 Oh Hello Good morning This is a big crew has anyone been through this meeting before first time here as well Just on YouTube Got it. That's good. So you got some sense of what's going on. Well, I think I watched the video got it for the introduction piece or for the 101 itself um I Goodness, I think it was for the one-on-one maybe Okay There's so many links There are many links Which one's mine? I My name is Matt Donovan. I am a legal intern and I actually have class at one So I can stay for the introductions and part of the CEO 101, but I think I might have to dip out early Yeah, I've got a hard stuff too, so I'm not sure how we'll play that See is this session owned by somebody or is it just an opportunity for us? I guess is everybody here new since the last sessions, okay So it's just an opportunity for each of us. I guess to introduce ourselves before sit joint of cool. Is that right? And it's it look like what I understood. Yeah self-organize Well, I think there should be someone from the people ops team, but I think I'm guessing that it's mostly I Think Chloe is supposed to hop on She was the organizer, so okay operating without assumption. I Saw her doing some things a few minutes ago. Oh in the sense of not sitting around. I'm gonna introduce myself real quick So I'm Walter Zavaleo. I started as director of business operations second lab. I want to say three weeks ago but The second week was in South Africa, so I'm actually super turned around for exactly how long I've worked here But it's been a good start so far A super popular question at the summit was like what is business operations even mean anyway? If you're sitting there asking that do yourself feel free to just ping me on slack Happy to chat a little bit about the role how I fit in and kind of what what I see is for needs Hi everyone, I'll just continue. So my name is Peter and I'm based in Budapest and I'm doing a sales inside sales So SDR role and I started on the 1st of August. So actually I've been around and also been to the summit and it was great. So I think I also have seen some of you at least faces I can recognize So I'm gonna be working in the German region mainly So Germany, Austria, Switzerland, but general EMEA inside sales for all cool And I actually just found directions for this meeting On on the invite part in the link So we're supposed to go in the order on the calendar invite and answer What do we do at GitLab why we joined and what we enjoy in our private life? As well as some things about the coffee breaks if you've seen us and you're on point So I'll start good. Good morning. Good afternoon everyone. Name is Mark Robinson. I'm the federal channel manager Yes, I'm dressed up for the meeting because I'm at a conference government conference today with my peers I'm learning the wonderful sales feel of the GitLab values and There is a tremendous demand in our space So very excited to engage our partners real quickly. What do I do like to do fun? Big foodie loved to drink wine Enjoy costume parties like we did in the South Africa Give us as well But very excited by this new culture of transparency and eager to engage with Sid There we go. I can go next. I'm Melissa Farber. I'm based in Austin, Texas. Currently. I'm in Philly for a few weeks prior to joining GitLab. I was In the healthcare space and then before that at a company called the knot the wedding industry I am on the security team and focused on compliance to help get us prepared for potential our IPO so internal controls Help support HIPAA JPR PCI the type of thing I like to bike ride mystery novels and I do enjoy red wine. So very excited to be here echo the thoughts of Gitlabbers that really look forward and embracing the transparency So and to working with all of you Okay, I can go next. I am Caroline. I'm based in Nairobi, Kenya I will be joining the support team I will be doing services support in email region So I'm one of the people that the customers will be encountering firsts when they they seek to interact with GitLab In my spare time if I'm not in the airport waiting to hop on the next plane I am reading or I'm swimming or I am just listening to music I am the kind of person who is disturbing the neighbors with very loud music Sorry neighbors Also, I'm really excited to be at GitLab from The entire the handbook the handbook is a fast. I will say that again and again It's it's got me very off-guard to have to prepare It felt like you're preparing for an interview with insider information, you know It's not like other companies that expect you to prepare for an interview and you know nothing about the company apart from what they put on their website So that was really a fast for me and very interesting So I'm excited to to work with you all and Yeah, this today is my first day actually so We are starting on a high note. So let's see how this go. Thank you All right, I think I'll take it from there. Thanks Karlin and welcome to GitLab All right, so I joined recently not as recently just before the summit so it's been a week and end of it for me My name is David Planella and I'll be joining or joined as the director of community relations So that means that my my team and I will be working hard to make sure that more and more contributors start making GitLab even more awesome and working across different areas of contributions meaning people contributing code people doing evangelism as in organizing meetups speaking about About GitLab and essentially making sure that our values and GitLab itself as a product is well known The one of the reasons I joined GitLab was essentially I come from a background where transparency was also key I used to work at Canonical the makers of Ubuntu for those of you are familiar with with open source I used to manage the community in there and for me it was it was essentially a great fit because not only I identify with these values of Openness and work in transparency with the community, but there's also something that I really enjoy and where I think I can I can try Other than that what I do outside of GitLab or for now not that to my computer I've been in the hop dancer for many years Link opposite ends well based on if you're familiar with swing with the next location of the summit as well It's a dance that was dancing from the 20s to the 40s in the US and in the 80s at the revival and All across the world is very to come very very popular other than that I do traditional woodworking as well Building things with with my hands. I do enjoy swimming as well and rock climbing Thanks, David. I take it from here. I'm Peter. I'm located in Bochum, Germany. I This is my second day at GitLab as a senior back-end engineer in the monitoring team I'm very excited and very glad to join GitLab in my previous company. We've used to GitLab for like five years and I liked the software and And After looking looking into the handbook. I was amazed how transparent GitLab is and I actually I said, okay Let's apply. Let's try it and here I am my spare time. I I play chess and ride bikes So thanks Thanks, Peter. I'll I'll volunteer to go next. My name is Rachel and I'm based in London. I'm going to be the engineering I'm going to be the engineering manager for the geo team I was really interested in joining the geo team specifically because I do have a special interest in disaster recovery Disaster recovery and preparedness and helping teams get through any events like that Yes, I was very interested to join I've also only joined yesterday, so it's early days for me When I'm not at my computer, I very much enjoy doing DIY around the house Or taking my dog for long walks down the canal, which is close to our level Hi, oh, my name is Josefine Otto. I'm based in Germany. I work to be foreign group on as a Engineering manager most focused on infrastructure databases Any reasons I joined at GitLab is for the values of the company and the challenge that we have in front here What I'd like to do in my spare time is like watch movies in this music I'll go next. Hi, my name is Seth I'm based in New York and I'm the engineering manager for the monitoring team before GitLab I was at New Relic and there I was the engineering manager for the APM UI team So it's a space that I'm I'm familiar with and I'm really hoping to help build out the team and and build out that that piece of the DevOps Life-cycle for for GitLab So I joined GitLab for a lot of the same reasons I've heard from for many of you I think the the transparency, you know from the beginning talking to the recruiter reading through the handbook that really struck me and then also I think the the excitement and the Of working for a company that does remote so so fully and and so well That's something I really wanted to Try out and to work on Let's see I We recently moved to New York from from Portland Oregon so on the other side of the country and So we've been spending a lot of time recently getting stuff set up here and exploring the city. I like to Like to watch soccer. I like to play volleyball And spend time with my kids That's all Thanks, Seth. I guess I'll jump in here if that works My name is Matt Donovan. I Am starting as the legal intern for you guys here at GitLab I'm a second-year student at the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia It's sort of a really interesting company if you think about it in terms of open source and remote work in terms of legal Difficulties, so it's a really I'm sort of an exciting field to get into You know, so I'm excited to work with Jamie Hopefully we can develop a better system where she gets some of the harder ball questions I get more softball legal questions But you know, I don't really have free time in law school But I used to and when that was that case I used to love skiing mountain biking and height in camping Okay, I go next. Hi. I'm Alexander. I live in Hamburg, Germany I Join GitLab. So I discovered GitLab because I was looking for Drops in the in the open source or free software space. And then I read Parts of the handbook and discovered this all in remote Only and so So basically everything about this job is the complete opposite of my previous workplace and I found that very interesting I'm I started yesterday as a security engineer for automation and Yeah, really really looking forward to to having the security team do their work without doing a lot of work and In Hamburg in my free time I Volunteer in various projects most of it in a local wireless mesh networking community I also have bought the small Japanese film festival. That's that's that happens every year in Hamburg and I regularly go to a board gaming group with several other software developers also from Hamburg Yeah Okay, then I go next I'm Dennis. I'm also studying the security team So I'm a senior security engineer for security research Before joining GitLab. I was working at Ripple the blockchain startup and before that I was doing a PhD at the University of Luxembourg and I was focusing on automated security testing Why GitLab first of all, it's it's a really interesting company for many of the reasons you already said like the values and the handbook transparency And also I think the opportunity is really great where I can bring in my experience Then I collected so far Yeah, I don't know that I'm living in Luxembourg native German and In my free time I like to climb and also to play board games Awesome. I can go next My name is Emily Leers. I am located in the Bay Area in California and I am I've been here for a week So my first day was was the first day of the summit. So This is kind of my first day of Normal work if you will But I will be I'm here with the field marketing team. So I'll be the third third person I'll be covering our Western region out here. I Come from MongoDB where I also covered The also managed job art and so super excited to be at GitLab. It's for me It's a great opportunity. I kind of was interested in the quote-unquote lifestyle that a remote company allows you to have I'm a competitive triathlete. So I love to swim love to bike I kind of run because I have to wouldn't say there's any love there But thoroughly enjoy it. I really enjoy meeting everybody from Who is able to make it to the summit and excited to get to know everybody else? Okay, I'll jump in here and so I'm Liam. I'm the new engineering manager for the managed team Manager think is one of the two new teams that spawned out of the platform team And it will allow us to have more of a focus on the administration and user settings that kind of thing around GitLab I think the product manager Jeremy has come up with a slogan that we're trying to turn GitLab Admins into superheroes. So no small tasks there. I guess and So I joined GitLab for many of the reasons that have been discussed already. It looks like a really exciting project to be part of and When I'm not working I'm a big sports fan. You usually watch in these days more than playing or being involved And I have two daughters a six month old and a two and a half year old And so actually most of my spare time is now taken up by sleeping And I guess to continue the theme from earlier. I'm also also like drinking wine probably more so now I have to do room and But yeah, that's that's me. I can jump in next Oh, sorry My name is Blair. I'm a support engineer for America's West. I started a couple weeks ago, but wasn't able to go to the summit. I Join GitLab kind of to echo what everyone else said the transparency to the culture as well as the product Are all just really exciting to be a part of I Live in steamboat Springs, Colorado, which is up in the mountains in Colorado. It's just here as I So I love to ski. I was a ski instructor. I love to do that We're just praying for snow now. It's starting to get cooler, which is awesome I also love doing triathlon. I am a volleyball coach. I And just like to play in the mountains. So yeah, all right. I think everyone else is gone I'll go next my name is Jeremy I'm a sales development rep with GitLab. I started probably the day of or the day before the summit So I didn't get to go out there and meet a lot of you guys, but definitely looking forward to the next one. I I've been a financial advisor for the last eight years and had my own brokerage and so Really had no free time whatsoever and so I'm really excited to kind of get back to some of the hobbies that I used to have I Like to fly a pair of motors. I love to cook I've been cooking since I was a little kid. My mom and I co-published a cookbook Actually was able to put, you know, a couple steaks in the sous vide right before we got on this call So I'm really excited to be working from home and the ability to work remote I have a daughter and she's on the speech and debate team and last year. She got to travel to DC And I mean I was stuck working so I'm really excited to be able to travel with her and you know be a big report of her life as well As far as the coffee calls, I have known my coffee calls But I mean everybody I've met so far at GitLab has been so friendly so nice so helpful And so if anybody wants to chat, you know, I'm more than happy to jump on a call with you as well So did everybody get a chance to go? Speak now, so I didn't do everything because I was not paying attention to the directions of course But again director visits operations as for the why of it So I came here from Puppet Labs and I got to go from employee 80 to about employee 700 there And so I was very interested in getting back to sort of those key scaling days And I think sort of where we are as a company right now. GitLab is a super exciting time to be And I also, you know, like everyone said some of the cultural things or you know, I think of them as operational things Around transparency and sort of distributed values to me represent operational challenges that I want to sort of see more of and engage more with And so for me sort of the challenge at GitLab is can we scale and how can we scale the way we want to and maintain that control that autonomy At the individual level that is such a big part of the reason why everybody right on this call was here. So That's kind of where I'm at for a private life. I live in Portland. So I do all sorts of weird Portland stuff And then I'm super into sort of synthesizers. So I'm hoping to quit smoking and Play with the synthesizers instead of that from my house here I haven't done any of my copychats. So I might show up on some of your calendars But I thought that the summit was a pretty good replacement for that And then I think I met at least five people Maybe six That's what I got Awesome in the spirit of continuous iteration. I just realized I forgot to mention where I'm based Um, so I'm based in cologne and in the north of germany Cs cst time zone. I'm actually not from a native german. I come from Plays near barcelona. I always say because that's the city west where That most people know but I've been living in germany for the last 10 years or so Cool and walter. I I wanted to to mention that I noticed the portland flag behind you about halfway through this call I noticed you left portland. Why would you do that? Uh, only only because my my wife is starting a doctoral program here in new york That's about the only excuse. There's not a school in oregon. I don't think Yeah, so if there's a second round, I'll go as well about I also forgot to mention my interests So I also loved viking. So I noticed quite a few of you Said that and emily. I see you have even one hanging Down from the ceiling Mine are parked outside. There is no room for them here, but This is We have three of them Sorry, you have three of them as well. Okay. Yeah, they kind of we put them in various places All right. And are there are they all like, you know, thin tire race kind of bikes or? They are so I have two road bikes and one tri bike. Um, so Yeah, I would love to get into mountain biking. I um My first triathlon I did on a mountain bike and couldn't understand why I was slower than everybody else And and then I got into a road bike and I understood that it was much easier to do it that way, but Yeah, it's the whole geometry and the and the tires and kind of tires and I actually also have a Not to bore you guys to just it's a mountain bike with a double suspension which I use on weekends I don't even have a lock for it because already three of my bikes got stolen in the last Four or five years So now I have a city bike which I use for everyday commute. I have two locks now Which is worth half of the bikes. They say that should be 10% But I I don't want to fool around and I have a third one which is an older one. So Uh, yeah, and I'm based in buddha, but if I didn't mention it, I'm not sure Maybe I can ask a question to Matthew. He said he's a student. What are you doing and where are you standing? Uh, yeah, thanks, uh, I am a law student So I'm studying a law in the university of richman in richman, virginia And my focus has been mostly on compliance But this year I'm taking on about two or three projects. I'm really excited about We're working on with the olympics to combat corruption when they go into host countries Which is a project I'm really excited about we're going to go to paris to see how they're going to combat that I'm working with the government in bouton. They just are implemented First law school and it's they have a mandatory anti-corruption program And then I'm working with the professor on the effects of private policing Which is basically what happens when security guards make arrests and if they're authorized to do so So I'm really excited to be here, you know, it's it's it's going to be a great opportunity to see how that plays into open source The olympics is going to be a no small feat No, it's not we've got we've got a pretty big team on it. Yeah So I'm excited about it though So corruption in the olympic is it's a it's a very rampant problem Yeah, it is absolutely, but um, you know, there's a for the first time ever the uh, the olympics have instituted anti-corruption measures for host countries Well, they're not those are going to have any actual enforceability is going to be the main question Interesting because we have one of the best olympic teams here in kenya. We always finish top five because of our runners And something funny is that the officials are pretty corrupt. You'll find them wearing jazzy's in uniforms that were meant to be for the Athletes it's quite funny. It's and it's a pity in kenya corruption comes in every department Anywhere think about it. We are we are stealing from there So to hear a concentration in one of that area really caught my attention. So thank you for sharing No, I'm really excited about it, but it's it's you know, it's a bit of a fool's errand to think that one last student's going to make a difference You might Well, I noticed you were from colorado. I'm born and raised in colorida springs Uh steamboats one of my favorite places, man. Oh, yes, it's like it's like Moose walk through our yard and we had a banner like it's just it's the coolest place, but I actually grew up in hueson, texas Um, but we always came up here. We're just the texas that came up here Ruined my snow for me. I get it But no, I love it out here like, um This is such a great town. So yeah, and there's actually another guy who works for gitlab out here matt dorfler. He's in sales Um, and so, yeah, which I thought was awesome. There's a lot in Denver, obviously, but um up in the mountains is sort of rare Sounds like a great mountain jog get some skiing in for sure, right? Oh, yeah. Well, I will I live like 10 minutes walk from the mountain So I'm definitely planning to get some like Session hit that hundred day mark sort of thing. Oh, yeah. How many how many days you got? Not that not not even close not even close Not even close. Yeah, no, but uh, no, I'm gonna do I'm gonna get an at this year. So that's what I'm gonna buy Solomon's coming out of a really nice finding that's a lot safer for at And for everyone it doesn't know at is alpine touring It's when you can hike up the mountain on your skis and then ski down So you could go to like a national forest or um, a lot of people in the spring here do 14ers and they ski down Faces of them. So, um, it's like ski mountaineering So I'm excited Be fun You live in, uh, colorado springs I live in steamboat springs, which is northwest colorado more up in the mountains I want to I spent some time at the broadmore resort in colorado springs and that's what made me want to move out there Yeah, i'm from colorado springs. It's it's a really cool spot, but you know broadmore is a broadmore is a step above man I'll give it a hit like yeah It's like the pinnacle it's like the best in colorado We're actually looking at making an exit from the bay area to potentially colorado We're looking at a couple different states. So montana Utah colorado, so I might come visit you guys at some point If you ever want to come visit, give me a shout. I'll see your triathlete. So I'll take you on a road ride Yeah, colorado is is is an actual choice for me Oh, yeah, you like boulder is like tricenter like but the boulder res and stuff like that's all the trials My coach is from boulder and he's like i'm trying to get back there and I was like you just tell me when and i'll follow you Well, it's hard. I lived out in broomfield because I was working in boulder and it's just like it's tough because everyone wants to live there Um, but it's it's beautiful. I mean, there's a reason why Everybody's gone. Yeah. Yeah, but I like it up in the mountains better just because I like to ski So it's easier in the winter if you just live up here Because again, like I can just walk to your ski, which is awesome And yeah, yeah, and like we have really like all the county roads out here are just great for road Rides. Um, I mean a lot of climbing, but that's good because like you just Yeah, but um uh, I feel like a lot of people bike out here and um And if you ever wanted to get in the mountain biking like the mountain biking trails out here like top notch, so for sure A rowdy I think we should have sid here in a second maybe Oh, but another so I'm I coached the seventh grade team at the middle school here for volleyball And it's their first game today. So fingers crossed Some of them I think it's their first time playing a volleyball game. So it should be good time So I think we have to sit now Thank you. Oh, I can't record the host needs to get permission. Who is the meeting host? Oh, we're recording already. That's great Welcome to um, ceo 101 and this Call is to answer questions that you have stuff. We might have missed stuff. That's unclear Long questions about our values, especially Who has a question? I do I can go fast But mine is not uh, is not about the values. I'm going straight for where I come from So I was wondering uh, if you've been if you've seen it in the news somewhere, Kenya where I come from I come from Nairobi, Kenya was dubbed like the silicon valley of Africa So I was wondering do you have any kenyan best clients? I or if no, are you planning to venture out in this region? And uh, how can I help? Yeah Cool. Thanks for asking keraline. Thanks for asking the first question. Uh, I think it's really Exciting to see the developments in Nairobi and uh, yeah I seen the hacker spaces there. I've even worked with um A person there even before or maybe during my time at get lab. I did african rails and I I only had one student that uh, that showed up and I uh, I worked with the person I will name him because this recording will be public but uh, he ended up working at at get lab and It was it was really hard to see like what the level of of Facilities was that this person had so I ended up sending him money for uh, a laptop and a 3g subscription So he could get online um But for example, he's living expenses where Or he he was living on a hundred dollars a month. Which which is something I can't imagine um In the end he applied at get lab. We declined him. He uh, he learned more. He applied again. He got a job Uh, he worked for a while. He ended up getting getting Let go for performance. Uh, which was super harsh for him and For us like well for us or for me. I was involved with this termination um and he uh He had a super super rough time. He got back on his feet. He started a startup He ended up hiring like over 20 people Uh doing a full delivery startup, which was amazing and I I recently Uh exchange emails with him. Um, but uh, I can see the the ecosystem there developing There's there's there's kind of venture capital there And it's a really exciting development of which uh, two dot percent got a close look at not sure that answers your question Is it briefly Uh, what I would want to know is are you are you trying to target the market? Because now things have changed like a lot of our fintechs are coming up a lot of software development companies are coming up So are there plans in the long term to target the market and can I make any contributions? Yeah, um So targeting the market, uh, if we talk about market, I think about customers We don't expect to get any significant revenue from Kenya I do hope we got a lot of usage in general in outside us And in mea we got a lot of usage like, uh, jacob shots just visited brazil And all the hands went up when he asked who knew about get lab if we look at india china Amazing amazing usage of get lab not a lot of money like we're not making a diamond China which is weird lots of Privacy going on lots of companies that are reluctant to pay. Maybe our price points are off Uh, we don't invest enough in channel partners like lots of reasons why it's not working I think for ken yeah, we're not going to make a dime either I do think how we how we can contribute Is is by hiring people Offering people a chance to to join a fast-going startup Learn how that is run, uh, how financing works all these things you get access to if you join get lab So how you can help is by recruiting other people not just for support But also for other functions at get lab If you like it here spread the word also Spread the word about things you don't like here so that people can kind of self select and opt in or out Speak at a at a conference right at write a blog post on our blog how you experienced the first month um What was bad because it's pretty hard to start here all remote. Uh, so write about that too bb frank, but uh But but shine shine a highlight on it. What's um get lab is pretty unique startup There's very few companies that grow this fast and uh, I think it's interesting and we want to hire more people in in africa Uh, I think ken yeah is is one of the places we'll end up hiring a lot of people. So that'd be great We just hired a recruiter focused species specifically on africa. So please please help us hire more people, especially Uh diverse hires, uh, would be great Okay, perfect. Thank you Thank you. Thanks for asking Um, so we had um, I was in the summit among some of the call and One of the things that I found quite enlightening is to learn from our advisor. Um, jack Um, I was wondering if you could give us an overview of the role of the advisor or self many of how many of uh, There and there are and how are they helping us? I have a feeling what sec you're talking about, but since there were two advisors named sec at the summit, maybe it's good to uh, to disambiguate Uh, jack or lock Yeah, so thanks for the question that the role of the advisors is to help us and The the most important thing is just pointing out stuff Uh, where we make a wrong decision or decisions we need to make that we're overlooking um Zach earlocker had great advice to our management team is that we were We were kind of right now our kind of executive team is coming together and we're close to getting that kind of filled out And we were feeling pretty happy about ourselves still seeing what we need to do Seeing all the highest we need to make and he was like well, you should focus on now on the director level Like the people reporting to the executive team That is going to be your focus. Uh, you should put a training program in place for them Etc that that is now where your scaling will fill and we're all like, yeah That makes total sense, but none of us were focused on it. So that's where advisors come in I think in this it was really fun to have a second sec join The summit so that you could get an outside perspective on git lab And we also have two investors join. I think it's it's fun for people in the company to like Hey, how does how does git lab compare with the rest of the world because for many of our people, this is the First kind of like super high growth startup like more than doubling every year that that they're joining and it's That is not an intuitive or normal environment and it's kind of Nice to get an external perspective how we're doing compared to market or what they're normally saying and I think Michael McBride's presentation really was great there, too Thanks Good morning. So this is mark. Um, how are you doing? good Great, um, so I was at the summit very excited saw the culture of the people the Just amazing culture there Following along the same line of Of advisors if you had a choice and this question may have been asked in the past of you If you had a choice of two living Historical persons or not dead or alive Uh, you would want to have dinner with who would they be and why? this was also in the new york times 50 questions to fall in love together. I think I hope that's not your intention because that will be illegal for me the I have a lot of respect for Jeff Bezos and that's not because the company just Uh, became amazon just became worth more than a billion dollars. Um billion a trillion dollars um, which is crazy amount of money, but um, because they've been able to kind of grow Um businesses that are not just adjacent but like completely different going from Retailing stuff yourself to running a marketplace to then running a marketplace Then selling compute And now they're into like advertising and all their other new initiatives. I think it's amazing and I think The the long-term bets they take and the patients they have are really an inspiration and It's an inspiration for us to To do more go from just source control to every part of the DevOps lifecycle from planning to monitoring So so a reason to do very long-term bets like maltano that will only generate money five seven years down the road So That'd be that'd be a person I uh, I invite Hi, sit if I can follow up on that. Uh, my name is surf peter. I'm sdr Working for emia and I was also at the summit. It was really great. I enjoyed the meeting all the people face to face And uh, it's really true. You can feel it when you had somebody A 2d you had with somebody a 2d coffee chat on monitor and when you meet them in person You already feel like you know them, uh, which is really crazy when I when I read the reviews I was kind of skeptical but now I felt it. So it's really great and I also enjoyed your key notes so, um Following up on my question is actually where would you like to see git lab in three to five years? In terms of, you know, kind of leveling up from repo management to the complete level cycle and ci cd Yeah, so Right now we're best in class in source control. We're best in class and ci Pretty we're pretty close to being best in class for planning um I think in three to five years Will be a public company Um Will be best in class in all the ops spaces too. So packaging releasing configuring monitoring um I think that's our journey and we have the market being aware that gilab is A single application for this that a single application has a lot of emergent benefits that it's that it's better um And that gilab becomes synonymous with a well-known engineering organization That in order to transform your organization to deliver value to customers And users faster you you gilab is like the logical way to do that instead of trying to assemble it yourself You co-created it more than two thousand other people and hundred thousand organizations So that's that's uh the wish for gilab in the coming years Um related to that. I have a question. Um, so I've also read about about this long-term vision that Everybody should be able to contribute to all kinds of media um Do you always do see different kinds of gilabs? Uh being at the end of this or is it More important to keep it as a single application rather than Support widely different types of content Yeah, that's a great question I'm not sure is the answer. We'll figure it out along the way um There's amazing applications like in vision that make it much easier to do Kind of collaboration and version control on design elements So maybe maybe you need different things. There's uh, for example O'Reilly media a user gilab on the back end to write their books. They made their own front end um So i'm not sure whether it will be a future like that where there's there's uh gilab On the back or where there's different variants of gilab or where they will be able to integrate more and more into gilab itself i'm Very excited for example now the client side evaluation that just shipped for a web IDE like We're able to add a lot to gilab and for example for meltano for now. That's a separate application, but There's a plan in the back of my mind to maybe one day integrated into gilab if we can do that without losing the audience um, so we'll see No, no fixed opinion could go either of the way and the nice thing is we know need to decide now So we can just wait and see for now We're just adding more and more to gilab as a product to make it Great for everything from public publishing a static site to making Mobile apps and everything everything else, but yeah, I hope someday Uh gilab will be used for data science for ai for For editing movies and let's see what shape that that takes Yeah, our mission is everyone can contribute. We want to change culture from read only to read right One of our early investors um Is in the Movie industry and we were talking like if now if you Watch a movie that you can't remix it like you just get the binary end result Wouldn't it be great if you get the separate camera feeds all the editing information? Um, you you you'd be able to have a lot more power So, uh, I think I think that's that's that's interesting Thanks I'd be curious to know a little bit said, um, so many things are going so well Where have you seen some unexpected challenges and what's kind of keeping you up right now? Yeah Look at this growth like more than doubling every year. There's not there's not a lot of things going well I think I think what's going well is that nothing is Super broken yet and that we're hiring really great people into the company and that they still kind of come on board in time They in general they say that they know what what's expected of them um, if that's not the case Send your boss a message send me a message because that's That's that's something that breaks really easily in companies and then that's that's we want to know asap if that happens Uh, what was really broken was gillab.com. It wasn't available. It wasn't performant I think we're making huge strides there just today. We turned off the nfs servers. Um Those are the file servers and the problem was if one of them broke the whole website broke, which is horrible Because it's the cloud stuff breaks all the time. You should be resistant to that and uh Moving to gcp turning those off to nfs servers offices huge huge progress So we're we're not there yet, but we're making strides the website's getting faster On a huge merchant class used to take 80 seconds before you loaded it now. It's three seconds Um, I'm seeing all the the metrics improve I think what keeps me still up at night is um Uh, some had filling out the executive team. Um, thinking sure that's functioning as well as it can The the director level that zek pointed us at zekker locker is probably something I should be worrying about I think the security of gillab.com. I think uh We quadrupled the team Or no more than quadrupled truth. We're growing the team this year from two to 16 people kafi is doing an amazing job Uh, but that doesn't the target on our back is growing at the same rate. Um, so um There's there's a lot of work to do there. Uh, I think kafi It's got it and she's doing everything she's she can and I think we're doing a good job but there's an element of luck uh in there and That's that's a risk you You you want to avoid if possible. So that's something I worry about and I talk with kafi about but She's doing amazing our bounties for in the private program we run for finding an rc and gillab We're raised from like $2,000 to $12,000 now in about a half a year. So we're doing a lot Awesome. Thank you Welcome I said I I have a somewhat related question. I guess to to the the growth and changes that come with that um, which is as you look forward to to you know, uh continuing to grow the company and especially Uh getting to the point where um, we're IPOing Uh How do you see um what what challenges do you see with maintaining the values that we have now with with a company like that? Especially I would say around transparency Once once we're a public company yeah Look transparency is is something we That's that's not that's very hard and we'll need to Put active Time into it every day like right now. I'm in a slack conversation about like hey, why are our core contributors in all our channels? Our customer is okay with that and we're like, yeah, they're signed an nda. Is that enough? Can we well our customers accept it? I'm not sure but we're gonna try to find out and we're not gonna We're gonna challenge all the assumptions that people have about that and and see see how far we can go if we become a public company any um Any information that might affect Our stock price needs to be on a predictable channel So for example, I just send a tweet out on my personal email A personal twitter account about how many ci runners we have on goodlap.com I think in the future that'd be something I wouldn't send out personally I'd have it send out through the goodlap account just to make sure it's on a predictable channel um Lots of companies what they do is they send out less information um That's not actually the sec rules the sec rules specified has to be a predictable channel So we can keep being very open as long as it's a predictable channel. That's equally accessible by all the investors So that's something That we're going to push our investor relations people for and we're going to keep being as open Well, but that's that's going to be a challenge like the though There'll be a lot of pushback because we'll be doing it different than everybody else Another thing is that for example on the team call today. We shared a sales update um If you're a public company you can only share that with insiders. So we're going to make everyone in the company an insider Um, maybe means that like core team members cannot be an insider. Um, not sure making everyone in the company an insider is Done sometimes, but it's not a regular thing. So Those are things where we'll keep pushing and we'll have to kind of challenge Our advisors our lawyers Our analyst relations people our investor relations people Our pr agencies and and state how we're doing things different. Yes, we have a public roadmap Does that affect your revenue recognition? We're looking into it. Probably not Because we're going from six or five to six to six, etc. So we're looking into all these things I don't think we'll have to Go back and so far. I'm very proud in the company's history. We never walked something back. We're only getting more and more open Um, not sure we can always keep doing that. But so far so good and as a public company We can be open about our financials. So As soon as we got financials that are audited We will start giving investor calls every quarter even before republic Because now we can afford a new level of openness Um So really excited about that and the goals get more open. Not less Hi, I have a question that follows on from that. Um, as you've spoken there about transparency Which is one of the values and I was wondering what you do on a on a weekly or uh monthly basis To try and encourage the values down into your direct reports and further than that Yeah, um, thanks very much. Great question Look, I'm trying to lead by example try to Put things in like the slack co channel put things on twitter record my meetings I think i'm currently very focused on and that goes for everyone and just my reports But more of our conversations should be public videos on youtube This conversation will be but you're having conversations with colleagues Hopefully in zoom lots of the time where if someone asks a question you say, hey, let's help on a call and discuss it for 20 minutes What I want that The instinct of everyone in the company to be is say hey, let's do this and let's hit the record button and after 20 minutes We say look we We took care to avoid mentioning any customer names. There's there's nothing super confidential We're not quite sure what it is. It's interesting for the rest of the world, but we don't care Let's just publish it on youtube um I hope that will be the case and i'm going to make a note that everyone in the company should get a youtube upload account so that they can publish on our company channel and I want to see about a hundred videos a day new on youtube because one third of our company every work day should Have a conversation with a colleague. That's uh that they kind of anticipate that it's going to be interesting for at least one other person I said and So I think obviously remote working is a huge thing at gitlab and has contributed to the success of the company And I see obviously we maintain a remote only website and on which it states some of the disadvantages Is which it might scare off investors and customers and such I was wondering in the in the early days of forming the organization at what point you kind of committed to the decision of being a remote only company And were there any concerns coming through by culmination or maybe with with some of the early shareholders about that way of working Yeah, thanks. Um, it happened iteratively As you maybe know in or maybe poli didn't notice but on our values page It doesn't talk about remote remote is not one of our our values at all. It's an outcome not a non-input um In the beginning we started remote because it was kind of meet and meet you And I was in Netherlands. He was in Ukraine Then we hired a couple of people in the Netherlands and they came to my office and you tracked Now a house that you can Rent for free. So make sure you take advantage of that But Those people stopped coming in after a few days. They never discussed it They just stopped showing up start working from home because that's just how we rolled Why combinator they told us look you this makes sense engineering remote, but it doesn't work for sales and marketing So we said, okay. Well, let's let's let's do the boring solution Which is one of our values all the sales and marketing On on site rented an office expected to grow out of it in half a year But we didn't we kept it for three years and then we Downsized because what happened is sales people like Hayden They showed up for the first two days and then they didn't because it was a one-hour commute every Every way and they didn't get any value of being in the office. And if you make sure that In the office, you don't have extra information gossip sidechats If you don't miss out on career opportunities because you're not in the main office People actually don't like to commute um So the only reason they commute is because they're being if they are thinking they otherwise miss out So if you make sure people don't miss out, they'll just stop showing up Um, that's what happened for a long time. We kept an open mind about it like maybe this doesn't scale, etc um And I think it was only at like 200 people that we said look this is this is scaling a lot better It's it's not scaling worse. It's scaling better than Uh co-located places. So that's when we said, okay, we're we're sure about this Are there any other companies that um kind of model their company template or culture after get lab? And is that something that is on get labs radar as far as influence influencing other companies? um From time to time I hear companies that say hey, we're looking at your handbook a lot and we copied certain sections Which is very welcome. It's it's creative comments. So people can just copy that um We're also inspired by other companies uh We're looking to up to for example wordpress They're pioneering a lot of the remote working There's other companies kind of doing the same without Causality between them Zapier in vision are also running all remote companies and are doing a super good job of that But over time I expect more and more companies to kind of be inspired by us also because We document everything we do and and they can just copy parts of the handbook And I've known that that happens a lot where people copy one or two pages send it to their department I expect future startups that start just copying the whole thing Sid may I have a question about? um For example, are there kind of countries so my question is where do we grow the fastest? Is it in america's europe? Or is it is it asia and where the fastest growing? Is it is it manufacturing or is it more finance? So i'm trying to find out because As you said in one of your famous pitches is that every company is becoming or is already a software company So in which kind of vertical do you see the most growth? For gig lab Yeah, thanks So growth we measure it as incremental acp and right now that's happening with You need big companies because big companies buy more You need companies we're going the fastest with companies that don't have not made their own tool set yet so if for example your um Let's say a company like for example netflix netflix is not a customer of us And they they were one of the first companies that embraced cloud. They made a lot of their own tools So they they even if they wanted to use gig lab We mean deprecating a lot of tools that have like net netflix specific stuff in it Doesn't make sense for them to adopt netflix However, there's for example a lot of financial Services firms on the east coast that don't have a big cloud native tool set yet and for them gig lab is a great way to bring this in Then our usage is a lot bigger outside of the us But you see the us being companies in the us being ahead both in in like adopting DevOps practices and being more willing to pay and in the end our yardstick is incremental acp like the extra subscription revenue we get So we're seeing a lot of growth there bigger companies in the us making their digital transformation And we're historically very strong with self-hosted companies. So financial services, for example, is a great vertical for us Awesome. Thank you. I might have another question. So I know that you interview Great number of the of potential candidates if not nearly all of them And they have like and they have like a wide range of skill sets and also a wide range of roles Given that what's what's your criteria or thought process when What to decide whether they are a good fit for for the role again giving the breadth of skills and roles Yeah, thanks for that I stopped interviewing Every single hire at when we were 140 people big Because it just didn't work with my time anymore Um, I still review every hiring package before it goes out because I want to keep a tab on like Are we putting the our bar high enough? Are we missing something? Do we have accurate role descriptions for everyone? Uh, are we are we sticking to our compensation calculator things like that? So, um Keeping tabs on that although that's going really well. I think I should step out of that anytime and now Um When I review one of the hiring package, I I have a look at the resume of the person want to see Hey, do they have like a relevant study relevant company expertise? Um, have they completed some long stints like have they been at a company for Two and a half three years at least one time in the last three years um Do they Is there something Sticking out like some special achievement Maybe a talk they gave, uh, maybe an industry certification Did if there's any Flanks like did people in the interview process address them like if they stayed at a company for seven months Do we know why is that a plausible story? Um, did people dive into that? Why do they want to work at gate lab? Have they As they progress in the hiring process like have they dig Done more homework on the company and the role that we have so many materials It's okay if people don't Do all of it up front, but by the time you are doing your last interview You should have gotten a bit interested. Um Yeah, are they are they able to get results? Have they been successful in previous previous roles like to de-achieve their responsibilities, etc So those are things I look for So thanks I see what's the percentage that we have nowadays on the githlab.com customers What's the best what on githlab.com customers? Yeah, the percentage we have most of them. They have the solution they implemented by themselves In few of them are right understand that this is a smaller percentage on the dot-com, right? Yep. So For our incremental acv githlab.com is basically one large customer so It's not contributing a lot to our our revenue and our subscription growth yet Um, however, we do feel It's going to be very important in the future. There's lots of companies that want to consume it As a software as a service. So we're responsible for the upgrades. We're responsible for the backups They get rid of that administrative burden And so far we've we've fallen short of of making it something that is ready for mission critical applications It's not been as available and as performant as people expect However, I think we're turning the corner there and it's it's getting better and I expect we'll see I expect that we'll see as people realize that we'll see A much faster growth than historically there Although it's already grown fast like like it's it's growing exponentially and And that's great, but I think it will pick up As as we as the service is better Okay, thank you One thing I am wondering about is at the current time do more customers Choose github for the CICD part or still mostly for the Development and and repository part And is that is that distinction even a thing? I'm asking because Until a month or two ago. I was mostly aware of the repository and I was really surprised to learn about the extent of the CICD part and now in my head at least they are these two separate aspects to get there Yeah, for sure there and and then We're not even talk about all the all the planning and the security and all the ops capabilities but You're right right now a lot of people are in a similar situation to you where they're only aware of the the source code management and the create capabilities in our product and That's not okay Like we should do a better job talking about all the other aspects of git lab And that will take time But there's there's no time like the present to start start talking about that And we do see when we tell people people are aware and they're picking us for ci For example, we had a blog post I published yesterday About how Jenkins is splitting up in three different versions of Jenkins. Um, that's a great opportunity for us to say hey Git lab has really great ci capabilities And you can use it with git lab repositories, but it also works great if you're still on github And uh, there are companies leading companies like data doc that actually do that They use github for their source code but github ci to test their software and We we build github ci cd for github for that reason and and that's starting to get traction So I think it's a it's our second entry point into the market And as more of more and more of these capabilities become best in class We're going to have many entry points I foresee a future where people get github just for the security or just for the monitoring It's going to take us a while to get there, but it's it's starting to happen I have a quick follow-up question about that said, um, do you foresee a time as as Git lab becomes, um You know better known for these other capabilities and really flushes out the rest of the product and maybe you know future things That that haven't been conceived of yet you foresee a time when uh The product git lab outgrows the name git lab and its association. I think we've already outgrown it But I also think air bnb has outgrown air beds and breakfasts. So I I think it's It's a it's a name. It's a variable. We wouldn't pick the same name today, but uh going to name change is something very distracting Both for us But also for all our users who have get lab running in directories and and and have software installed with that name So I think uh, I think we should just make sure that people think Of git lab as a single application for the whole DevOps lifecycle from planning to monitoring And stop thinking about it as a as a as a git tool I can do this all day. Um, we're gonna keep going until 20 past and I especially appreciate questions about our values Something about iteration. Is it irrational iteration? iteration I think Yeah, how how well is this being practiced because when I read in the hard book about the whole idea I'd never heard about it as a value before I was like, this is gonna be a challenge. This is gonna be something So I guess my question is Does the team struggle with it or is it easy for people to go around it and what would you advise somebody to make it easy for them to adapt it Great caroline. Thanks. Thanks for that. That's a great question and You started off with questions. This is just your second day. I understood so Thanks, thanks so much. And you hit the nail on the head iteration is by far our hardest value to adapt to Sometimes we get new hires and they say, oh, I love iteration and then we know that they haven't really practiced it because it's very painful and hard Even I struggle with it regularly where I make two elaborate of a plan And it's possible to to have a smaller first step and I Catch myself or someone else catches me as I say, this is overblown iteration is hard because we We want to make something beautiful and great and we have a plan and when humans have this unique capability to look out far into the future And then you have to constrain yourself and say even though this is the future that we're envisioning now What is the minimum thing we can ship and that's frequently something very small Something you're not quite happy with because it's still missing so much but something that has this quantum of value for your For your users or for for whoever you service And and we have to do that and It's something we don't just do in development, but we also I want to practice in all other areas and I'm not super sure about support, but I can imagine frequently you have like, hey, there's missing something missing in the documentation or this This thing totally needs to be refactored and then it's yeah, yeah needs to be but what's what's the thing you can do now What's the thing you can do in two minutes? Well, maybe places a bit higher on the page or add a line here or add a troubleshooting section with one comment But it's it's not intuitive. It is Painful in the words of nat Friedman Future CEO of github it requires a low level of shame and that we have to live with because we're not happy If you go to our website now you click on products You'll find four or five empty paragraphs That's like the main page the leftmost menu item on our website When you click that there's empty stuff there I'm super ashamed of that But I'm also proud of the team for just pushing that out and allowing us to to set the Take the next step And it's uh It's the thing I have to train our executives on the most like they they come in and they want to make a three month Plan and they they're starting to work on a big powerpoint And we have to stop them and say no stop working on the plan just do For everything you're proposing do the first thing and we'll talk next week about how that went Interesting I'm I'm I'm excited to see how I adapt to that one especially so Maybe you could tell me some pointers. I know some things that have made it easier for you over the years Something you picked along the way. Yeah Thanks for that question. I think it's always like you have a big plan For example, I wrote a big document about our vision where github.com should go And it's it's 3d pages and I was like, okay What's now the first step and I wrote a first step that is a very simple thing we could do in a couple of weeks And it's it's like that every every single time where you just say, okay, what what can I do in two minutes? What can I do in an hour? What can I do in a day? Just so figure out a small time constraint For you if you're you'll frequently be answering tickets. It will be like, okay, this is kind of I couldn't This customer I couldn't point them to the documentation because it's missing there instead of like typing the answer there Make a commit to the documentation Where you add that answer and I'm send them a link to your commit It's going to cost you two minutes more to put it in git instead of typing it in an email but now that answer is there for everyone else to see as well And Probably the customer is going to be way more impressed with you updating the documentation to answer their question Thank you At what point in the company's life were the values created and did you see them maybe have like a real impact on the organization when they when they were? Yeah, they they were created over time Um At some point we had 13 of them. So we rationalized them a bit because even I couldn't name more than like four of them So we had to make it a bit simpler um I think The biggest impact has come from iteration And I think that happened during a white combinator there was a A white combinator to have a two weekly session where you talk about what you did in the last two weeks and what your plans are And after the second session I said what we did and after me was lis from campus job now called way up and They did so much more and she has she knew her number so much better That after she was done, they said, okay, that's that's how you do it And then they looked at us like that's how you not do it And we drove back me in the meeting and we said look we gotta up our game here like like these people are going from no customers to having a Having done 300 phone calls in two weeks With just a single person like they were They were making much faster progress And we said, okay from now on it's going to be like what can we do in two weeks? And it's amazing how if you need to grow like 20 in two weeks How that suddenly constrains the problem where you're like, well, we can do this. We can do that That all takes longer like that's not going to have an impact and then you end up with a couple of things and you say, okay let's ship it and One person stay behind in the Netherlands during that time and He was like, what's gotten into you like, why are we why are we going so fast and taking so much risk and putting out things that aren't aren't fully baked Everyone's like, yeah, this is no no normal. This is how fast we have to go and it made a an amazing difference and then the trick is to keep that speed after you graduate from yc and not let anything stand in the way, so You'll find me if you look at the ceo page, you'll find like we have to keep shipping I think there will be a thousand reasons why you have to stop shipping from gitlab.com performance to customer things to all kinds of reasons But we'll never we never will and that goes for every single department You you cannot slow down because after you slow down it's really hard to get back to that iteration speed because The organization will start applying new quality standards and everything and It's happened to a lot of good companies that we know and respect for for their for their product, but that have slowed down so That's that's our thing. We we stopped started shipping during yc in the first month and we'll just never slow down And I think that's an uh, it's an appropriate end to this meeting. Uh, thank you very much for all the questions If there's anything wrong at the company, it's my responsibility So feel free to all to dm me and slack with any problems you encountered And uh, and welcome to gitlab. Thanks for joining Hi, thanks. Thank you That's it. Thanks everyone Thank you