 Cool. Welcome to GitLab 101, which is the CEO Edition, which is me answering your questions. Does anybody have a question? I do have a question, yes. So having me involved in a few company extension events in my previous company, what gives you awake at night? What can make GitLab go? Company extension events go through me up. And that's no fun. And that's really hard, and it's easy to run a company when it's going well. It's hard to run it when it's all going south, and you have to make decisions in time and do the right thing for the people that signed up. Obviously, it's my responsibility to make sure we have enough money. Most of the company extension events are because of that. I'm pretty comfortable there. Paul's a pretty conservative CFO. We've always raised money before we needed it. We never let it come close. It took a bit more dilution, but it took some risk off the table. Things I'm worried about now is things that are hard to fix, and that mostly has to do with GitLab.com. So GitLab.com availability and security are things where we could have major incidents, and it's hard to fix them afterwards. We're investing a lot in hiring additional people to run that hiring expertise, investing in systems, and then security-wise, where CAFE is greatly expanding the security team to make sure we're ahead of anything that might happen there. So those are things that don't keep me up at night, but that would be my top two risks of greatly diminishing the value of the company. We've done a couple of these, one on one. So far, I'm kind of curious if there's any specific topic or topic area that you really wish people had brought up and wished somebody had phoned in on that you haven't had a chance to speak to you about? Thanks to that. I'll take that. I think, one, I love to talk about our values. I think that's very important to talk about. And I think the value that's hardest to get for people is iteration. If you... It's really hard to do that right and to really do the minimum viable change. I catch myself a lot of times where I'm like, I have a great plan, and then I'm not taking the smallest possible step. And it could be as simple as like, ever dream for like a GitLab contribute house where people can just hang out when they want to. Like if you want to be amongst other GitLab people, you can go there. First step is not even to get an Airbnb at some, I'd like a beachy location or something. But I already opened up my own house and now we're opening it up for a period of time. I think two weekends and a week in between, so nine days and ask people to sign up for that. And that's the smallest step. Like I've got all these ideas, but this is the smallest thing. And it's in the house channel on Slack. And it's from October 6th to 14th. And people have joined, but no one has said, yeah, like, hey, I intend to come. So let's see how that plays out. Cool. I have a question speaking about values. So culture obviously is very important and values are very important. And especially I think documented values are very important. And when you join a company that has documented values and a documented vision, it might feel like you're joining a cult. I remember when I joined Amazon at first, right? Like the leadership principles, I was like, oh my God, these guys, what is this? Really serious? But over time you realize that these are not just words, they are an extremely powerful tool, right? They allow you to call people out at any level, right? So we have seen time and time over and over again, people have been called out by using the documented values that were put forth by leadership, right? And this prevents something that is extremely, extremely dangerous. And that's normalization of deviance, right? Over time, by small increments, a common vision can become something completely different because the deviance became normal, right? The non-standard became standard. That's how air crashes happen, right? So my question is, back to the point, at what point did you realize that values and vision and culture is so important that you need someone like a chief culture officer? I don't know exactly. We can check the commits on the values page and figure out how they came about. I do know at certain point we had 13 values and nobody, including me, knew what they were. So we rationalized that a bit and made something that made sense. I think there's a lot in your statement that I really love. One thing is the drift that you indicate. If you're off by a bit, that can add up over time. If you've ever done position tracking using accelerometers, you'll know what we're talking about. I also think a small percentage in effectiveness in a company makes a big difference in where you'll end up. If we're a bit more efficient in marketing or shipping a bit more product every month, it makes for totally different outcomes over time. If you've had the theory of accumulated interest and things like that, talk about that. I think of our values as a distributed decision-making framework, decisions about what are we going to do, who we're going to hire, who we're going to promote. Those are made much easier by a set of values. It's not so much that every company needs the same set of values, but that you need, I don't want to say unique, but you need a set of values so people at least are all going in the right direction. Not in the right direction, that's the opposite of what I wanted to say in the same direction. The worst thing is if you're doing different things and you argue about it the whole time, it's better to convincingly go somewhere that might be a bit off course, but all go there together and not have to. I think there's a lot of values with other companies where I'm like, well, I think no one's going to disagree with these values, so I don't know what I'm signing up for. It's a lot more, it's better to have distinctive values where people are like, oh, well, this is not the place for me and other people can sign up for it. I think because we can hire people almost wherever they are, I think it's much, we have an opportunity to have values that not everyone's going to sign up to, which is great because it allows people a choice. The worst you can be is a mediocre company or an opinionated company. As you said, values allow you to call people out on it. I'm not always iterating, I'm not always kind, but I hope that the values give, and they do, they give people a hook kind of to call me out on. If not that, my flaws are documented on the CEO page. Feel free to call me out on those two. And last but not least, it's not a cult. The values are not beyond reproach, they're not static. Something was added to the values yesterday, the dog fooding part, and they're open to discussion. Talking about a cult, we had our last company summit was in Crete, in Greece, and I think we were 80% of the hotel guests and we had a toga party because it was Greece and my wife made a super nice toga for me and it was in the GitLab callers and everyone was floating around there in togas and some of the hotel guests actually thought we were cult. That's a cult, yeah. David says that a few people are having trouble getting into this video stream. I'm sorry to hear that. I'll paste a link here, that's to the YouTube live stream and then if they wanna ask a question, they should chat one of you or find another way. So they should go to YouTube, go to the GitLab channel and we're streaming live now. Does anybody else have a question? Yes, Sid, I have a question for you. I've always been very interested in kind of leadership development and in the past video you mentioned that you were working with a CEO coach and I was curious if you had any kind of takeaways that you'd be willing to share or even tips for the team here is I think in a way we're all leaders and could benefit from some of the insight that he shared. Yep, thanks for asking. Yeah, my CEO coach is John Ham. There's a lot, I don't have like an overarching thing. I think a lot of the leadership lessons I'm trying to share with the company are on our leadership page. So if you Google GitLab leadership, you'll find that page, the top two books there I really recommend, especially the first one, High Output Management, that's a great book if you wanna know more about leadership. I think the most important thing that John Ham ever told me was when we had a quarter that was looking really, really bad in sales. So we were gonna be down maybe 30% in sales. And I was really worried because like that's like I'm responsible. The most important thing in this company is growth, incremental ACV. And if that number is way down, that's a big problem. And he said like, look, the board doesn't expect you to like prevent these things from happening. Like these things happen, what they do expect you is to know exactly what's going on and what you're gonna do to fix it. So for the two weeks before the board meeting, I think every other day we had a call where we went to the sales forecast and we really dove in, looked at all the segments, had many requests for extra data. And by the time the board meeting came about, I knew exactly what was going on and I knew what we were gonna do about it. That's all they wanted to hear. The only feedback they had for me was don't do any crazy things like don't sign terms with customers that you don't wanna sign just to up this number. Because they saw I was focused on fixing it. That's cool, thank you. Okay, I have another question. The kind of that, I think of thinking about leadership, I'm thinking about leadership, what makes leadership and leadership growth different down remote only company? But also like kind of along the line with that, and is there anything that you talked a little bit about rational for becoming a remote only company and how it started organically? But is there anything that surprised you, by the way, that you attribute to us being a remote only? Especially as it affects our leadership? Do you have character and values? Okay, you were hard to hear, so I'll take the questions as I heard them and thanks for those. So first of all, how's leadership different in a remote company? I think one thing you don't have in a remote company is that you can't see when people are feeling down. Although video calls really help, but you have less general awareness of how people are feeling. So it's much more important that people know they can just let you know when there's a problem. And someone like, let me know on yesterday, there was a problem in one of the teams, they reached out, we had a chat, it felt comfortable enough to discuss it with their manager, we had a three-way call and give me one second. I just made that call invisible on my calendars and none of you can find out who it was because that's between those three people. And it wasn't a big thing, but it was great to hear that people, even for like smaller things that they just get annoyed about, felt comfortable reaching out and having that call. And I think the call with the manager went really great and I think the situation is resolved, but I think that's a big difference in remote leadership where you have to be, you have to manage on output, you cannot see the input as much and you have to make sure that people feel super comfortable reaching out when there's a problem with how you function as a manager or how the team is doing. And the second part was what's surprising about running remote. I think what surprised me is how well it works. I thought it would be much, much harder. I think a hybrid company is really, really hard. You get all these problems that you don't have when everyone is remote. So I really love the old remote model. I was also surprised how skeptical investors still are of this model and they can clearly see that we have superior onboarding and superior retention compared to and just really talented team compared to their other portfolio companies, let alone a much lower spend. Craig asked in the chat, how is leadership development different, surprised about being remote? Yeah, I hope, I think I interpreted them right. Thanks for typing them out. Any other questions? Yeah, I have a question related to a podcast that I was listening to recently. They mentioned Conway's Law, which for anyone who's not familiar with it, it's the idea that system design tends to reflect the communication structure of the organization that designed it. So yeah, what do you think about how Git Labs organizational structure has or might in the future affect the design of our systems? Yep, great question. I love that law. I'll answer it first for engineering and then for the company as a whole. For engineering, we recently reorganized everything according to our categories. We got a bunch of stages and those are basically product categories in the marketplace, like create, like monitor, like secure. And we organized the organization according to that. So there's a special BM for that stage. There's a front-end team, there's a bunch of front-end that's dedicated to that. There's a back-end team for it. There's UX person dedicated to it. The disadvantage of that is that like it's a very clean separation. So you might get some trouble communicating across it, but that team is able to focus on a specific set of functionality. It's very clear what their market is. It's very clear what their product is. It's very clear who the competitors are. It's very clear what they have to do. So they should be able to ship very efficiently. They have less dependencies on other teams. So it's clean, it should be efficient and they should be able to get lots of results, lots of feature shipping. Now as a company, we're a functional organization. The advantage of a functional organization is that it's very efficient and that it's easy, that it's possible to create one integrated product that's a beautiful experience. We are making a single application for the whole DevOps lifecycle. That single application that's consistent experience for our customers is easier because we're functional. The disadvantages is that cross-functional collaboration is much harder. We try to do different things to help with that. One thing is stable counterparts. So always have the same UX person work with the same team, work with the same PM. Have the same SDR work with the same strategic account leader. They're not reporting up into the same organization but because they're always dealing with the same person there's a lot of opportunity to build like social trust and get to align on goals. There's other things where we try to make sure everyone's aligned. Like we have a free dinner. If we meet our incremental ACV goal, let's make sure that even our developers understand that what's the most important number in the company. That's not the responsibility of sales, that's all of our responsibility. And there's of course like the summit where we're not some breaking up into functional groups, doing sales kickoffs and road mapping sessions, but we try to mix as much as possible all the different teams. There's a lot more to say about this. It's on the leadership page about why we're not a matrix organization. With the functional groups like that, that goes to depth of expertise in the field. And building pockets that are highly capable within a functional area. Are we doing anything similar to a breadth of expertise within the product as a whole? Yeah, so how functional gets you depth? Are we doing something about the breadth of expertise? Not explicitly, preferably you want kind of T-shaped expertise where someone's deep in a certain narrow thing, but then broad across a swath of things. I think one of the things we do is that we're pretty open about whatever one is doing. So if you're interested in an adjacent area, it's easy for you to see what's happening there. For example, if you want to look at like front end code, like it's easy to dive into that. If you want to see what the SDRs, how that marketing meeting is run, hopefully you'll be able to find that meeting and attend it. So by working out in the open, we try to get better at that with the handbook and everything else, give people the opportunity to learn. And luckily we have some people that switch teams sounds bad, but it's a good thing. Annabel just switched to the UX team, which is amazing to see. I'll ask a question, take it away a little way from the company, but just what are you most excited about for Summit? More from like a team perspective? Yeah. I always was pretty nervous about a new Summit. Like I was like, are we gonna have the same vibe as we had before? And now thanks to the answer being yes, we can have the same vibe even though we grow. I got comfortable there. I'm excited to see a whole lot of people. I think after South Africa, we'll say, we'll never again do something in a place that's so far away by airplane. But I also think we'll say that this was a really, really magical place. It's a beautiful place with lots of different activities we can do. I'm most excited about the user generated content sessions. So I encourage you, even though you're new here to submit proposals for it and to opt in for the sessions you wanna attend. So I think that's the people hanging out together and that feeling of finally being able to hang out with the people you've already met online. It's always great. And I'm super looking forward to it. I have a question about dog-fooding. I'm never sure I quite like the word, but I really like that we use GitLab to develop GitLab because I can see how that helps us make GitLab the product better. Then it's gonna be better for everybody else as they try to create big projects as well. I'm curious about what features and we've got all of these features that pretty much do the whole DevOps life cycle that you are most excited about and enjoy using and things you can do in the future that are gonna be even more exciting to make developing GitLab easier and faster and help other companies develop products easier and faster. Yeah, thanks for that. I don't like the term dog-fooding either. So other companies use Drink Your Own Champagne where frugality is one of our sub-values so that doesn't feel right. And then the alternative is Drink Your Own Wine which Amazon I think uses. I think there's some people in the company that never drink alcoholics, alcohol. So I don't think that's super diverse as a term. I also think that the association you have with dog-fooding is that it tastes pretty gross. That's probably true for dog-fooding and our own features too. So maybe it is appropriate. As for GitLab itself, the application, I'm still stunned by the progress we make every month. There's one thing I think is really interesting and is that most of the developers we have are Rails developers, but right now you cannot use AutoDevOps with a Rails application. There's no database provisioned. We don't run any migrations and we don't provision HTTPS certificates automatically. So I'm thinking about making that and the company, the summit challenge. I always do a summit challenge where I do something silly if the company achieves something during the summit. So I'm thinking about that. I already have a juror. It's the husband of Barbie. He signed up to judge the efforts and whether it's usable. And I think how we're really good at chipping individual features, but as a company we should pay more attention, making sure the end-to-end experience is really, really great and that there's no small hiccups in the road. So that's why I'm trying to get people to focus on. How do you balance the, as a CEO said, how do you balance the short-term goals that we have as a company and also the long-term strategy and growth? Because I know there's a lot going on today, a lot of goals that we have short-term, but then also thinking forward to the strategy and innovation required to keep that momentum going. Yeah, that's a hard balance. You can see us struggle with that in the board deck where we ask for hiring 33 to 45 extra people to complete our vision for this year. And it was a tough conversation, but the board agreed to hire 33 extra people so we can ship complete DevOps this year. That is, that's an investment in the future. Most of those things will not be generating revenue until three years in the future. And it's important to start them, I think so, because the three years is not gonna move. So the earlier we start, the bigger the benefit, but it's a very future-oriented thing. And there's always these trade-offs you have to make. You have to make your numbers for the month and for the quarter. So for example, we have lots of SDRs and that's, is that the most efficient way to get leads? They're more efficient ways, but they take two years. And I think the answer is doing both. Like I don't think it will ever, we'll have SDRs going forward as well. And I think we can get the more efficient as well. So you continually have these things you have to do. For example, for our database, we now engaged an external firm. They're really great, but it's extremely expensive to do it. But we're gonna do it for the next three months because we need that expertise and we can't hire a great PostgreSQL people that fast. So if you know any, please let us know. So that's the balance, but luckily we're in a really great business of enterprise software with 90% margins. We're in a really great economy situation where the venture capitalists are able to fund projects like this easily. We're in a market that's increasingly seen as critical to the success of companies with just a few competitors. So we're in a place where we don't have to make those super tough trade-offs that other companies might have to do. That being said, every dollar counts and we should spend them very wisely and efficient. From the YouTube live stream, thanks people from the wider community to asking questions. Any plans to implement WebVR tag into GitLab? No, we have no plans for that. The most fancy thing, which I'm excited about is that we're gonna have client-side evaluation for the Web IDE. That means if you start a new project, and view or react in the Web IDE, you can evaluate the code, you can change the code and immediately see how your app will respond without having to spin up a container or anything else. I'm really excited by that. We're using technology from code sandbox.io. And I think that's a great win. There was also a remark about, we didn't set out to be remote. So we're all remote. That's not a value of us. It started off like that. Martin was in Serbia. I was in the Netherlands. Dimitri was in the Ukraine. And after our combinator, we anticipated two things. First of all, we were glad to be going home because we lived together in the one roof with eight colleagues and my now wife, Karen. And that was great, but pretty intense. But also we learned that it's common for engineering. It's not so common for marketing as well. So we assumed we'd be no exception and that we got an office. But then people stopped showing up. Like Hayden came in two days and then he stopped showing up and doing the commute from Alameda. So I think it follows from our values because we care about results and it's not, it's not, I think most people are able to get results better if they're able to focus and not get a lot of distractions. And we're about efficiency also in your personal life where you can save up to two hours a day by not having to commute. And then the thing you have to organize if you're remote is the social interaction. CEO walking by like a session like this or the virtual coffee breaks and all those things. Can you speak to the origins of one portion of the handbook? Recognizing inspiration is perishable and that we should feel free to capitalize on it where that comes. Yeah, that's, I think I was stopped that quote or was inspired by 37 signals now called Basecamp. I think our mission is everyone can contribute so that should also apply in the company. So if you have something you wanna work on for a couple of hours or a couple of days go ahead and do it. Give it the facts, your results and things like that. Like discuss with your manager upfront but feel free to make a change. It's now part of your onboarding to make a significant change to the handbook. You're free to contribute in other areas. We want these people that know more than just what they do. We want these T-shaped profiles and expertise. So if you care about something, do something about it. Yesterday I was changing the code for our production categories. I spent 20 minutes on that. It's not the most efficient thing in the world but I learned some things about Hamel and it's fun to do something like that. So if you're a salesperson with a great idea to make something, feel free to team up with an engineer, et cetera. Who are your influencers? So I read a lot, I have an addiction to technology news. So I read a lot on Hacker News. GitLab was born on Hacker News. First I saw it on Hacker News then I did a show Hacker News with it. I love the books that are listed on the leadership page. So I'll facilitate those. Great people like David Hayami Henson from Basecamp, Jeff Bezos from Amazon are an inspiration. There's so many interesting things in the world and things to learn from. And I have also inspired by people in the company, lots of examples there, but also for example, our work members, for example, Bruce Armstrong. He's been a CEO a couple of times and he knows, he knows stuff, he let me make mistakes that he already knew like half a year before. Then I was going to do something wrong and then he kept his mouth shut until I asked him what I should do and he didn't volunteer anything. I don't think I'm ever going to reach that level, but yeah, those are an inspiration. Now that I, in San Francisco and being able now to hire the best people all over the world, it's just the quality of the level I deal with on a day-to-day basis, both in our team and outside the company. It just keeps going up. So relatively, I keep going down, but I enjoy it, I enjoy it a lot to learn from everyone. Have you read any good fiction books lately or do you have any good ones that you could recommend? Thanks for your question. I generally don't read fiction. I think reality is very interesting and it's beyond what most of us thought. I do have, I do want to read Snow Crash at some point. I'm not sure I'll get around to it. A volunteer television show, yesterday someone came by and he said, have you seen that show? And he meant the profit. And it's an amazing show about someone goes in and kind of fixes a smaller medium business. And I think it's a great example of what you should care about and simplifying things in order to get effective again. So that show has been an inspiration. So when you're expanding the team this much, how do you avoid kind of a Mythical Man month problem of more input does not mean more output? I get the Mythical Man month problem and what did you start your question with? Since the team is expanding so much right now, how do you avoid that problem? Yep. Well, the inspiration there is Amazon, two pizza teams, teams of about, I think they're slightly smaller at Amazon, but we aim for a team size of about seven people. By the end of the year, no engineering team should be bigger than 10 people. No one should have a span of control bigger than 10 people. And I think we're consistently able to do that. And clearly delineating like responsibilities, making sure there's no too much overlap or coordination required. And then keeping the work really small, like the smaller the unit of work, the less coordination is required. Coordination grows exponentially with the length of the project you're kicking off. So not allowing things that take one more than one month, one release of work is a way to get there. Thanks for the question. Thank you all for the questions. We're at almost at 50 minutes. I really appreciate the questions and that this call ends doesn't mean it's over. Like there's a CEO channel. Feel free to ask something every day. And if there's a problem you wanna talk about, it's always my fault. So feel free to ask me about it. Have a great day. Thanks, sir.