 to our guest speaker, really, really excited to have him here, Sid from GitLab coming up. So Sid is the founder and CEO of GitLab. If you don't know GitLab, I think most of you do. But if you don't know it, it's a developer platform, so it's for, you know, source code management, continuous integration and delivery, issue tracking, things like that. And GitLab is a really interesting company because they're a fully distributed team. But Sid's going to tell us all about that, how that works. Yeah. Welcome Sid. Thanks everyone. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. We value our partnership with MesaSphere and we're working on some technical integrations. But that's not what I'm here about. I'm here to tell how we do remote only. I want to preface that by saying that we never expected to be a remote only organization. One of our values is boring solutions and there are not a lot of remote only organizations, so we never expected to be one. We thought it might have worked for developers. My co-founder is Dimitri from the Ukraine, and we started off remote, but when we got to San Francisco, we expected to grow company there. We rented an office, but at some point people stopped coming into the office. I think that was because they were not missing out on anything. We think remote only changes you in some good ways. You tend to write more things down, be more structured, and that helps you grow. We did have to get really conscious about how we organize social connections. If you're in an office, they tend to happen naturally. Remote, it doesn't happen, so you have to structure it. We did it in a few ways, and I'm going to tell you more about the different ways in which we did that, but we were really conscious in going about that and we're still trying to improve every single day. I think remote has a pretty bad name. Being from home means you're slacking off for the day. I think that's because in many companies it's not done properly. You don't feel part of the team. There are no processes to help you set it up. You're judging people sometimes by the number of hours that they are online instead of their output, and it doesn't make for a very pleasant experience. We have many people that join our company that are refugees and remote at another company not liking the culture, not feeling part of the team, and then they come and work at us. This is a slide deck originally for investors, if you can tell. You have to always say what change that makes it possible now. This is that slide. Fast Internet and all the different tooling you need to do remote properly. That is what makes it possible now. It's great for team members. There's flexibility for other important people in your life. There's less commuting. There's less interruptions. You can manage the interruptions. You can turn them on and off. You have more ability to travel, and you're free to move cities without losing your job. We had over 20 people move countries within GitLab, and they were able to keep their job. You can follow your partner around the world, stuff like that. We also think it helps the world. Less commuting means less energy spent. We're spreading the wealth that we're creating, which is now very concentrated in cities like this in SF. We're spreading that a bit more around the world. This is a very long list because we also think it's really good for the company. We can hire great people no matter where they live. That's been the biggest game changer for us. We're not limited to our office locations. It makes for more loyal employees. Our so-called voluntary turnover last year was 3.5%, even when we more than doubled headcount. That's a very low turnover for a startup. I think it's because people like working with us. We hear from a lot of people, I'm now spoiled, I'll never work for another company again that makes me come to the office. One of the not so obvious second order effects, it selects for self-starting people. We tend to not have a lot of project management. Either you manage yourself or you're not a good fit for the company. That means that the people that are self-managing are not confronted with team members that are not. Number eight, it encourages a focus on results. We're not measuring the time in the office. We're not measuring your time online. There's really no way for us to tell whether you're effective, apart from looking at your output. That's what we're set up to do. We did many different initiatives to make remote-only work. I'll go through each and every one of them. First off, our team call. It's mostly about 80 people. It's voluntary, but you're not allowed to plan over it. Most people opt to join. You can see in the lower left, Stan Hu showing off his shout. We encourage people talking about what they did. Some companies tend to have like almost a programmer culture, where people do push-ups to show off to one another. We like to think of us as having the opposite culture. There was a guy in South Africa, his name is Dewet. He brought his mom on the show. His mom was pushing 60. He said, she believes age is just a number. She trained for a long time to be able to do 60 push-ups. We have a mom programmer culture. I'm not quite sure, but his mom was showing off the push-ups right in the team call. I'm very proud of having a company where people show off their family members instead of trying to one-up each other. It's four times a week. It's about 10 minutes spent on new hires and not discussion points as quick announcements. It used to be discussion points, and then the meetings stand to last for three hours, so that doesn't make sense. It's mostly spent people talking about their day, what they did in the weekends mostly. You're up every two weeks, and you talk about what interesting things you did for the weekend. There's a few rules. You cannot say that it was not interesting what you did. Just tell us. If you watch television, don't tell us you watch television. Tell us what television you watched. We tend to all go on the same schedule where everyone was watching Narcos at the same time. People took hints. This is a screenshot of the agenda, and these announcements, it's basically reading up what's there. Everything has a link. If you want more information, just go there. Then we do functional group updates. These are about 20 or something functional groups that present this has been the progress in finance or this has been the progress with this technical team. There's a presentation of about 10 to 15 minutes and the rest of the time is spent answering questions that come up in chat. It's a really nice way to stay informed. At the end of the week on Friday, we do a public blog post. You can go to our website, look at our blogs, see the functional group updates, and really know a lot more than you ever care to know about what's going on inside the different parts of GitLab. One thing I like very much is real-time notes. In GitLab, if you plan a meeting, you're either going to give a presentation and take questions on them, or you have an agenda. It's not acceptable to not have a presentation or an agenda linked. The agenda needs to be a Google Doc that's open at least for editing by everyone in the company. Beforehand, you can see what's up. Then people kind of indent their questions in the agenda, preface with their name. You say what you wanted to say, then you give the word to the person asking the question, and then we take real-time notes about the conclusions. We never have a meeting that starts with, let's acknowledge the notes from last meeting or something like that. No, the notes were there being taken as you talked. At the end of the meeting, everyone is literally on the same page. Know what has to be done. I think it's so much more efficient. So much faster, so much more pleasant than having a formal notekeeper that has to kind of write up the whole meeting and then see notes over email a week later. Being remote means it's even more important to know who's part of the company. You don't see any people in the office. We have a team page. You can go there. It's a public one. It has everyone. It has a map of where everyone is. But it also has for everyone who they report to what their expertise are. And we're very liberal with handing out these things. So many questions in the company are always like, who's the person that knows more about Chef Cookbooks? Well, you can find on our page. If you click them, you can see they're a bit of their personal story. But it's really important to add these notes like, this person is a trained release manager. Or this person is a good lab summit expert. And we also have our team structure. So it's dynamically generated. So our org chart is never out of date. And everyone can view it, and everyone can see where people stand. So if they want to go, they're not happy with someone. They can find out who their boss is and go to them. Messaging, we're a big user of Slack. We're very liberal in talking about other subjects on Slack. We also talk about maybe the things that you wouldn't normally talk about in a formal way. So when we were fundraising, people had questions about the fundraising. And in a normal office, you'd walk in after pitching and people would ask, hey, Sid, how did it go today? And we didn't have that. So people were asking me questions. So I said, OK, we'll do it. We'll have a fundraising channel. But at the top it says, don't get distracted by the roller coaster that is fundraising because that's why I didn't want to do it. But we did it. It worked out really well. And they got it play by play. We went to this VC and they said no. And I was most proud when we announced our fundraise. The first question was from a developer and they asked, OK, what's the liquidation preference on this deal? A person who didn't even know what a VC was maybe at the beginning of the fundraising process. So everyone educated themselves. Our handbook is the most, I think, visible artifact of our remote culture. It's over 500 pages long. And it details all the processes in our company. It's public. So you can look at it. We try to detail anything and everything. And I think the biggest help to us has been with recruiting new team members and onboarding them. We have people that, by the time they're interviewing with me, they say, I've read your entire handbook. I want to work at this company. So it allows people to self-select and probably also to self-opt out. I wouldn't be talking to the people that don't want to work at us. We need only a few percent of people to work at us. And I think we're certainly getting there where people are really enthusiastic about working at GitLab. And they already onboarded. They already know everything that's going on in the company and how we work by the time that they start. So you're able to onboard really effectively. Obviously, being GitLab, we make issue trackers and we tend to use them for everything, including finance and marketing. We do GitLab University, a company training program. The difference with us is it's all public. And then onboarding, we take a lot of time. We invest a lot of time in making sure that people can see exactly how their onboarding is going. So everyone gets an issue. It has, I think, over 60 checkmarks in it. And you can see who's supposed to do something for you, whether you have to do it yourself or who else has to do it. And you can follow the progress as you go along. And I think it's really empowering to be able to track the progress of your onboarding. It's not like, oh, yeah, someone forgot to add you to that system. I'm sorry that you looked around for two days. No, you can see who should be adding you to a watch system. And one thing, in the bottom, you can see the virtual coffee breaks. So you can see everyone that starts at GitLab has to take a couple of virtual coffee breaks. And I'll explain later what that is. Having a handbook makes it really easy for people to give suggestions. If you've written down everything that you do, it's really easy to make a suggestion to change it. And that's what I found at previous companies was kind of ambiguous how you change a process. With us, it isn't. You send a suggestion to change the text in the handbook, and when it gets accepted, that's it, the process just changed. You might communicate the diff or the merge request on the team call to tell everyone. And we also do something offline. We do team summits. They're every nine months. It's a week long. And we really focus not on, like, it's not like a management offsite where we all try to make a plan for the next quarter, because guess what? We do it every nine months. So it wouldn't be nice if we needed that. We focus on bringing people together and creating these social connections. So we do scavenger hunts. I'm looking forward to doing user-generated content sessions where people suggest and vote up subjects they want to talk about. And it's very important that it's cross-functional, so that you're not spending it with your own team but meeting everyone within the company. There's a big drop in productivity during those that week, and actually the week before it and the week after it, but we think it's totally worth it. This was our first one in Austin, and this was our last one in January in Cancun, Mexico. I still owe you the virtual coffee base. So what those are is like that hallway conversation you tend to have in a company here where you can just chat with someone. We empower people to do that. We call it virtual coffee breaks, and you just plan it in someone's calendar. You send them a calendar invite, call it virtual coffee break, and you get to chat with someone. And we're trying to lower the stigma of having an agenda-less meeting, just a casual meeting, and it's perfectly fine if you don't discuss anything business-related during that meeting. And anyone can do it with anybody. So some people sent me virtual coffee base, and I'm always really thankful if they do. In conclusion, so far it's working really well for us. I think the nice thing is if you grow really fast, having everything about your company documented allows people to ramp up a lot faster. Also allows you to relay your culture and work a lot better, because you get to do it formally. So that's been great. I think we're in a very advantaged position because we're completely remote. It's much harder if you're hybrid, where some people are in the same location, but some are not. We're not wedded to this idea of remote only. If it doesn't work, we'll change it. We'll do whatever it takes. It's not part of our values, but so far so good. And I'd love to take questions. Thank you. Sid, I'm actually going to read one that's remote. So how does GitLab deal with time zone differences, challenges, solutions? Yeah, thanks. Glad that the first question is remote. It's the end of distances, but not the end of time zones. Time zones are absolutely horrible. I think we should get rid of them, but I have no idea how. One of the big things is that our team members in Asia Pacific, for them the timing to join our regular team call that's kind of optimized for America, Europe, is not ideal. So they can't. So they have their own team call once a week, which is not as good. Look, I'd rather have everyone in the same call. So we do record all of our meetings. We do record all of our functional group updates. Everything is a Zoom meeting. It's recorded. It's dumped into a Google Drive. You can find it. We'll publish the functional group updates on our blog. So we try to timeshift as much as we can, but we haven't solved this. Great. A couple more remote ones. What mechanism is in place to help remotes know that they are on track? Yeah, no. What's really important in a, if you work for a company is a sense of progress and a sense of progress you get to having the feeling yourself and getting that acknowledged by your manager. The most important thing we do is we give everyone exactly one boss. And that boss knows what you're working on can guide you is an expert in the functional matter you're working on. So we don't have a matrix organization and having that one boss that has between five and 10 reports can give you a lot of, like, detailed feedback and help you be more effective is, I think, one of the best benefits. We also have an OKR process and our OKRs are public. So if you want to know more about our No Matrix organization, Google GitLab leadership, if you want to know more about our OKRs, Google GitLab strategy and scroll to the bottom of the page. And then a couple of people had some questions and I think you answered this about video calls and what tools you're using. Is it Zoom and Google Hangouts? Yeah, so it's multiple things. Zoom is great because it allows us to be in the same call with the whole company and it's really effective. So we're kind of switching everything to Zoom then for smaller calls, some people still do Hangouts and for impromptu calls, people tend to use Slack video calling. Anyone in the US that has questions or I'm sorry, San Francisco has questions? Chair in the back. You said that you had a lot of different employees move to different countries. How do you deal with immigration and does the company support that? Yeah, so a few things. We tend to set up an entity in every country where we have, like, a substantial presence, like here in the UK, in the Netherlands. Then employees around the world tend to be freelancers. And then for us, for example, it's relatively easy to organize a work permit in the Netherlands so you can apply for immigrating there. For the rest, people don't have to travel. It's only our summits that are a problem, but we're now getting pretty good at making sure people can get a business visa and just have lawyers that do these kinds of stacks of paper It's been some very sad stories, like Dimitri tried to get into Greece and like they wouldn't even acknowledge his appointment and we had at our last summit, we had one person from Africa that couldn't join because they rejected his visa, but we're getting really good at it now and last summit we got everyone in. So you mentioned earlier that people self-select kind of when they're looking at GitLab and I was kind of curious, how do you how do you interview and deal with the situation where someone doesn't know if they're good or they don't, you know, they've never worked remote before because I find that we have that situation a lot where we're kind of interviewing someone where they've never worked remote before and we don't actually know if it's going to be a good fit and they don't know. So how do you evaluate that in that situation? People think that we maybe have a really good test for that, but we don't. We do ask them whether they're comfortable with it with the whole concept. It's more of getting a heads up on any concerns. If people are good at their job, they tend to be good working remote too. People that are effective tend to write things down, they tend to be structured, they tend to be good writers. We never had someone leave the company because they worked remote because they weren't able to work remote. We do offer to buy people a workspace so if they don't want to work from home but they want some distance, that's fine. It tends to be that after three months they get rid of the workspace and they start working from home but it's a good transition period. If there are any team members nearby we suggest that they meet up with a team member every week just for their feeling. They do report that the first month we've introduced the virtual coffee breaks that we make you take ten of to help with that. We've introduced a buddy that is supposed to help you with all your dumb questions. That helps. It's still because we've documented so much people feel overwhelmed by the amount of materials so we now try to structure it almost per day what you should read. We had, I think, zero people leave because they said I can make this remote thing work zero which is kind of surprising. As an engineer one of the situations in which I find face-to-face meetings most useful is for design sessions when there's a lot of whiteboarding going on. Are there any tools or techniques that you guys use to help in those situations? We're big believers in face-to-face meetings just not in person we always start to stimulate getting on a video call together because it's so much higher bandwidth. For most meetings a Google Docs or something suffices. For design it's harder. We're big users of sketch. I think we added sketch rendering will be in GitLab 9.1 so that you can preview to those designs in an issue. I'm not aware of any other real-time tools that we use for that. How do you handle diversity in this culture? A few things because we can recruit from anywhere we are much more diverse culturally geographically. One of the things has been that open-source projects tend to be almost 99% male and a lot of our contributors came from the open-source community so that's been a struggle for us. We do believe that working remote and having a flexible schedule where you are in control makes it easier to combine with the rest of your life. Does that answer your question? For us we try and actively go find from academies or wherever else to recruit more women but being remote I can't imagine how you would do it. We do have several recruiting channels that are focused on minorities or underrepresented minorities and women. That's where we try to focus our recruiting efforts. I have another question. Does this kind of culture end up attracting a certain personality type? Because I can't work remote so it's just some people can, some people can't. I think what I said earlier it tends to weed out people that are not a manager of one. If you're not able to motivate yourself to get results every day it's just really easy to slack off and do other things like no one's watching your screen if you don't produce for a date and you find out. So it requires more discipline than some other companies. I have another question. This one is from our office in Hamburg, Germany. Talk was very focused on the positive things. What are some of the things that don't work well remote? What are the challenges that you've had to overcome in the solutions? I think if you don't write things down as leadership problems, so at a certain point the whole executive team has to get on board with this and start writing things down and we make that change. Another thing that's been problematic has been fundraising. Our fundraising went great. We started in the beginning of June and by the end of June we had three term sheets but we did have some really good investors drop out and say look by being a completely remote organization it's really hard to get guys acquired at a good price. So we're not comfortable betting only on the IPO. We want to see an acquisition story here too. That's what we see in all our companies and for you guys it's going to be half the price because they can't acquire the physical people and integrate them into their office. So for that reason we're out. This one's a little lengthy. As a remote employee I feel pretty anxious about making sure my output is visible. Sometimes I spend time on work that does not yield the results I hope or results that are not visible as other tasks like tracking down flaky test causes brainstorming work, etc. I think people measure time and hours because output is difficult. Do you sense this in your own organization? Are there any practices to help you correct for a bias to only notice certain types of effort? Yeah that's really good. Not all work is as visible. I think like in any organization I'd recommend that people do call attention to what they've achieved and it doesn't have to be a very self-promotional way but just make sure that people know what you spend time on or spend time on don't defend the time spent but if you've solved a really hard bug just you can tell you can stay in the issue look I'm really happy I've been able to solve this the one way the best way we solve this is by giving you a manager that really understands what you're doing so everyone has a functional leader so if you're in front end you have someone that knows front end really well so they tend to be a lot better at estimating like how much work you've produced what your output is, what your results have been so I think that's the important part and if you're in a if your boss is like a cross-functional boss they might not be able to appreciate how much work, how much results you've achieved so that's the number one thing giving you that boss that doesn't have a lot of reports that knows exactly the work you're doing and is actively contributing him or herself as well anyone else? great, thank you thank you very much thank you