 Welcome to the AMA. We have our investor of our B round and board member, Vili Ilchev with us. He's a strategist. He saw a lot of companies. He saw a lot of different trajectories. He saw a lot of things that are wrong with companies and what makes them successful. And I hope you all pepper him with questions. Vili, I saw you join. Is your setup working? I did. Did you hear me okay? Yep, perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you for having me. Appreciate it. I'm excited. Thanks for coming on. Feel free to ask questions in the chat or even better. Push the button and speak up. Does that mean I can ask you questions down too? Anything I want to ask in front of everybody? No, it's ask me anything and your name is on it. But make sure you get invited to our AMA where you can answer me any questions. But you haven't been too shy about that so far. All right. Okay. Questions are going to come via messaging. Is that, I see them starting to come. Okay. What makes GitLab different than any, than other companies that you worked with in the past? Boy, just about everything. I think, I think GitLab was definitely stretching the limits of what I thought was possible and breaking my biases in so many different ways. Certainly starting with the remote workforce. I mean, I didn't know what's possible. I still think we don't know what is possible and what the limitations are. But certainly allowing myself to be open minded and explore what an organization can look like that is not bound by proximity, but rather by vision and values. I thought was an experiment worth making, but certainly not fitting with the way any other company I've seen being built in the past. I think I've seen companies talk about shipping and about output and about differentiating based on innovation. But I've honestly never seen anything like this. I think what you guys as a company and Gauss as a company have accomplished and done and the output and velocity with which you ship software is just remarkable. I think the big difference here than most other companies I've seen is also the opportunity for this company is just huge. It really is remarkable to me that for the most part the only risk in front of GitLab is execution risk. I don't worry about the size of the opportunity. I don't worry about the competitors given what we discussed about output and just the velocity with which you ship. The only thing I worry about is continue to scale the company, build systems and processes that are stable and just execute. If you guys can continue to execute the way you have, I don't think there's anything that can stop the company. And that's very different than anything I look at on a daily basis. So I'm sure a lot of other things are gonna come to mind that are very different but I'll leave it at those three. And that's smart because there's 17 more questions in the doc already. I'll read the first ones. You have time to open the doc at your lecture. That's from Victor who's not in the meeting. Do you have any examples of companies that have successfully transitioned from self-hosted offering to self-hosted offering plus SaaS offering? What lessons can we learn from that and apply to get both technical, operational, cultural and organizational? Very few have made the transition. The one that comes to mind that has done it spectacular, well, two come to mind that have done it spectacularly well. One is Adobe and the other one is Ultimate Software. Adobe obviously with their Creative Suite and Ultimate which is an HR software company selling basically all the back office HR systems to companies. I think both of those companies did that transition as a public company. And when you do that, you go through a really painful period where your revenue basically disappears and it gets built over again. And that's very tough to do. So my kids are saying bye, so I'm gonna tell them bye. So I think you guys have the luxury of not having to worry about that. Obviously we all care about revenue but not in the same way that not under the microscope of a public investor. To me, and this is a conversation Sid and I have had since I've joined, to me the way to make the transition is to make it cultural, which is how do you define the company? Is it a single tenant on-premise software company or is it a cloud company first that also distributes a single tenant application? And if you define the company as a cloud company first and I think Victor, your mic is open. That will align the whole company around building and scaling a first class citizen cloud service. I think that's how I think about it. It has to be how you guys think and define the product and the company, cloud company first that also allows customers to run the application in their own environment. I don't have anything more substantive than that. It's cultural. Cool, I have a question for Mike. Mike, are you on the call? Yes. You wanna? You wanna? Sure, I'll answer your question verbally. Yeah, sure. So what do you think are the biggest challenges or threats for GitLab to achieve our revenue projections for the next few years? The challenges are, I'm on the call, sweetie. Okay, sorry. The challenges in my mind are purely execution. I mean, certainly there's nothing that worries me around product. Certainly there's nothing that worries me around the market opportunity for the competitors. I think that the challenges I see are building the brand, building a way to consistently communicate with the developer community and with enterprise companies, articulating the value pop of using GitLab, getting momentum around the concept of concurrent DevOps and the benefits of standardizing on one platform for all of you developer past season tools. I think it's, and just executing on the sales side, I think there's no magic. There's nothing that stands in the way between you guys are gonna be a good company no matter what. You already are a good company no matter what. The question only is, can you become a great company? And that's largely in your hands. I think it's purely execution, reaching, communicating with customers, articulating the value pop, doing that at scale and making customers successful. And that's as simple as that. Clement, you wanna ask it? Yeah, I can read my next question. So my question is, what would you identify as the strengths and weaknesses of our current executive leadership team? You talked about how execution is important. So I think this ties in really well. And then also what is our board doing to help improve the leadership team and these weaknesses? Yeah, I mean, I think we have spent the last, and by we, I mean, said, I mean, the board, I mean, everybody on the management team has spent the last two years, certainly since I've been involved to continue to surround said with great executives. And I think we've made a ton of progress. We have an amazing leader now in the body. We have a great engineering leading, Eric. Who else have we hired just in the past? You know, I'm really sad and disappointed that Joe didn't quite scale to the needs of the company. But I think we've made a ton of progress. We have been hiring a chief revenue officer. Hopefully we're gonna have something to announce to the company very soon in the next few days. And so we continue to add, I think what we need to bring into the company is more people that have done it before, have seen this high per scale growth play out and can bring a level of execution excellence and maturity to help us scale. But, you know, I've been very active. I've been helping Sid with interviews and Sid has been focused on recruiting, you know, for the last year. We are constantly looking for, you know, great talent. We've done amazing things with the marketing organization, you know, even just below Joe. And we just need to continue to do the same thing for all functions. Thanks. I got the next two questions too. So my next question was about IPOing in 2020. So there's been recent talks in the company about how we're on track for that. And Sid mentioned that we're starting to get to a place where we'll have to decide whether that's something we still want to do in 2020. So I was trying to, wanted to see what your opinion is on that and like how you perceive the market, whether it's favorable and all that. I mean, the market is amazing right now. And we don't know what it's going to look like in 2020. But the company is absolutely on track. I think if we continue to execute, we absolutely could go public in 2020. The question is, do you want to do it in 2020? Or do you want to do it in 2021? And what are the pluses and minuses and the environment of that happening? But you absolutely could achieve that. I think the next 12 months are gonna define the trajectory of... One thing that we have in our business that is spectacular, that is just amazing is the leverage we get from the bottom-up adoption of our community-addition product and just the organic and natural viral almost growth of the product within organizations. What that allows us to do is have great visibility unless something changes in how that natural organic adoption occurs. That allows us to have great visibility to the future. And so if we can augment that organic bottom-up adoption with great inorganic execution on the sales and marketing side, we're off to the races. So I think that's the plan. I'm certainly extremely hopeful and optimistic that you can achieve. I think this is a special company and we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I'll be lucky, honestly, in my career as an investor if I associate myself with another company that looks like this. So I think, and that's true probably for every person that is working at GitLab today, most of us are lucky to be part of this once. Some people may be extremely lucky and be able to participate in similar experiences, but there are opportunities and we just need to take advantage of it. I think it's definitely possible. Yeah, your mic is open. Oh, sorry. Apollo, Billy? Yeah, that's it. I think that's all I have to say about the IPO. Oh, but one other thing I'll say about the IPO. The IPO is not a goal. That's not the point. We're not building this company with the goal of achieving an IPO and then everybody goes home and celebrates and we're done. IPO is a milestone, not any different than most other milestones. I think an IPO is only significant in that and it creates a more liquid monetary value for everybody's options and shares and ownership in the company. But I don't think Sid is building this company with a goal of just an IPO and then he goes to the beach and all of us do the same. I think this can be a great company and an IPO is just the beginning. I don't like sand in my shoes. And about that CRO, so that was in reference to not building the company to be on a beach, about the CRO he just signed so we can expect him from next week. So that's amazing news. I just wanted to share with everyone. Yay. Great. I'm excited. That's me too. I'm happy. Who had the next question? I think Brandon. I think so. And I think you already answered some of those, Philly. So thanks for that. But my question was about balancing, looking at what our competition is doing, which is obviously something we do and something customers talk to us about with our own vision and our own unique view of the world. I think you answered some of that, but I'd be interested in whatever other take you may have. You know, my view is look at the competition in the context of are there gaps in our product that are preventing us from winning deals? And that's the only time I would pay attention to the competition. To the extent the customer says, we went with Bitbuck, you know, GitHub because you guys lack something, pay attention to that. Otherwise, where you are going, forget them. Like, who cares where they're going? They can't keep up with you. So let them, you know, play catch, catch up with GitLab, not the other way around. We don't need to worry about what they're doing. You know, we have an extraordinary product team. We have a great leader and said, you know, define the future and let others copy you. We don't need to worry about GitHub or any of those companies. Taylor? Yeah, you kind of already answered this, but what convinced you to invest in GitLab and become a board member? I mean, I think I said a lot. I mean, big market, huge market. No real dominant player. Git is still, I don't know, early stages of adoption. Great neighborhood. You look at the competitors in the space. You have a great company in Atlassian doing very well. They will continue to do well, but for any customer that cares about product, you know, we're gonna win. You're never gonna hear a customer that says, oh, I love the Atlassian suite. That's not to say they're not gonna continue to be very successful. That's simply saying that there's plenty of opportunity for somebody with a better product and a better vision to build a big company. And I would say the other large competitor in GitHub, very challenged, not executing very well in many ways, creating a lot of opportunity for GitLab to come from underneath them and disrupt them in a major way. So I saw the execution of the company to date, the efficiency with which they have marched and achieved so much in such little time, the velocity with which you ship, and you put it all together and you say, man, there's a lot to like here. There's a lot of magic here that I think it's a bad worth making. So that's how I thought about it at the time. Thanks for that, Billy. I'm speeding up because we've got lots of questions left. Joe, do you wanna talk to your question? Sure, sure. So you mentioned this briefly at the very beginning. What were your initial concerns about investing in a remote-only company? Do you still have those concerns? Have you found any new ones? And then what are you reading right now? What book are you reading? No, good question. So the concerns, I definitely had a concern. You know, I used to run corporate development at different enterprise software companies and I can tell you acquires of companies ascribe a lot of the value to having people or everybody in the same place. And definitely a lot of worry and hesitation around a distributed workforce. So one of my worries is for the most part, this is an exaggeration, but for the most part, the only way out is an idea. Now, I don't really believe that. I think there are plenty of companies that would love to own GitLab. But for the most part, I still believe that if you wait and count for that, you may be disappointed. And what that means is, said and everybody around here has to be very clear that the way to build this company, the way to think about liquidity one day is to build public companies. The luxury of that or the clarity that reality provides, I think is quite refreshing, which is nobody at GitLab should hope that tomorrow somebody gets excited about GitLab and buys you. That's not what we're doing here. We're building a great company. We're gonna take this company public one day and if you're not willing to, this is not something that is gonna be built to be flipped and acquired next year and sold. And that's quite refreshing because you know you're playing the long game and you're investing between in the long term. So that's how I thought. I wanted to make sure that there's no religion around remote. The reality is we still don't know the limitations of remote. We're gonna figure it out as we scale. We may need to make some adjustments. I don't know what they are. I don't wanna presume what they are but we always need to keep an open mind that we can do things better. And if we end up hitting some limitations or just we'll see what we need to do but keep an open mind. And then what are you reading right now? Oh, what am I reading right now? I have two kids and dog. And so between trying to do email between after the kids go to bed and midnight, no books at the moment. No good. Next question from Mark. Sure. Sales numbers have been pretty volatile. With some months and maybe even quarters missing our numbers. But then other months blowing it out of the water. Last month was a good example. How do you think about that? And are you concerned? I'm not concerned. I think it is completely normal and natural for this to be happening. I think as the numbers get bigger, that should, a big deal here and there shouldn't have a huge impact or shouldn't make us miss the quarter, I should say. And I think Ashley said that at a board meeting yesterday, his mindset is that any big deal that happens within a quarter should only be upside. We shouldn't be relying on one big deal to make the quarter. We should be relying. A big deal should like blow the quarter out of the water. So I think that's a management issue. I think it's a scale issue. I think we need to get better at it. I'm not particularly worried about it. I think other than the most painful quarter we had, if memory serves me right, was Q1 of last year. We had a pretty disappointing start of the year. This year we are doing way better than planned or better than planned. So I think when you're down, don't be too down, pick yourself up, that's normal. When you have a quarter like you have, we just did, don't get too excited. Just block and tackle, just keep shipping, keep executing and that's the best you can do. We have time for one last question. I'm putting Cortland on because he hasn't asked the question yet and it's very relevant to Billy. Cortland, can you ask the box question? Yeah, Billy, I was wondering what you learned about sales efficiency during your time at Box and how you would apply those learnings to GitLab. Yeah, I mean, Box and Salesforce are very different. I think the one thing I've learned is being closer to revenue is a lot easier to monetize than something that when you can delay a purchasing decision by one to five quarters and you cannot create an urgency in the sales process, you end up in a lot of pain and misery and unfortunately that's what Box was. Box was, a customer delaying the purchase of Box by a quarter or five had no impact on the business for the most part. In the case of Salesforce, the delay of the purchase and deployment of your CRM by a quarter or two was very painful. And so when you have a direct sales motion being close to revenue makes a huge difference in the efficiency with which you can monetize. Now, the lesson here is that's one lesson but the other one is if you cannot create a sense of urgency, then you cannot afford to be 100% direct sales model. You need some bottom up organic adoption of the product which is much closer to the draw box model. They still have direct sales. They do plenty of direct sales. They need to talk to our highest customers but they have the luxury of the bottom up adoption and that's much more efficient. So I think, I don't know to what extent we can create a sense of urgency in the minds of our customers. I think that's TBD. I think the clarity with which we tell the story around concurrent DevOps and the urgency we can create around it is going to determine the efficiency with which we can sell but even if we can't make it lab we must have a tomorrow purchase. We need to rely on the organic and bottom up adoption of the product to make this efficient and scalable company. Thanks for that, Willi. We're out of time. Thanks everyone so much for the questions and judging by the questions and the great answers from Willi, this was a great success. So if he's up for it, we'll probably have him back. Totally. I'm happy to do it again sooner if people want to chat about all kinds of things. Thank you. Thanks for taking the time. Great job, everybody.