 Welcome to the GitLab AMA and I just merged something that will set our experience factors from .9 to 1.1. So tightening that range, I put a link in the chat. It was kind of illogical that you could get promoted and your compensation could go down. We had a spread of 40% due to the experience factor, which doesn't make total sense because the spread between two titles was 20%. So we now brought that in line and we also have better data for a lot of functions. So we increased the benchmark for engineering manager, but we also recently increased the benchmark for engineer or developer. So that will all come into play next year and nobody will go down in salary, but people will go up in salary as that is needed. But I'm open to questions about anything. Can you tell us about your wedding? Wow, sorry. Thanks for that. So my wedding was initiated when Karen said, my now wife, I don't want to lie to the customs officer again. Now, this might be put on the internet, so I better be careful what I say about the US immigration system. But anyway, it turned out that she could only get a dependent visa if we were married and see at some point had seen all the touristic highlights in San Francisco. So I said, okay, well, we know what that means. So we went back and I thought we had to get married in Vegas because our flight was leaving in a week. But it turns out in San Francisco, there's a long waiting list for a lot of things, but not forgetting married. So we got married under the dome in San Francisco exactly a week later, two hours before our flight back home. But she also told me during our life that if we ever get married, you better ask me. So I had to do some planning. So I told her there will be a package arriving from blue now, but please don't open it. Because I was a way to white combinator camp, something I've been looking forward to for the weekend. So on Monday, I had the first Uber black ride of my life. We went to Golden Gate Park and we walked to the conservatory of flowers. And then we walked along a tree. And then we walked along the tree again. And then we walked along the tree again, as he was like, what's happening? And I'm like, patience, patience. And then there was some guitar playing coming from the tree. And I kneeled down in a plaid of I forgot what it's called. And that's interesting. The hint is it's the same as the icon of ICQ for people that go that far back. ICQ is like the AOL messenger of Europe. That's how we met. And I kneeled down in a bed of those. And I didn't say, oh, which is the ICQ sound, but I did have some written words and she said yes. And then we walked away and I said, I have to make a phone call and the phone started ringing in the tree. Turns out I hired like a guitarist and a paparazzi photographer who were going to lay out like a bed and a bottle of champagne and like a picnic blanket and stuff like that. And I was the first one ever to arrive on time so they weren't ready yet. So we had a glass of champagne and then they said, well, guess what? This wasn't my ideal location anyway. So let's you guys make it up to us. We all got in an Uber and we went to a proper venue which was Baker Beach. Baker Beach has a view of the Golden Gate and it was where Burning Man originated. And at that time we went to Burning Man three years straight. So it was something we liked and I thought that was a great location. So we went to Baker Beach. Let's see if I can find the picture. Yeah, here it is. And you can find the URL. It's site.com slash engage.jpg. And we shot this picture which I thought was pretty cool. As people might notice, that's a yes, that is a GitLab shirt on the left. And it was very beautiful. And we might have told most people in the Netherlands that that was where we got engaged. Of course, we also were looking forward to a big party. And that was in the Netherlands. And Karen used to be an event organizer. And she had the perfect spot. It's a church at the Jansk Gijkhoff in Utrecht, our favorite city where we live. And it was beautiful. And because it was a free venue, so we could do our own food. So we got a bunch of home chefs and a bunch of food trucks. And food trucks are still hip and happening at the Netherlands at that time. Like it was very new. We invited everyone. You have a thing in the Netherlands where your wedding guests come only for like the ceremony. And then they have to eat on their own. And then they come back in the evening and all kinds of weird things to save money. We didn't do any of that. Everyone stayed. We had a party. And it was great. We had a wedding dance. Our wedding dance was actually pretty, pretty great. I'm not sure if I shared it yet. Let's see. Here it is. Not sure you will be able to see my, I'm pretty sure you can't even see the audio. I'll put this, I'll put this somewhere so people can see it. What music were you dancing to? It was Beyoncé with Halo. I can also recite it word for word. And then I'm especially proud of the after party. Like we had flyers for our after party went to a different venue. And like, we reminisced a bit last week. So my uncle reminisced that he was, he dismantled a drum kit that was there. And he was parading around in the after party venue, banging drum sideways, and just wreaking havoc in general. It was pretty epic. Toby asked, have you been practicing together? Yes, I have no talent for dancing. I'll say it. Neither does Karen. So we practiced for seven years, we did Zouk dancing. And to get this, this routine right, like we hired our dancing instructor and we took a few private lessons to get there. Yeah, Zouk, it's really, it's the lowest effort, highest spectacular dance thing. Well, Lindy hop is up there. But it's really great. I think that was a pretty extensive answer. William, when you started, William, do you want to verbalize it? Yeah, so as you've been functioning as interim CMO, I know when you first started, you mentioned wanting to learn or you were looking forward to learning in the role. And so I was just curious, what's something or some of the things that you've learned about marketing, since being more focused on that role? It's a good one. Let's see. Things I learned in the role. I think like I already knew, but I'm still happy with like the power of data. I just got a request for an approval of an expense. And I was like, okay, we did this before. What was the result in incremental ACV last time? And like, Oh, forgot to look at that. Let me look at that. Oh, it wasn't too good. Oh, let us go back. So I think there's so much in marketing where things feel good, but aren't good or things that feel kind of off, but they have great results. So I think making it more data driven, making sure we get an attribution right. I think even though I knew it was important, I'm still surprised by the power of it. It's not totally as an interim CMO, but I just went on a tour of all kinds of financial institutions talk to about 15 to 20 of them. And I was amazed that all the things they need, we already have, it's just that they aren't even aware that we have them. So I think marketing is the most high leverage thing we can do right now. Just making sure people know what GitLab actually does. It's like we went into a big financial institution, 30,000 developers. They just took to a meeting as a courtesy with like three people who were just working on their laptops. And then we started talking about GitLab and like the people closed their laptops, they started leading in. At the end of the hour long meeting, they were actually pulling my back for not wanting us to leave, because they wanted to hear more. Like so if we can get them to just figure out that what they're now doing with their 10 to 60 people that working on DevOps tools is not it's undifferentiated heavy lifting. They should be co creating that with the other 100,000 organizations in the world and the other 2000 people actually contributing to GitLab. And they can focus on the stuff that's unique to them instead of just doing the stuff that everyone else already did better. And then not not just take like save on the effort, but also get a lot more knowledge in there because of the best practices that are encoded in GitLab. That's just a game changer for them. Every single one left the meeting like with like, wow, we're going to we're going to do that. Can I just follow up question after that comments said sure. Have you have we considered running sort of customer events where we invite sort of large customers along to summits which are for them? Yeah. Great, great, great stuff. Yeah, the summit right now it's a place to get to know your team members better. It's going to be a place to get to know people in the GitLab community better. We invited a couple of customers this time. We don't have a very special program. We're very worried about the distraction that comes with customers distraction from meeting your team members. Because like customers, of course, when they're there and they need our attention, we're going to try to make it work. You might have an a summit that's like first the executives meet and the team members fly in and some people from the community and then more customers kind of starting from an executive offside and ending at like a dreamforce kind of event. That's that's that's the direction we have in mind right now. And of course, like our customers shouldn't feel like only customers they should feel like members of our community as well. So yeah, that's where we're going. Thank you. So I'm going to catch up to the cat. Clemente asked what worries you the most about GitLab right now. I'm not so worried right now. So the biggest problems have been for a while. GitLab.com availability and number of leads. This cloud basically, I think both were I've seen the actions being taken to address them. So I'm very happy with those. We hired almost a complete SRE team and like a month and a half or something. So that's really good. In marketing, I see more data coming in. So we'll be able to put our efforts towards things that that actually pay off. And I think when we start doing that, we'll fix we'll fix this cloud problem as well. And it was just great like visiting customers. We had two customers actually put on the agenda, whether they could could could get licenses for ultimate to try it out. So we got a lot of pool in the market for what we're doing, where we're going in the right direction. So I'm I'm not very worried, which is weird for me because Clemente knows I'm mostly worried about something. Lyle asked, there used to be some sort of remote cat camera thing where GitLab could play with the cat. What happened to that? Suri, you get a you get to ask Karen, my wife in the Valley Channel, whether she can turn that on. Ask nicely. It's we bought that with our own money. I think it's disengaged right now. But I think Karen cares a lot about the cat and it cares a lot about playing with the laser pointer that comes out of that remote control thing. So I think you can make that make that work. If you want to chase the cat, you can also use the beamy who's still available and you can drive around. Toby asked, how did you find DevOps Enterprise days DevOps Enterprise Summit? I guess it's called London. I found it really great. If you know me, you know, I like efficiency. What we did is not like sit through all the talks, we just have meetings with all the great people that were there were lots of great people there learned a lot, including and I'm very excited about it. Our tears, our pricing for tears. And let me let me show you, we've always struggled a bit because it's not like, Hey, if you're just starting with DevOps, you should just not pay us and get core. No, you actually need one of the higher tiers. And I think we've the DevOps maturity, I don't think is a great one. I think it's knowing who the champion is. And I think like what it then does. So our tears are going to be focused around who are we selling to. And I think that's great. And I think we're going to get rid of the maturity because even companies just starting on their journey can benefit from ultimate just as much. Clemente, I see if we see a GitLab conference. Yes. So right now the plan is to turn the summit into that conference. I've a lot of other companies, including I talked to a lot of companies and a lot of companies say a summit is a great distraction. So we want to have that no more than once every nine months. If we do another thing, it's just going to be as big of a distraction. And I don't want this that the risk that we have is company being a leading and being a steward of an open source project is becoming internally focused. I think right now, you think of the people that you work with as your team members should be that it should be the rest of the community. Our users are customers and contributors. So I want that I want that mindset to to to change in the company. So that's that's why I don't want to have a separate event for just team members. It shouldn't be the in crowd versus the out crowd. It should be keep people that care about GitLab coming together. Bob says I love that we have the core team there as well. Yes. And they love it too. But they also complain that they kind of feel like the fifth wheel in the wagon. So that's what we need to change. And that that changes if we invite more of them, if there's more events catering to them, etc. Siri keeps going favorite ice cream flavor. I think it's pistachio. Yeah, pretty sure. And then maybe some banana, even though pistachio and banana is a weird combination. I still order it. I also drink a Solent. So I link lots of chocolate flavored Solent, which is pretty great. Keep going Siri. And then ask this that mean the summit once a customer open event will be in less exotic places. That's a big question. I think it should be in exotic places because if we're going to take the time to travel, we should end up somewhere nice. So I'm going to try to get the customer does the summit in that place. And otherwise it will be in a place like San Francisco. And that's just as expensive and a way a lot less fun. I'm not sure we can get there, but that's that's what I'm hoping to do. Sorry, what's your spirit animal? I'm a Leo. So I like, I like, I guess it's a lion sold and strong. Don't know about that one. Thanks for that. Please know Vegas. Yeah, Josh, I agree that that doesn't seem to represent what we stand for very well. Also people that have their service in Vegas, they have an HR update every single morning, not looking forward to those. Everyone on ask, what are your thoughts on all the recent funding in our space? Can someone articulate? Do we mean GitHub being bought or investments in in cloud bees and things like that? Yeah, cloud bees, everyone else. Yep. Look, every company is becoming a software company. And and there's too few developers. So you got to enhance them with great tools. So if you're a great tool, there's there's funding available. And it's great. We were in the right place at the right time. We're the only single application for the whole lifecycle. We can make companies three times faster. It's a great place to be Alaska or Canada. I don't know. Emily about the master rename. Yeah, that rename. Maybe I said that there were no plans at the time. I hope that at the time there were really no plans. So that probably changed. That's fine. So I to clarify, I meant that role renamed changed or happened, but the branch like that the main branch is still called master. Oh, yeah. Thought process between not just doing both to, you know, more friendly names. Yeah, two things. I think calling it the master branch is is kind of a default. Although in Git, you can have different default branches. Like this is what everyone does. So I think it will be more disruptive for our users. I also think it's different about talking about a role, like the connotation with master as a very negative thing is about someone having that role, a person having that role, instead of a branch, which is kind of an abstract concept, not really applicable 100 years ago. So I care about the role much more than about the branch. Thank you. John Nortrop also says please know Vegas, even though I think he went partying in phases at some point. So and even Robert, so good stuff. And I'm saying that we have enough options to avoid Vegas for a while. I think that's Kirsten. Alexis asks, what are you passionate about outside of GitLab? Oh, first, I got to I get to mention something kind of inside of GitLab, the Meltano Project. Jacob Schatz just showed me how he's he's making an open source alternative to Looker. That was super exciting to see. I also care about the kind of immigration over the migration opportunity. I think there's an article on the economists that there's a 78 trillion dollar opportunity if people can migrate to where they want. I think it's one of the there's two great unsolved problems in our times. And one is, well, tree, I think it's sickness. I think it's climate change. And I think it's migration and I have some ideas about migration. So that's that's the thing I'm passionate about. Clement asks, has Meltano's current direction at the expectations you envisaged for it at start? It greatly exceeded it. Clement, two very positive things. One is this Looker alternative. The other one is Thomas in the team advocating for using airflow and get set of GitLab CI. Right now, I still think we should try to enhance GitLab CI. But I love the I love to see that the team and Thomas and data team, but that we're aggressive about making progress and our advocating for progress. And we're not we're not going to be boxed in by what is there now. I really hope we can add more features to GitLab CI to make it better. But if needed, we'll just switch to something that works well. But I love people seeing people care and about the rate of progress. Also, I'm having an interview later today with a potential general manager for Montana, which is really exciting. So how's the CMO search coming along? It's coming along. It's not great right now. We had a very promising candidate, but the reference checking. We found out that that it wasn't the the fit we hoped for. So we're kind of other candidates. Most of them didn't work out. So we're so we're still in the early stages. 20 searches going on. We have a very high bar. So it's it's coming along. But but like we expected, it's going to take a while. Mark, as you consider a mentor as you progress in your career, you have these bosses, which you which you really try to learn from. Not sure I learned enough, but at Proxen Gamble, I had a boss who was so patient and so nice. It doesn't it's not me, but I was inspired by that and I aspire to to be like him from time to time. I think I just read a lot of books that like influence me greatly. I think the hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz is a good one. I think higher output management is a great one. They're on our leadership page under the book section. I think that white combinator was an amazing experience. So that was a lot of mentorship there, including just that being unreasonably ambitious, just putting putting goals out there, which are like there and then and then seeing that if you do that, you can achieve them. And I probably drive people in the company crazy from time to time like saying, hey, we should do that and we should do it in two weeks. And the thing is you it's it's surprising how much you can achieve if you just set very high goals. And I think we're proving many people like you about proving that every every single day and week. Joyce, are you ready to talk to analysts about Meltano? Wow. I think it's early for analysts. I think we should still talk to a lot of analysts about good lab like, but I'm not opposed to it. But I think it's too early. Like there's zero customers outside of GitLab right now. So we don't even have user stories. I think before you talk to analysts, at least you should have reference users. So maybe wait for that. I also ask how large do you see GitLab growing? So this year, we're growing from less than 200 to more than 400. Probably double again next year. I don't have seen it. I don't I've not seen any projections. But we're doubling incremental ACV. We're close to tripling every year revenue wise. That totally means you're doubling employee or team members wise. Have you thought about another iteration to the team call to encourage market labors to speak? Yes. And what I'd like to see is two or three calls a week with the same group of people. That's that's how we started. We got an 80 percent attendance rate back then. Right now we have like 30 percent attendance rate. I think having a stable group of people and being able to follow them over time throughout the quarter is a better experience. It allows you to to to have some continuity there. And I think that's essential for for getting something forming a connection. Joseph asked did you work most closely with Sam Altman? No, I hardly ever spoke to Sam. Our mentors were Kevin and Kassar. And I talked to Kassar the other day. He's now no longer with my combinator. He's working on something cool. And I realized that he's actually younger than me. But because he was our mentor, he in my mind, he was so much older and wiser than us. I know it's kind of funny, funny, funny to realize he's been great. Did Super Mario Bros. free have any influence on Ternuki? And a Ternuki with a tail? It didn't. But I like now that we we have it. I think I ate a super leaf is a great way to think about it. But that came afterwards. So yeah, so what's your favorite color? It's red. Kyla asked we recently released our education program. A GitLab classroom approach. I think we should do something like that. I'm not even sure what GitHub classroom exactly is. I think I looked at their page once. So I'll schedule a call with you Kyla to discuss that. Sounds great. Thanks. Thanks for bringing it up. And Agnes asked what's your leadership style? Ask my report and read the handbook. I think it's is direct, clear goal setting, iterative, like lots of our values come true in my leadership style. Cool. And Lyle also wants to do it. Lyle, can you set this up with at least the three of us and consider including Ray or Raymond, who recently joined as a committed marketing? The original Tanuki logo, we have we're out of time people. I'd love to answer more things. But thanks so much for joining. Have a great day. Bye.