 I think it's been a pretty productive day so far, a lot of really interesting, great insights. You know, I think as I sort of reflect a little bit, there's sort of, I guess, four categories of areas of challenges and issues that I think a lot of people have been bringing up through the course, both through the questions from the audience, which have been great, so please keep those coming, because we'll try to address those a little bit later, but also through the panelists. And I think sort of those four categories have been culture, communication, management and hiring, sort of. I think that's what's on top of people's minds, so we'll eventually dig into that and get your thoughts on that, Sid. But I think you alluded to this earlier when we initially spoke up here that you used to have an office at GitLab, but people stopped showing up. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, for sure. So the first office was my house in the Netherlands, and I had a spare desk, and anybody who was new to the company would be invited. And they came on Monday, and it tends to be that Wednesday was the last day that they showed up. They didn't show up on Thursday. And I was always like, why aren't they here? And why didn't they tell me that they not intended to come? Like, I thought it was weird, but I felt like, okay, well, it's about the work. They were working, I was seeing results, so I never told someone, hey, you have to be there. And then the second time was when we went to Y Combinator, we were all in the same house for three months, nine people, super intense. Then Y Combinator said, okay, you plan on going all remote after this, but we don't recommend that. Remote works for engineers, but not for sales and marketing, so get an office. So we listened, we got an office, and we put 10 desks in there, and the same thing kind of happened. I think Hayden, our salesperson from Alameda, was the first person, he showed up three days, and then he didn't show up anymore, and that kind of pattern repeated. So funny, you hire a VP of sales, and they say, oh, this doesn't work for SDRs, the people who do outbound. They're just out of college, they won't be able to do this, but by the time he came around to hiring VDRs, he was living in Sacramento, so he had a four hour commute before, so he was pretty interested in the idea of no longer having that, and then we found our BDRs in Utah, and they were great, and there was no way they were gonna come to San Francisco. That's really interesting. So somebody made a comment earlier that the first 50 hires you make are really, really crucial for setting the tone for culture of the organization. I'd actually be curious, how were you able to recruit people in your early days to get through that first 50 hires? What was sort of the pitch? Were people either attracted to or maybe turned off a little bit by the remote nature of it, or how did you get people over the line to join the company? Yeah, I'm gonna disagree a bit. I think culture is something you do continuously, and I think our culture is more strong and are pronounced now than it was at the time, and that's because we wrote it down, because we continually iterate on it, but also because we reinforce it. You can find the 11 ways in which we kind of reinforce our values on our values page, but the pitch, like to join a remote company was, hey, you're gonna have more time, so you're gonna not have your commute time. You're gonna have more kind of freedom on how you distribute your date. You wanna go to the gym or the supermarket during the day, that's fine, and you're gonna have more flexibility if there's something on foreseen that pops up, but there were also other pitches. If people were already remote, it's like you're already remote, you know how awesome it is, but this is now a company where you're not in the satellite office. You don't feel out the loop because everyone's on the same level, and to executives it was like, yes, I know you're skeptical of this model, that's okay, please have a chat with our CFO who's gone through this and is now able to have quicker communication with the sales people than he was able to do at his previous company. Interesting, so do you ever, especially in the early days, did you ever run into any negative, you mentioned why Common Air sort of told you that this might not be a good idea, did you ever run into that same reaction either from potential investors or customers in the earlier days? Yeah, for sure, and it was most pronounced during our B round. During the A round, we were still sat on the office. During the B round, it was pretty clear that we were not gonna do that, and we had a great investor here in the Valley who was very articulate. They say, look, you check all the boxes except for this remote thing that you're doing, and it's just not, it's unusual. And he said literally, I'm not saying it's not gonna work, it's just a risk that we don't have to take because we have enough deal flow to take a company that does check that box. So that was, I couldn't disagree with that, and we didn't get that investment. And there's a person here who actually managed to convince our B round investor, Orvis Capital. And his name is AB, he's here in the crowd. Thanks for coming, AB. Will you stand up? Oh, he's meeting another founder, always hustling. So the feedback was from Vili Ilchev, he's like, I love this company, it's great. I'm concerned about this remote thing, but what he did great is he invited us to talk about it. So all the other investors were thinking internally, but not inviting us to talk about it. So he invited us, I had a deck specifically addressing all the concerns. We were at the end of the deck, and Vili's like, yeah, that sounds nice, kind of being able to mitigate it. And then AB pounded his fist on the table almost, I don't think literally, but he was pretty close to that. He said, look, I spend the entire night reading their handbook. This is the best-run company I've ever seen. And that kind of closed the deal for us. So anything from customers in the earlier days? You know, sort of, it's a little bit unusual, and maybe they don't even actually know that you were remote in the earlier days. Did you get any feedback from them? Yeah, it's remarkable, like customers is not a problem. Customers love when you visit them. So it's not a problem, and our CFO, his Zoom background now, is a UPS office. It's the UPS office where GitLab is registered. Sometimes they have people kind of showing up there and asking where GitLab is, and it's like, it's all remote, there is no office. That's funny. So to double click a little bit on hiring, which I sort of mentioned a little bit earlier, what's sort of the approach to identifying talent? When you have effectively seven billion people in the world, how do you narrow the scope and find and attract the right talent? You can't hold a local meetup to try and find people. What are some of the things that GitLab is doing to do that? Currently, they find us. 90% of the hires we make is inbound. So people that apply it on our website and we get 3,000 applications every week. That's not, I don't think that's healthy or good. So we're gonna go, we're gonna strive for 50-50 and doing more outbound ourselves will be able to kind of attract people that make the company more diverse. We think that's a great lever. But so far, people finding us, we get a lot of people say, I read your handbook. I kind of copy pasted certain things to our organization and then after a while I start thinking, I might as well work at the company where they make the handbook. Right. And so, especially in the earlier days of trying to scale your hiring, were there specific things that you did to improve the hiring experience to get people comfortable across the line and getting engaged with GitLab? Well, we started early. The first NEP promoter score we did, or a satisfaction score in our case was for the hiring experience. So we ask everyone who got declined by us what their experience was. We're striving for four to two and we've generally been above 4.0 for that. So measuring it right now are... That's on an out of five scale. Yeah, out of five scale. Yeah, that'd be pretty bad. And then we're still working to get applied to accept, to get that timing down from 40 days to 30 days. I think what we look for in candidates is not so much that they can do remote, but that they are a manager of one, that they can manage their own time, that they don't need someone constantly prodding them to advance. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One of your colleagues mentioned earlier about the salary widget that you guys have created, sort of a calculator to come up with the appropriate compensation based on where somebody is in the world. Can you talk a little bit more about how you came up with the idea, where you get the data and just tell us a bit more about that? Yeah, that was a huge undertaking. So we had people applying and we wanted to not be paying people differently without a reason. And we do wanna pay people local market salary. Like it's not healthy for people to be above market because they will not leave your company even though they're miserable. And that's not good for people to be underpaid because they will leave your company even though they're doing great. So a market is determined by the metro region you live in. There's huge differences between San Francisco and somewhere else. So we tried to get to that. And in the beginning, we were kind of thinking about like cost of living and stuff like that. But it's not about that. It's about the market wage. And we found that the rent in a city is a great indicator of what the market wage is. Now we've since progressed a bit beyond that. And Brittany, who was on stage earlier, did a great job at that. And we, it's a pretty simple formula and it has six factors. One of it is the San Francisco benchmark. Like what is this wage in San Francisco? One of it is the location. One of it is like, what's the level of the job? Like are you senior or junior? One of it is kind of the experience within that level. And so that's a 10% higher or lower. One of it is, are you a contractor or an employee? And with those factors, we were able to kind of construct a great salary, which we display on our job pages. So if you apply for a job at GitLab at the bottom of the page should be that calculator. And since a few weeks, it also has our stock options so you can kind of look at different scenarios and see what your stock will be worth. And do you find when you take feedback from candidates that didn't make it all the way through the funnel, do they mention that specifically? Is that something that you find is instrumental for their experience? I don't think so. I think you can live without a calculator that is public. We just default to public. I do think it's very important that you can explain internally why you're paying people different things. Like you have people come together, they talk about their salary and they come to me like, hey, why am I earning half of this other person? And you better have the right answer. Like, hey, they're a contractor in a high cost region and you're living in a lower cost region, et cetera. And this is how it works. On that note, transparency is a key piece to the GitLab culture. And I believe the last count I heard your manual is now about 3,000 pages. Yes. Talk a little bit about some of the decisions early on that you made to make that one of the key values. So we started with that because we are a company that is very influential in the open source project. Now what you find is that people in the open source community tend to be skeptical of the influence of the company and making that work is essential to our success. And we thought by giving them greater insight into the company, you tend to have more compassion and more trust and it's easier when something goes off the rail to quickly remedy that. We also found it's a great help in hiring people, if you can tell. Like having that handbook out there is a great kind of promotional tool. People can opt into our culture. Like if they like how we run a company, they can opt in. And that doesn't have to be everyone because there's many more people than can ever work at GitLab. So that's been a great other reason to do it. And it's for us, transparency is not something we do because it's necessarily always the most pragmatic thing but it's something we do because it's in our top three values. Are there any things, are there certain topics or things you won't be transparent about? Yeah, there's a list of that too. So if you Google GitLab, not public, you'll find a list of 15 things all the way from like non-audited financial results to partnerships with other companies. So you've talked a lot about in the past communication internally and using tools like Zoom and Slack. Are there any tools that you have in GitLab that you wouldn't be able to do business without? Yeah, I think Zoom and Slack are good. I think Google Docs, we use it for meetings and we make sure there is an agenda for every meeting. It's editable by everyone. It has the questions. You type the question in the meeting doc before you even ask it and people are taking notes real time of the meeting and it's made our meetings much more focused and efficient and also if there's some people who couldn't attend the meeting, they have much better notes of what the meeting was about. So I think it's not just Google Docs, it's not just a tool, it's also how you use the tool and we've got a lot of documentation of how you use certain things. Right, so on the communication front, one of the challenges you might run into with a distributed or remote workforces, different cultures and views of the worlds based on where you live. Recently, there's been some reports about how you deal with political banter at GitLab. Can you talk a little bit about why that has been a challenge, if it has been in some of the decisions you made as the CEO around that? Yeah, we have a policy of not bringing up political subjects in the workplace and I think it's the default for a lot of companies but you see that here on the West Coast, especially like in San Francisco, it's getting more prevalent to bring things up. So we're kind of, we're struggling to kind of rhyme the two things. On one hand, we do want to kind of talk about things that are important internally. On the other hand, we don't want to alienate people. So I think it's hard. I think we have a lot of a significant portion of the people who work at our company are Republicans. And we don't want to alienate those people. At the same time, there's things happening that I can imagine a lot of people in the company, including myself, are not super happy about. So it's a very tough trade-off and I hope that there were simple solutions to it and I'm figuring out that there's not any clear-cut ways to do that. How early in the organization life did you establish the no politics? Was that from the start or? It was basically when I came to the US and I realized that was kind of happening in a lot of companies already. For our people in Europe, that was something that was not, like if you work in the US, you know not to bring up political things the most of the time unless you're kind of aware of what the vibe is of the rest of the people. For the people in Europe, that wasn't obvious and that was creating a lot of confusion. So we try to make these implicit things explicit so that everyone is aware even if they come from a totally different culture. That's really interesting. So one of the questions that we actually got from a number of people, we asked a few people when they signed up what sort of some of the challenges were. I think people did struggle with the level of transparency. Do you think you can still get an all remote organization to work without a high level of transparency? I think it's very hard. Obviously you don't have to be public about things like we're public about everything. I don't think that's necessary. It's something we do, but others don't. I do think that remote is mostly about working asynchronously. You can shoulder tap as easily, you can ask as easily. So you do have to make sure materials are available and you cannot wait for someone to share something with you and if that's the case, you have to share things with more people than you normally do. So I do think an increased amount of transparency is a necessity for working asynchronously and remote. Makes sense. So shifting gears to talk a little bit about culture and you mentioned at the beginning that's cultures and that you're constantly working on and it sort of feeds on itself. Your culture today is stronger than when you started with the business. Talk us through a little bit about why that's the case and some of the things that you do to foster culture. Yeah. I think it's the case both because our values are better defined. Like if you Google GitLab values, you'll see that there's a lot of thinking that went into that and there's a lot of examples. When we started the culture, all of that was, we weren't, at some point we had 13 values and nobody could name more than three. I think that's a lot better now. And there's also like more ways in which we reinforce them and we have 11 ways right now. And examples are every promotion is linked to our values, every hire is linked to our values in case of a promotion publicly for the whole company to see. There's also a thing like we have a thank you channel and when people thank someone, you can add emojis for the values that kind of apply to that. And that's input for like a value award we give later during our global get together. And do you do anything face to face? And a couple of people highlighted earlier that it is still important despite people working all over the globe that you do get FaceTime. Do you do anything to encourage that? Yeah, once a year or once every nine to 12 months we come together as a company. It's about 85% attendance and we spend our time not on deaf by PowerPoint with presentations, but half of the time we go on excursions together and half of the time we have an conference where people bring up subjects they wanna talk about and informal setting of 15 people. Great. So got a really good questionnaire from the crowd. I think that there's been a number of conversations on the stage over the course of the day today around how do you ensure that people are contributing and ensure products of you? This is actually the flip side of that. With Philly Remarked Teams how do you ensure people don't get burnt out? Are there things that you can do to manage and assess that? Yeah, it's super hard. There's a few things. So for example, a GitLab managers are not allowed to ask about how long you're working except if they suspect that you're working kind of two long hours. It's also important to kind of have that be open about mental health and have that conversation and make sure that that's kind of a topic that can be discussed. We also wanna make sure that we recently edited the handbook to say, look, if you're not taking vacation, you're not a very good collaborator because apparently you're not able to transfer your job to anybody else. You're not able to define it well. So we try to shame people into taking vacation. I took three weeks off this summer. I took last week, I took first day, half the day off and Friday the whole day. Like we try to get lead by example as an executive team. Now, of course, like preventing burnout is not just about hours, you can burn out working very few hours. So it's also important that when managers see someone's productivity declining, they have an open conversation and could be due to them not working hard enough, but almost in every case it's due to something else. And cultural norms around vacation vary a lot across companies. And how do you enforce or encourage people that when they're actually taking vacation, you're on vacation? Are there certain things that you do in terms of either forcing people to put up email responses on those lines? We don't. And it's a thing I struggle with. I have one report, Emily Surio, and she calls it as a half a vacation. So she's not doing her regular things, but she's joining meetings, she finds interesting. She sells on Slack, but she's also like reading a ton of books and doing other things. And I think there's a huge, we want managers of one and we better treat people like managers of one. So for example, at GitLab, in a meeting, it's okay to not pay attention. And if someone has to repeat a question because you weren't paying attention, that's not a shameful thing. That's solely okay. We'll repeat the question. You're the boss of your own time. You better manage it well. And if that part of the meeting doesn't seem interesting to you, it's okay to do email or even Facebook on the side. It's okay. Turn your camera on. It's totally fine to look the other way. I think with vacations it's the same thing. Like people should be in control of that. I think it'd be a problem if people get kind of pinged or demanded upon by colleagues while they weren't into that. And I've not seen that happening yet. Do you find yourself relying heavily on, I guess for lack of a better way to put it, quantitative metrics of productivity, code commits or whatever that might be for engineers. If so, how do you kind of think about that for a little bit harder to quantify roles, human resources and some of those? Yeah, for sure. We rely a lot of metrics. And metrics might not tell you what the problem is, but they certainly can tell you where a problem, where there might be a problem. And for engineers, it's virtual class per month for marketing, it's MQLs, SQLs, activity. For community, it's average response time, sentiment. So there's metrics possible for everything. And if you want to have an idea, you can Google GitLab KPI index and it shows like the 50 metrics for every one of our departments. I think there's over 100 metrics on that page and some of them have public embedded graphs so you can check them out. Great, I'm just looking at some of the questions at the audience and just a reminder, if you want to submit questions, Slido, you've got some good ones here though. So one of them is how have you solved the time zone issue? It's unsolvable, it's the bane of our existence. Asynchronous, working asynchronous is the only thing you can do. So write things down, record it. If you Google GitLab and filter, you'll find a YouTube channel with like a ton of videos. Right now our biggest problem is that we can only livestream one meeting at a time so we're gonna create a bunch of extra channels. Write things down, work in issue trackers. It's also about taking stuff out of Slack if you can because the Slack conversation kind of moves on and then people in other time zones are left. Also not have too many meetings, like try to do things asynchronously. For example, there's a key meeting for sales and they did it asynchronously this month. So I think that's the only thing that can fight it. It's still not great. The experience for GitLab and people for people in Asia Pacific is not as great as for the people in America and Europe. And as you guys continue to scale, do you think that that will become more challenging or less challenging? No, I think it will be the same and I think we'll get even slightly better at working asynchronously. Great question just came in actually, that's related to what we were talking about previously. What do you do if an employee on vacation is not checking their email and you might lose a customer because of that? Is that something that you've run into or how would you deal with the problem like that? Yeah, I've not seen that problem happening and for example, if it's a customer thing, like we try to work in issue trackers and we are sales people, keep the notes in sales force, like we try to document things. So there should no be nobody who's like admissible and but it's okay. Like it's if it's something you really dire, yeah, do send them a text. Got it. So you mentioned that when you moved here, it's about nine employees at Gillab, when you moved to San Francisco? Yes. And today you're approaching about a thousand so it's about a over a hundred X growth in the last four or five years. Four years, yeah. So that has to pose a lot of challenges for you. What would you say are the biggest challenges you're facing today at scale? It's been remarkably good. I think some of the things were focused on improving. One thing I mentioned is doing more outbound recruiting that will allow us to bring more gender diversity into the company. Another thing what we'd love to do is have more opportunities for juniors, so like internships, apprenticeships, which we don't have yet. And one thing I'm super worried about, but that's not happening is that us lowering the hiring bar because we wanna recruit a person for that function, but actually over time it's kind of gone up. That's great. So any advice, so we've had a lot, I've talked to quite a few people in the crowd today and I think a lot of them are earlier stage founders who are thinking about going fully remotes. Any particular advice you would give them from the earliest stages that they should be focused on? I think the hardest thing at Gillab has been a handbook first culture and that is like if you wanna make a change at the company, if you wanna change something, you change it in the handbook first and then you communicate it and that's allowed us to kind of have a living, breathing handbook that's so essential to that success and that's not intuitive, that will not happen naturally, that will not happen because you wrote down that it has to happen, that takes kind of constant reminding like hey, that's great that you're making that change but should be in the handbook before you communicate it. That's the thing I've been focusing on very early and I think it's just something really hard to get back if you're bigger. So we're coming on time here but the last thing I wanna ask is we're sitting here five years from now and you're looking back on the journey of Gillab. What would you hope happens over the next five years that you would call a success for the company? Yeah, so we have publicly documented goals for November 18, 2023 and that was include, for example, being at a billion dollars of revenue but also that our top 10 performance should say that Gillab has the best people in their team with a satisfaction score of four or two. They're all public so Google Gillab sequence strategy if you're interested but I also hope that when we sit here five years from now that all remote is a bigger part of the legacy of Gillab than the company itself. I think all remote has the potential to transform the world and spread opportunity more equally and I'm super excited to see that. And just so people in the audience know where can they find the Gillab handbook? Google Gillab handbook or Google Gillab all remote because Darren has done an amazing job like writing up a lot of the lessons. Great. All right, well we're at time. Thank you guys very much for coming and I wanna especially thank our teams from General Catalyst in particular Ronda for helping put this together as well as a team from Gillab, Darren and other folks. This was an amazing endeavor and I hope you audience, you took a lot away from this. There's a lot more to come. This has become such an interesting burgeoning topic. We're gonna see a lot more along the lines of blog posts and a whole variety of information. I think this is a great starting point for everybody. Thank you guys. Thank you guys.