 All right, guys, it's your last chance to bail. Is this where you intend to be? This is the talk you want to be at? OK, everybody, thanks for being here today. My name is Jillian Huff-Nagle. It is an honor and a privilege to be here, both in person with you all safely in this room and saying hello to all of our friends that are virtual, as well as our friends that might be watching this on replay maybe later on. This is my first open source summit. I like to describe myself as a human who really loves working in startups. I'm currently on my ninth startup, and I'm having a wonderful time. All right, back on track. So I identify as a human who really loves working in startups. I'm currently on my ninth startup, and I'm having a wonderful time. I'm a five-foot-tall woman with brown hair, and I'm currently wearing a black blazer. In the past 20 years, I've worked in technology, and I've observed some of the best company cultures and some of the not-so-awesome company cultures and everything that fits in between on that spectrum. And one of the things that I'm really excited about talking to you today is, what do we do when we have a popular open source project, and we want to build a healthy company off of the value that that brings? And because open source is now extending our reach, you might be an open source creator, and you're asking yourself, could this be a company? And like, how? How could I make this a company? And so at Slim AI, my current company, we are built off of a really popular GitHub project called Docker Slim. And we've learned some pretty cool stuff in our first year as a company. So today I'm going to talk about some of our experiences as a team, and then I'm also going to talk to you about some of these core strategies. Let's see if our slides work. Excellent. Let's talk about core cultural strategies for how you focus on taking what's awesome about your open source, being consistent with the value that you bring in your open source, and then building a company off of that that really honors and reflects what your open source brings to the world. So there's a few ways that you need to do that. The first one is, you want to go meet your diverse users where they're at. What does that mean? We like to say, go to their party, right? The second is, you want to hire a team that resembles your diverse users, also known as hire your community. You want to be authentic by focusing explicitly on the problem that you seek to solve. And most important, you want to weave empathy into every interaction. When you can weave that empathy into every interaction, you create safety. And you drive collaboration and contribution. So I want to take a minute and pause there, because this is a really important topic right now. We've had so many tracks on diversity, equity, and inclusion. We've heard from some of the top community managers about how do you drive that empathy? We heard this morning from Sarah about how do you drive that empathy when you're working with folks in open source projects? And how do you extend that into your own businesses? So let's pause and just reflect on how important that is. Cool. So let's start. You want to meet your diverse community where they're at. So when you can meet them where they're at, you're going to drive really, really deep connection and deeper value. A few ways that I've seen this done extremely well is when you commit to an operating rhythm where you as the open source founder and your team are entrenched in the community. You're listening to your users all the time. You're understanding what are they doing with your open source that's bringing them value. You're seeking to understand what are the problems that they're solving today and what are the problems that they need to solve in the future. When you can listen to what those problems are and you have that deeper understanding of what they want to do, you're going to create shared collaboration. You're going to create shared ideation. And then you're going to bring more value back into your community. Talking to your community should be inclusive. A lot of people use inclusive as like a buzzword because, hey, we're really focusing on DE and I. I'm going to give you a very tangible example of how you can choose inclusivity and how you communicate with your community as well as your internal teams. Pick collaboration tools that are inclusive. Pick tools that allow you to communicate with people of different communication styles in various time zones and various aptitudes for how they want to communicate. Not everybody wants to talk live and that's OK. When you can build this inclusivity into the tools that you use, it creates a foundation for empathy. And we'll talk a lot more about that a little bit later in the talk. You need to be able to respect all communication styles, all varying degrees of experience, and all interest levels and aptitudes to contribute. At Slim, we like to chat with our community a lot on Twitch livestream. So for folks who want to engage in something that's happening in the moment, and they really enjoy that, we find that that's cool for some of our folks, right? We also like to use tools like Discord and Slack. Those allow us to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously. So we've already got team members across 15 time zones, and we're a tiny little startup, right? We need to be able to create tools that allow folks to feel connected and engaged, and not like they're missing the context. We don't want people to feel like we're intentionally hiding things. We want to be transparent. We want to be open, right? We've also found that some people don't like to engage live, whether it's typing or in a livestream. Some folks want to read. They want to digest. And so we'll produce content on blogs. We'll also go hang out at other people's parties, right? We partner with folks who are also solving cool problems for developers, and we go on their livestream, right? Or we promote their content because their value's aligned. They're excited about solving problems for developers just like we are. We want to be inclusive, not exclusive. We want to have a holistic community approach to how we drive value, which then creates more safety and more collaboration. So now that we know how to meet our community where they're at, if you're an open source founder, how do you grow a stellar team? Like, where do you even start, right? So let's make sure our slides go there. So you want to think about how do you build a team that looks and behaves like your diverse users? Like, what are the things that are awesome about your community? And because open source projects, as we said, are like a model for distributed communication and collaboration, and most cloud and hybrid cloud companies are going fully remote. The pandemic has taught us that. It works, right? You want to think about your talent strategy to go global, and you also want to think about your talent strategy to augment your gaps as a leader. You're going to need money to hire those people, right? All right, so if you start with thinking about where your investment comes and you only consider funding from investors that are supportive and passionate about growing both your open source and your company, you're going to be really successful, right? There's plenty of funding out there. You have to take the time to really analyze whether or not these investors believe in open source. When you choose to take a check, you're signing essentially a contract to be in a relationship with those people. You want to make sure that they're going to represent your values and your principles and support growing your open source and your company at the same time. So I'll give you a little bit of just a credential, right? Because you want to know that I actually know what I'm talking about. So nine startups, 20 years. I've supported just under 100 executives. And being an executive doesn't make you a leader. It doesn't. It's a title, right? So when you think about being an open source creator and you want to go from being a creator to being a leader, what are the things that you need to think about? Some of the most beautiful leaders that I've ever worked with have asked themselves this question not only at the time that they decided to be a leader, but continuously on their growth journey. Am I ready to challenge myself to upskill? Am I ready to step into a zone where I'm going to challenge myself to be a different type of person because leadership requires continuous development, right? You're not going to be a good developer if you're not continuously sharpening your toolbox. If you're not learning new code, you can't be a good leader if you're not doing the same. So here are some questions you want to ask yourself when you're considering becoming a leader. What are the things I don't like doing? Who can I hire to do the things I don't like, right? Don't distract yourself with the things that you can hire competency around you for. Don't waste time trying to micromanage things that are not your passion zone, right? There's plenty of folks out there that can fill your gaps. So how do you identify your gaps? Ask yourself, what am I not good at? And if I'm not good at it, does it make sense for me to try and upskill in that area? Or does it make sense for me to bring someone onto my team that I can delegate and dissipate some of those other activities and works to? You need to ask yourself, what are some of the experiences that you don't have? And then pull in that core team around you. So I said earlier that you should hire a team that resembles your diverse users, aka, hire your community, right? This is actually a pretty simple one. You're already hanging out with them. You're already entrenched in the community. You're already listening to them. You're already talking to them. You're already observing what they're doing and their contributions. Pay close attention to the people that are helping solve problems for their peers. They're going to be principle aligned for you, right? Because they really care about working in collaboration with other people. Look for people who are contributing in a way that is aligned to how you want your business to work. As I was preparing for this talk, one of my peers at Slim said to me, pull requests are job applications, right? It's so true. We don't have to go far to look for the technical competency in open source. It's right there in front of us. So when we think about using code and contribution as our initial talent assessment criteria, we can throw out old bloated process. We don't have to have a massive talent acquisition team with a huge ATS running thousands of job applicants at the same time. We've got competent, capable, values aligned people right in front of us. So once you can map, all right, technical skills are there. Desire is there, right? Then what you do is you get to start to talk to those folks about what's important to them, right? Understand the cultural fit. At Slim, this is where I get to come in, right? I get to talk to applicants about, like, how do we really live our values? So what does it mean to have a value of wellness and balance? How does that actually show up in our workplace? How do our employees embody that? How do they celebrate that? And then I get to geek out on other things, like, you know, benefits and policy and procedure and all of the, you know, all of the HRE stuff, right? But that's my specialty. And our team knows that's important to have people that have that competency to fill that gap. So there's a whole lot more on, like, once you get someone in the door, how do you do really good onboarding in an asynchronous organization? And I think if anybody's interested in that, Martin and I would love to do a livestream. So just let us know. We'll hit it up on Twitch. So next, I want you to think about talent geography differently. I mentioned earlier you want to be able to pull from a global talent pool. One of the ways that you can avoid limiting your reach is partner with an employer of record. An employer of record is an organization that allows you to hire anywhere in the world and avoid all of the bloated systems of setting up subsidiaries in various countries, which sometimes can take six weeks to three to five months. Right? Your talent's gone. It got a job somewhere else. It's not waiting for you. So when you use an employer of record, at Slim, we use a company called DEAL, D-E-E-L. They allow us to hire in over 150 countries, which is pretty much anywhere in the world. So this puts us in a situation where, like, maybe someone is using Docker Slim. And they're like, oh, that's cool. I like this project, right? And then they're like, oh, let me check out Slim's GitHub and they see our open source engineering principles. They're like, I'm aligned with that. That looks and feels like me. And then they see that we've open sourced the list of our jobs. And then they send us a note and they say, this is what cloud native means to me. I don't want your resume. I can see your code, right? And then we engage in a conversation with those folks at a human level. This is a slam dunk for us. You're already contributing to our community or a SaaS. Your principle and values align because you've self-selected in. At this point, we have no idea where in the world you live. And that's okay. Because if we're aligned, we can hire in up to 150 plus countries. So now that you're thinking about, okay, I'm gonna meet my community where they're at, I'm gonna augment my gaps as a leader. I'm gonna hire folks from my community. Let's talk about how do you remain authentic to that mission of your open source. So good news. Being authentic with your community by focusing explicitly on the problem that you solve, right? Focusing on who you're solving the problem for and what problem you're solving. That's your North Star. It's so easy to get back to that, right? If you're questioning whether or not you're going in the right direction and you know you're still solving that problem for the right people, you're on the right track. You began your open source project to help solve a problem. Building a company doesn't change that. Remember, you've got funding from investors who love open source, right? Check. So when you think about like, how do you as a founder, stay hyper-focused on that problem that you're solving? So this is where your leadership comes in. It's super easy in a small startup to get really distracted with, oh, this is a cool idea. And I'm gonna go do this. And this was a feature request from this person who we really love, right? But you don't have enough folks on your team to prosecute all those ideas. So as a founder, you're pushing yourself into a zone where you have to kind of draw the line and say, all right, we gotta stay hyper-focused on mission critical. When we can stay hyper-focused on mission critical, we're driving trust back into our community because we're delivering on the value that we say we deliver on. And when people trust us, they engage with us better, right? So don't get distracted. And what's cool about it is because you're already entrenched in your community and you're engaging deeper and deeper in your understanding better and better, you and your internal team have a very clear picture of what's the next incremental value you're gonna drive. Your users are basically helping you build your product roadmap for you. And the second you stop listening to them, they're gone. So don't lose them. The other thing that's really important, and I know in engineering, it's good practice, it's best practice to write things down. We wanna codify things. We also need to codify our mission. We need to codify our principles. We need to write down our code of conduct. By creating these artifacts and creating best practices of saying, hey, check this out. This is how we seek to show up in the world. We're not always gonna get it right, but this is always what we're gonna strive for. So now let's talk a little bit about maybe that elusive piece of empathy, because you can't just write it down. You gotta live it. You gotta operationalize it, right? So we're gonna go to the next slide. All right. I've worked in a ton of fast-paced startups where we are growing at insane pace of execution and hiring hundreds if not more of people a month. I have heard time and time and time again in my career from leaders, from investors, from board members, go faster. As a leader, you have to ask yourself, is fast good? Is it? Sometimes it might be. So when you tap into these diverse experiences and perspectives and the creativity of your open source and the people in your organization, you weave that empathy into the experience to drive the collaboration. You have to start with yourself. You have to set aside your ego. You're already questioning whether or not you have the skills and competencies to be a good leader, right? You have to respect and appreciate that there are teammates and community members that are maybe new to open source. Or maybe a developer who is like transitioning from hardware to software. They're just trying to learn a new way to work. If you as the leader of the open source and the leader of the company are showing up with empathy and creating safety for those people to contribute, then you're telling everyone else on the team that they can do the same. So many open source creators reject kind of traditional corporate America. There's a lot of things in big business that I personally reject. And that's okay. That goes back to your mission and your values and your principles. But as an open source creator, you cannot expect to grow a healthy company if you don't lead with empathy. If you're not regularly setting aside your own ego and you're modeling the behaviors. So just like your community, you need to work with your team. You need to work with your staff. Ask them, are you thriving? Are there things preventing you from being successful? Am I in your way? Am I your source of friction? Am I preventing you from doing something because I am too involved? That empathy also needs to extend into your community. When you have a member of your community that's showing up counter to your code of conduct, pull them aside. Say you are not operating in a way that's aligned with our community. What can I do to help you? Not your bad, not your wrong. There's the door. What can I do to help you? I need to understand. And if you give them that opportunity and they still can't step forward, you say with kindness, we're not gonna have you contribute to our community at this time and we're gonna be here when you're ready to come back. So the more you do this, you expand that empathy through your community, through your employees, through your investor ecosystem. And when you put good stuff out, you get good stuff back. It feeds this virtuous cycle. You get more aligned candidates. You get more aligned investment. And so I was hoping today to really kind of give you these tangible ways that you could weave these things into your organization if you're thinking about I have open source and I wanna make a company. I think we have a couple minutes left for questions. If anybody has thoughts, questions. In their team. Yeah, so when you're thinking about growth in the team, are you talking about kind of just the expansion of the talent pool? Are you talking about the growth and development of the individuals? Yeah, so one of the things I like to ask people is, is there a particular language that you're curious about learning? Is there a particular language maybe that you feel like you're not sharp on? Like I really suggest you partner directly with the individual because when you engage in that way, like you don't wanna try and put some massive, heavy program, like manager training for all. That's like the fastest way to get people to run out the door, right? Training should be focused on their individual competencies. One of the things that we do at Slim is I offer open office hours to everyone on the team. And so a team member may come to me and say, hey, I recently determined that I wanted to improve my public speaking. Or I recently learned something about a new leadership approach and I wanna try and deploy this strategy. What are some of the things you recommend for me? So I think it's important to do it at the individual level. At scale, that gets harder, right? And so if you model the behavior when you're young, guess what happens? The folks that are growing in the business with you model the same behavior as more folks come in. And so it becomes like this positive infection rather than a heavy process. Was that helpful? Yeah, cohesion and bridging and how there are these two things that you have to do but they're always kind of at odds. Because cohesion is bringing your community together and then bridging is making it not just homogenous with little instinctive groups. How do you, in open source community, but the business kind of historically really been an issue? And especially when it's in a corporate context here, what are some things that have worked for you to get people to the bridging stage and pull them along and have them see that this is good and this is how and this is beneficial? So you're talking, I think, a little bit about how do you convince someone that something is good for them, right? And if you have folks in your organization that don't already think that the way you work is good for them, you might not have necessarily made a good hire initially. And so you do really need to ask yourself, did we do the due diligence to make sure that this person can thrive in the environment that we have today? All right, if they can't thrive in the environment that we have today, what's our duty and our responsibility to create more opportunity for them to step forward into what good looks like? Sometimes that means they don't step forward and they go find an adventure somewhere else, right? And so bridging, if you do it right, you create a desire for that person to come across rather than make them feel like they don't fit. And guess what? We don't always fit. There's lots of other places we can go work where we might fit. So I would really think about how do you align and then also appropriately separate? I think we're done. Thank you so much for coming. I'm available for more questions.