minimal product at the door you get it because It's quicker and then when it's out you get feedback about how it's performing And if you want to get something perfect or complete You have a lot of work in progress Stuff that you're working on and isn't not facing the world you're missing out on feedback And other people are missing out on the chance to contribute um If you are redoing a page someone else has a suggestion they can do it because you're already redoing that page you're kind of locking everything and by It's also not very motivating because you've been working on something for a very long time and you have a a problem because it's um It's it's not it's not people getting back to you. So these are pretty good points. I'm making so I'll try to be a bit madder and a bit inspirational And let's see if this is already captured correctly in the handbook right now Can people see my screen? So here it is Let's edit that And talk about why we want to minimum viable change Oops that wasn't control f apparently Can someone say on audio whether they can still see my screen? Yes, yeah, we can still see it. Yes. Thanks The soft wrap doesn't seem to be working by the way Oh, no rep. That's better. I thought it was different. I thought it was The reps work differently, but the longer you wait less feedback The bigger chance Conflict So the less feedback um Anyone knows another reason why to do a minimum viable change So I've been making a lot of changes to the handbook And one of the things I've noticed is if I try to pack too much into a single a single change then Correcting that after the fact might be more of a headache That like if I if I make a mistake and I have to roll back It means I I'm covering more more ground than I should have to yeah Hard to review You have the bigger the change The bigger the chance of a conflict I'm gonna not do this here because I saw that in product we have A nice thing about the minimum viable change. So can we link from here? I'm not sure exactly where to link it from. I'm not sure I want to link from something that's highlighted So there's two minimum viable changes there Maybe this is a good way to state it and now we'll go to the product handbook And added this and try to be fancy and I'm going to use our new web IDE because I love that Oh, then it doesn't open the thing. It just goes to the IDE That's annoying So when I click on web IDE, I really preferably want to open that And console p doesn't mean print. Okay, so I'll go use the other editor But this is still on the values page. You know what? I'm going to share my other screen because I'm just going to use it Code editor Can people yeah, I think people can see it This is reminding me of a question that a friend of a friend actually asked me the other day about engineering is Whether or not The engineers pair That much or if I'm thinking that I know the answer now is probably not because of the focus on being asynchronous, but What what Is kind of a What's the de facto kind of answer for that? I would love to see more pairing in goodlap. I don't know why we're not doing it enough, but I'd love to see then Does that answer your question? Yes, that would have been An answer I would have given him one thing I've experienced in regards to The pairing is in a couple of the coffee breaks. I've had we've shared screens and just sort of looked at The code and you know gone over some things. So I think You know if I have any coffee breaks with any of you guys and you want to you know, you can go through an editor and you know You can teach me some stuff and vice versa and just Check that out Because you know there's always something to learn. I'll make I'm going to make a merge request with that and send it off to yop Thanks for that and I I hope you have a Great time here. If there's anything wrong that your manager can't solve for you feel free to get in touch with me You can just DM me on slack anytime Thanks, zed. Have a great time. Thank you Thank you. Bye Nice meeting everyone