 Hi there, I'm Sid, I'm the CEO of GitLab and I'm here today with Andrew. Andrew had some questions about how to build and manage a distributed team. Andrew, welcome. Thanks for going live with me. Can you tell a bit about what you do and why you became interested in distributed work? Absolutely. Yeah, thanks very much for having me here, Sid. So I'm Andrew Scheuerman, the CEO and co-founder of Arch Systems. So we're a venture backed industrial IoT company. We're 17 people today, 15 all in one place, one in India, one in France, but starting to become more distributed as both our customer base and the people we work with goes all over. So just a little history on our company. Probably a lot of people out there have heard of Internet of Things. Maybe you have Internet of Things devices in your homes. You know, everything's getting connected. In the industrial world, there's a lot of stuff that's not connected and it's actually not easy to connect at all. A lot of important problems. We actually started in Tanzania, Africa, where we were working on drinking water wells. People wanted to get clean drinking water out of a well. The well was broken a lot. We wanted to make the dumb well into a smart well. And there's no easy way to do that. So we have a variety of these retrofit sensors you can plug into machines like pumps and wells and manufacturing machines, turn a dumb machine into a smart machine. And our top focus worldwide is in manufacturing. We're rolling out with some of the global manufacturers to monitor their machines. And so from day one, we've kind of had customer projects all over the world, even when we were only three, four people. We were in like five, six countries already in terms of where our sensors were. So we've had to kind of embrace an international culture from the beginning. But we had our team all in one spot to begin with. And as we're spending more time all around the world with customers, we wanted to be around the world too. And while we do build hardware, the majority of what we do is software. You know, program these boxes, pull data out and analyze it. And I've just had the sense that there's so many amazing people all around the world that care about what we do and want to work with us. One particular experience we had over the last couple of years is a partnership with a university in Paris. It came out of nowhere. It was an amazing partnership. The people there just love what we do. And so it just kind of happened that way. We started working with people in France. We have one we're working with already and we're looking to expand. And as time has gone, we found more amazing people. And the traditional logic is, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, you've got to bring everyone all to one place, have them under one roof, or how could you possibly communicate? But it's like, okay, come on. In this age of tools and in software collaboration, really that doesn't seem necessary. And kind of having people all over the world at all times, talking to each other, collaborating effectively, the diversity of it as well as the talent that exists ever just seemed like a natural approach. So that's why I wanted to talk to you, Sid, because I know that you guys do this in an incredible way and see what we could learn from you and potentially apply here at ARCH. Yeah. Thank you so much. I'd say fire away. What can I tell you more about? I guess to kick it off, maybe you could give both me and anyone else that's listening, kind of an overview of what GitLab, what your distributed team is like. How many people do you have? Where are they? And at a high level, how did you get to that position? Yeah. We're now 400 people. We're kind of doubling every year. We're 200 people at the start of this year. And they're in over 45 countries. Everyone works from a unique location. So everyone works from the location they prefer, whether that is their house or whether that is an office. If they want to have an office, we will pay for the office space for them. But there's no headquarters. I'm now also at my home. We have another room here. I converted my living room to the board room. There's a table there. That's basically the only physical place we have because the board members really wanted a place to congregate. But at GitLab, we don't come to work every day. We work from our computers. We do a lot of video chat. So it's not lonely at all. We see each other a lot. Every day, we have a call and we talk about our life outside of work with a group of people. We do virtual coffee breaks and everything else. But we just don't have the need to come together. That means that we can hire people in most countries in the world. That's an awesome... It's a superpower where you're able... If someone is enthusiastic about GitLab, oh, sorry, you can hire them. I've got a ton of logistical questions, but let's put that maybe a little later on. Tell us a little bit. Can you tell me about the culture of GitLab? Maybe I'll also tie in. I think you started from the very beginning with that completely distributed... Yeah, I forgot about that part of your question. Let me tackle that. So it wasn't super intentional. The first employee was in Serbia. And I was in the Netherlands. So well, that was remote. And then my co-founder joined Dimitri to offer of GitLab, the creator of GitLab. And he was in Ukraine, so that was remote. And then I hired a couple of people in the Netherlands, and they came to my house there. They had two desks. But the two desks... Yeah, people didn't mind coming, but also they didn't see a need because we were all working online anyway. So that worked. Then we came to the US for our combinator, and we lived together in a house where classical Silicon Valley, like that living room was like our programming then. That was good, but also very intense. Everyone was glad to go home. People doing my combinator, some people that we met said, look, this works for engineering, but it doesn't work for everything else. I later found other people that say it works in sales, but it doesn't work in engineering. So people have lots of opinions. Anyway, one of our values is boring solutions. So we're not going to try to innovate anything here. So we got an office, and we got it near Bartz Station so people could come in, and people came in for like two days, and then they stopped coming. And it still worked, but they didn't see the need to come to the office, and we didn't make them. So that's kind of the story. Every time people said, they came for a few days, and they figured out it wasn't needed, and they leave. So I don't think people go to the office because there's a big reason, unless there's a big reason to come there. So if you're missing out on gossip, or on opportunities, or on overhearing things that are important, or support, or if you don't feel like part of a team, if you don't come to the office, people will come there. But if you can live without it, the inflexibility that comes with it. So that's how we managed to avoid it. So I want to ask some questions about culture first. What are some of the unique things that you do to still tie all those people together and make all of them know that they're one team, though they don't share one roof? You must have traditions and rituals of some sort. Yeah. So one of our values is transparency. So I think because in a traditional office, you're able to kind of compensate for a lack of transparency by more informal communication. That's not the case in GitLab. So we're very public about what we do. And you can find, for example, our strategy, our OKRs, all of our issues are roadmap. They're all online. Everyone can see them. And that means that they're easy to access. And it's actually helped us a lot as we've grown that that is the case. I'm going to take some notes now. I'm getting some good stuff here. Great. This will be recorded so you can re-watch it, but feel free to take notes. There's also a lot of practical aspects. I think what an office does bring you is kind of the you get to know people better outside of work and it kind of happens at the water cooler. So we want to recreate that. So every day at 8 o'clock, we have a group conversation and a certain part of the company presents so that you get to see what they do. And it's a maximum of 10 minutes and then a maximum of 20 minutes of questions that people ask about that function. So we stopped there for a while and people said, I don't know what's going on in GitLab anymore. So that's important. The other thing is our company call. It's at 8.30 Pacific. And it's five minutes of announcements. Like, these are the things going on right now that you should know about. So it's a few minutes of just hanging out with a defined group of people. I did it today and it's just casual. You get to know people over time. What do they like? What songs do they like? What do they like to travel? Do they have kids? All kinds of things. And like someone shared piano music that he really liked this morning. So I was listening to that. And so it's a way to get closer to someone. And that's a go-ahead. The morning that you do? Four days a week. Four days a week every single morning. And the first 10 you said is just announcements. And then the rest of the time, the 20 minutes. It's just five minutes of announcements. And they all have a link. So if you want to know more, you can click the link. It's just a way to kind of get everyone on the same page. Sometimes it helps to verbalize things. And then another thing we do is virtual coffee breaks. So if you join, you introduce, you do the concept of just booking 25 minutes on somebody's schedule. And without an agenda. And you can just chat. And it can be about work. It can be not about work. That's totally fine. And that's a way to have that informal interaction that you can have in a hallway conversation but recreate that remote. And you can just send someone a calendar invite to set one up. Or there's a donor channel in Slack that sets you up automatically with people. And if you join, we force you to do 10 to get used to the concept. Now, we do see the value of being in person. It is something seems real when it's in person. People tend to be also a bit nicer to each other when they're in person. Now, I think people at Get Lab are amazingly nice, by the way. And we see it when we have our summit every nine months. So we do come together. But we try to make that very much about doing fun things together. So we do excursions and talking about stuff that you otherwise wouldn't talk about. So it's not full of presentations. There's kind of no presentations allowed unless it's a customer who's presenting to us what they like and don't like about Get Lab. But there's a lot of unconference sessions where you can propose your own topics. And that's been a great experience. Where is that summit every year? Or every nine months? Every nine months. Different locations. So the last few were in Cancun, Mexico, in Crete, in Greece, and in Cape Town, South Africa. And the next one will be in New Orleans. That's pretty cool. That's not a bad perk to use in a cool trip every nine months. Yeah, we figured that. We all have to go somewhere anyway. There's not a concentration of people anywhere. So let's go to a place that's worth visiting. Worth to travel. Tell me a little bit about the main tools that you use. You mentioned Slack. You have a Donut channel. And especially to what extent are the tools manual and you're depending on culture to put people together? Or do you have automation that you've built in that is a little bit like this? Yeah, there's not a lot of automation specifically to match people. With the onboarding, the tank holes, those are checklist items you have to do yourself. The Donut channel does match people automatically. So that's cool. Other tools we use are Zoom, Google Docs, and a whole lot of GitLab, obviously, lots of use of our issues. I do think we're really good at using the tools effectively. So for example, every single meeting you have at GitLab, you'll find a Google Doc attached for life note taking where multiple people can take notes. So by the end of the conversation, you have a good overview of what was discussed. We schedule meetings effectively. There's no need to email first and then schedule the meeting. You just send the invite and the yes or no. People actually stick to that. That stuff starts on time, et cetera. So just being very, one of our values is efficiency and people have to be very careful with other people's time. So I want to ask you about costs, but actually before that, I wanted to talk a little bit about how you see diversity and inclusion. That's a really important topic at every company. And a lot of times with remote and distributed culture, people talk about how that's not a diversity of where people come from per se, but it is a diversity of work style that can lead it to be hard to be included in a discussion. So especially with a company that's in a hybrid situation like mine, when you have some people in the room and then somebody's outside the room, it's really easy to ignore them on the video chat. Since you've been 100% distributed from day one, I guess you've had, like you said, you've become really good at using the tools. Is that something that you think about at all? Like how you make sure people get a say in conversations and how their personalities map over video and digital interactions all the time to make sure that you hear from everyone? Yeah, it's something we think about. For example, at a certain point, we had pretty large groups in the company call and there were certain people that talked a lot and people that didn't talk a lot. So we cut it down in smaller groups where it's sure if you join, someone will ask you for your response or something so that everyone gets to speak and is listened to. I do think running a hybrid company which both co-located people and remote people is way harder. We're all remote and it's hard enough to get people to write things down and to record things. And I'm just a broken record about these things. Hey, we're having a meeting now but I don't see the doc attached or hey, we're having a meeting which could be relevant to other people but I don't see it being recorded or hey, we recorded that meeting but I don't see it being uploaded. Hey, you're announcing a change but I don't see a link to the handbook where we're a handbook-first company. You recorded there first. Hey, you're giving a presentation as a training but you should really be presenting the handbook pages unlike a broken record because it's very counter-intuitive to work like that. People are used to talking to having an isolated change that doesn't have to relate to everyone else everyone else is doing but it's very important but it's not intuitive and it's a very artificial thing you're doing. It works really well and requires constant help from everyone. Do you have any tips besides just being a broken record to get people to document first, like you said? Yeah, just be a broken record. It has to come from the top. You've got to give the example. If you look at our GitLab unfiltered YouTube channel you see me there more than anybody else make changes like the company call it didn't work as we scaled, we changed it it's now working again and stop being a hybrid company it's much harder for you because of the hardware but for example, when you have a room full of people and then some people on the screen that's just a horrible experience everyone should be in a separate room with headsets on that's how you get good audio and everyone can understand each other not the people on the table can hear what the other person is saying but the remote people are saying hey can you speak up a bit because the microphone is in the middle of the room like no, it just doesn't work that well. I will say for anyone else that's listening we're trying our best to do it and I know a lot of other hybrid companies are and we've tried to use it as an impetus to get better at inclusion because it's like hey recognize if somebody is on the screen here purposefully stop yourself and check in like hey do you want to add something to this conversation which our hope has been that whether that plays out as something that influences also the way you think about gender ethnicities you always have more aggressive and less aggressive personalities more extroverts and introverts we've hoped that we can set some norms where it's very obvious with a screen that you need to stop and that would also kind of propagate in the way that we try to bring more voices out but I agree it's so, so hard. Very hard. We have the reverse problem where people because of the latency people are not comfortable with interrupting each other but kind of adding on each other in a normal meeting that is what makes it like efficient to work in person because you can kind of hear when someone wants to speak because they'll start talking like they take a breath or you hear that so we're trying to make people more comfortable with kind of interrupting each other that's super hard and obviously it has to be respectful and not always the same people etc but getting as close as you can to that in-person interaction is a challenge. I want to take a question from the YouTube chat coding Koopa asks do you see this entirely remote form of a company taking a large share of the tech space in the future yes the answer is yes I think remote is the future of work I think we will have a lot of meetings in the future because I think there's something to in-person meetings I think a lot of them will be with people not working at our company so there'll be a lot of meetings with people outside the company and we'll have to travel for that and we'll go to conferences more and things like that but coming every day to the same location of a random selection of the company that doesn't make a lot of sense to me and I think that's going away alright let me ask you actually before we leave diversity we talked about inclusion a lot could you just comment a bit about the nature of your team are there certain people that you think just in today's world are you more keen to do, distribute it and enjoy it and has that led to where you're trying to push on diversity or has it been pretty broad? I think we've seen a lot of people are like yeah I want to join your company but I'm not sure about this whole remote thing especially with senior leadership and the lesson is that it's fine it doesn't matter if you get people who are managers of one they can manage their own time which basically you should hire for anyway then they can do remote I think there's people who just won't like it which is fine my wife loves to hang out at the office that's cool with me also the opposite was a remote working as a solo founder for a couple of years maybe also swinging back a bit from that but I think for the vast majority of people they can do remote just fine and there's not an intrinsic ability you need I totally agree and I was curious to see if it's that different at all today but that's good to hear for sure tell me a bit about costs whatever you can share you said at the beginning you can do engineering remote you can do sales remote not engineering likewise some people will say distributed is a much more cost effective way and just as many people will tell you it's going to be so expensive when is it more expensive when is it less and how do you think about the costs of your distributed team there's an obvious thing you're saving on and that is the office costs although we pay for the internet of our people and stuff like that but I do think you save money I think you save people a lot of time that's not the majority is accruing to the people themselves not to the company and that's fine but you save people a commute you save people the distractions of an office for example we would have to move the company probably 8 times by now which is a major headache the other big thing is you get to hire outside of the big metro areas if you're going to have a co-located company you want to be in a big market because you want to have a chance of finding the people you need and that means like San Francisco or New York or London or Berlin that's going to be expensive well Berlin maybe not so much but that's the market where most of the talent is San Francisco, New York, London it's very expensive and if you're all remote you're going to have people all around the world and most markets will be more affordable and the market rates will be lower than those few hubs that you're otherwise constricted to can you tell us how you do compensation at GitLab? do you do market data for all different geographies and then normalize? we have a compensation calculator that looks at what's this job in San Francisco and then it looks at how does the market rate of this location compare to San Francisco in general and then we do that formula if I was on your team do you ever have people that were in San Francisco want to move to somewhere else or want to move to for example and do they then come with a request to change? we'll have a request and we'll look at it and in principle we could lower your compensation that happened if you may I'm not sure that ever happened most of the time we can say look you can keep your compensation but you're not eligible for like an increase you're paid more we won't decrease it also we didn't have this happen a lot we tend to have very few people in San Francisco itself I think we have 15 people there now most of them really want to be in San Francisco but so it can happen our right is that we can lower your compensation most of the time we're able to find another solution one of the things that has to resonate with me right now we're based I'm sitting in Mountain View right now just across the street from Google headquarters here and so we're in one of those big centers but San Francisco during traffic time is a full hour and a half away without traffic it's 30 minutes but that's such a painful commute that a lot of times a lot of people that doesn't make sense for them it's so painful so even though we're in the city center our view is constricted to like 15 mile radius or something it doesn't commute much further but it's really painful for them so even when you're positioned in the middle of these cities sometimes it as traffic has gotten so much worse and they're overpopulated like even then it doesn't feel like it's working no the Facebook is a good example San Francisco is basically the dorm for Facebook because they can't build any housing on campus so they transfer it to people it's a one and a half hour bus with the traffic each way so you're spending three hours a day in a bus with not so great internet and not so stable desk and there's no desk it's just a bus and you're hunched over your laptop and then you get to campus and it's not that every meeting is in person because the campus is so big that you can't make some meetings so you have to select which meetings you want to attend and the other ones you join by kind of video so you spend three hours commuting and then you still have a lot of your meetings that you're taking by video I think there's a better spend of that three hours and we should encourage more flexibility and yes there can be a meeting a day where you want to collaborate and it's nice to be in person or it's a really long one or you want to build rapport with someone great like come in for that don't blindly go every single day in the morning and go back in the evening that doesn't make sense to me so in terms of accountability because that plays a role in cost you know when you think about the people that you're bringing on to try to get a lot of great work done are you just do you just totally manage it by your goals by OK ours and then just what's their output or do you have anything about showing up on a daily basis checking in or anything like that yep no it's all about results it's all about output we are not allowed to manage the input so if they're going to ask you like hey how long did you work yesterday or if they start watching when there's a person get the green icon on Slack or stuff like that we shut that down like that's not appropriate the only case where that's appropriate is maybe if we suspect you're working too long I confront the people with like hey you seem to be working I can see your good life profile you're working weekends like okay you should stop what we do look at is like an activity profile if someone hasn't shipped anything for two days they're probably stuck and they should have told you but apparently they didn't so that's that's okay but use it as an indicator and not don't try to measure productivity so everyone at GitLab gets a manager who understands your job like who's been in that job who can sometimes like review like who should be able to help you and mentor you but who can also assess what your output is and whether it's whether it's what we expect of a full-time team member that's awesome okay jump over to the legal side so it's not easy to hire people all over the world at least I've it's not been easy to me to know how it's done that's one of the things I was most curious to ask you about like we have contractors who use in other places maybe that's how you do it we've looked into you can write employment agreements for people there's other firms you can work with you can have entities like how do you do it today and have you always done it that way or have you used other methods all of the above so we use all of the methods you just described so it really depends on what is the legal system in the country how many people do you have there how many sales do you have there and it can be we can do freelancing we do two other firms we employ people to resellers and we have also six or seven or eight countries where we have an establishment like we have an entity there and we hire people as employees so you have to look at kind of country by country how many people do we have there does it make sense to incorporate can we still do still have them as contractors etc do you have anybody in France specifically we do but we're not hiring anymore in France and it's for those kind of reasons like it we looked at it we don't want to having an entity there it's a pain and we cannot afford the time that that would consume do you have any entities in Europe yes we have one in Germany, in the Netherlands and in Great Britain which one was first the Netherlands I incorporated there 2014 so you've got Germany 2014 you've got Germany Netherlands, the UK the US, you have one in the US and where are the other entities I have to look at at our jobs page, I'll have a look so I'll go to aboutgitlab.com slash jobs view opportunities I think it might be in our compensation calculator can you give us like continent wise what's the distribution look like of your people kind of roughly where do you have the most people where do you have the least today that's a great question so I go to aboutgitlab.com slash company, slash team and then we have a map of all the people at Gitlab and where they reside that's super cool we have a physical map of where people come from and where they are but not a digital one okay that's awesome you've got West Coast and East Coast US and Western Eastern Europe that's how it's kind of distributed yep in the East Coast some Canadians are actually on there it's not perfect very cool so if somebody comes to you let's just say what's a country where you don't have anyone yet today or maybe you're all over the place so where do we not have anybody I think the person in Russia I think the person in Russia and Hawaii I think the people with the longest distance to any other team member I'm curious if like if somebody applies to your job portal and they're from a different country you're not in Panama maybe you have people in Panama okay so someone's in Panama they look fantastic and they fit one of your needs what do you do, how do you go about do you say we're not, we don't have any structure no no we make them an offer as a contractor as a full-time contractor to start as a contractor and then if you start getting mass you'll start looking into new options over time, what does that look like exactly and these like I think India where contractors we looked into it so instead we're hiring people to a reseller same in China so not every country in the world you can do the contractor thing but most countries you can you know has anyone, I don't know if you've done it or anyone else, has anyone like shared some of that research because I'm asking because like we we've been looking at a number of countries we've been looking at France most recently as you mentioned France is one that is trying to become a lot more attractive to companies but they do have really strict laws that can make it challenging and so I've done research into like the six different methods and you must have done it, a bunch of other people must have done it for different, of course it changes all the time it changes all the time and it's legal advice so there's firms that can help you with this and basically it's employment law so you should get a lawyer and work with them and look there's a reason we're not hiring in France France is one of the hardest countries in the world Do you have French people that you've had move do you know, or you just No, we do employ some French people Yeah, it's too bad, I wish it wasn't so hard but I know that is definitely the case Someone asked is there a workflow that's good to manage tasks for open source projects I know exactly what you mean W2E DevOps but we like using GitLab to manage our workflow I'm sure that answers your question So what about what's the we have an open source component of our software as well what does it look like in terms of your open source distributors versus your employees like in terms of the cultures and the interactions Do you mean our distributors, you mean our resellers No, I mean people that are just contributing to your open source Contributors How do you interact with those people because for a lot of companies that's very different but for you and the distributed team maybe it kind of more naturally fits into your flow Yeah, it was actually one of the reasons why we really liked being all remote because everyone's on the same level so we had some developers say like I was making this, I was getting all this advice from this person but I couldn't find him on our team base and we're like well that's because they're not employed by GitLab but they just care passionately about what you're doing So like all of our issue trackers are open and we work in there so the contributors are on the same level they have the same information they can see the same code etc so I think that's really important if you want to be a successful open core project that that is the case and it makes it much better and there's a few people people that have in the GitLab core team that have the commit bids in GitLab if they sign an NDA they can even join our Slack and see everything that's going on in the company That's really cool Could you share a bit like how did your open source community get started in the very beginning So Dimitri saw a need for something like GitLab he needed GitLab to exist and he's like well how hard can it be to make it he was working for a consultancy company at the time and he just started started coding and 300 people joined him in the first year that's when I saw it and by now over 2,000 people have contributed to GitLab That's awesome So it was just kind of attractive from the beginning because what you're solving is a very general need for people working on open source projects and other I think there was a clear need and then right now we're trying to even push it further we now get more than 100 contributions every month we're upping that to 150 by just helping people through the process so we even have like merge request coaches we call them people that help to get contributions over the finish line as the project become bigger that the quality bars keeps going up and we want to help people meet that bar and by by helping in them to everything so that's we're trying to actively help people get there That's awesome it's something we're working on we have something like 15 to 20 teams that work with our open source stuff today but we've got these hardware physical boxes that people need to get and so you think about how do you do the open source component of hardware we're always trying to innovate to make it easier to just get a kit and then build the software on top of it and thinking of ways in the future of being able to share the files and help other people build their own stuff potentially or get low cost access to it but it certainly makes it more complicated to get started yeah my first company was actually an open hardware startup it was called the airman the IR man and it was a small circuit board you'd attach to your computer and you could use your normal stereo remote to skip to the next MP3 and that was someone made one for himself published the schematics on GeoCities which was still a thing in 1999 and on the page he said I'm not selling these but he was selling them on the local university marketplace I was like hey what's the disconnect he's like yeah it's much too complicated to sell them so I said okay I'll sell them for you so I got 100 email addresses and I emailed everyone like hey send me send me dollar bills with a piece of cardboard attached to them so you can't see the dollar bills to the envelope and send that to me and I'll send you one of these things so that's that's how I started running my first business that's awesome okay I actually I have a few more questions on culture because I think it's one of the most fascinating and maybe like challenging parts of this because they're probably at least this is what I'm thinking I don't know if other people listening think the same but it's like man that sounds incredible like I want to jump to your model or at least have elements of it but you know feel scary to get there what can you tell us about like are there specific people in your community that are kind of like influencers that you have to lean on that are like help facilitate the communication or is it very much like a just like a central hub and spoke like it's actually really not that hard like I guess like are there you know like when you think about Wikipedia as a project it's lending a bit of open source and distributed teams but a lot of people make edits to Wikipedia but there's only like two to three thousand people that really make the whole thing work there's some element like that to your communication culture or is it is it not that hard and like everyone can pretty easily contribute yeah I think reading wise like everyone is reading I think contributing back wise you have people like Brendan like Victor that are just more passionate and they'll record a video or they'll send you the merge request or they'll edit they'll fix my spelling mistakes like you have people that care a bit more and that will edit more so I think there's a big difference between who reads that should be everyone and it should be like one too many like when I publish something everyone in the company should have access to it should go through an intermediate but contributing back you have people that do more of that and that's fine not everyone has to do it although for example for our leadership next quarter I'm thinking about requiring everyone to upload at least 10 videos to YouTube and get them going with communicating but that will be for managers and up that makes perfect sense so everybody can kind of read and consume smaller number people that are really the creators of content have you done any specific efforts to try to encourage those people empower them get them better tools is that something you've focused on yeah for sure well I try to be very appreciative of when people contribute and getting them better tools for sure like everything is maintaining GitLab so we're trying to make GitLab better and make the web ID better and all those things to make contributing easier in terms of like targeting that small group like I'm curious if you if it just kind of emerges or whether you have you ever been like here are the 20 people that really create some content let me put them into a group and ask them no I normally push like all the content is organized functionally so you have leaders so I would say hey leader of department X your piece of the handbook is a bit of a mess so make sure you fix that so if I'm a directive it would be through the hierarchy tell me a bit about how you do speaking about hierarchy you know with teams that have hybrid models like I was talking to the guys at Postmates and a bunch of others out there that have these hybrid models of you know couple headquarter like people sit together but they're all over and they've thought a lot about how they do direct lines of reporting versus dotted lines you're completely distributed what do what is reporting look like direct lines very much so if you go to aboutgetlab.com slash company slash team slash chart you'll find our complete org chart there's no dotted lines there and if you go to aboutgetlab.com slash handbook slash leadership you'll find me talking about no matrix organization I've lived I've suffered to a couple doesn't work everyone has one and exactly one boss and no boss is horrible but two bosses even worse well I'm not sure they're both really bad so exactly one boss please okay that sounds great how do you deal with situations where you want to create a new team save engineers to build a complex feature and the best people for that team you know are currently on other teams don't don't don't don't move them like then you'll then some people are gonna have go to a learning experience so we'll have stable interfaces we call it so if you're a bunch of back end engineers you always work with the same front end engineers but they're on a different team because we want to give everyone a boss that understands what they do and a front end manager doesn't understand what back end might not understand what back end engineers do and vice versa and they come together they're all like working on one of our stages for example the plan stage and they come together do features together and it's okay like you form a group together that works on planning but that doesn't mean there's a reporting relationship there because your manager should be able to understand the output you produce otherwise they can't measure you manage your output and can learn you new things so no dotted lines and I think that the biggest lesson is stable interfaces so that they're because you know you're always gonna deal with the same front end person or this the couple of same person you get to know each other's preferences how you communicate and there's a certain reciprocity like hey can you help me out quickly here I'm stuck and they do that for you you do that for them okay I know I'm running out of time and I could keep asking you questions for a long time let me throw you a few general or maybe summary ones to close this out is there if you could go back and build Git Labs distributed team from the beginning is there anything you wish you knew or you would do differently or do faster I would not even attempt to get an office a significant number of deaths and then tore them down afterwards so we could have saved ourselves the time there and I would I think we're still not aware enough that it's not known widely enough that old remote is okay like you got other really great companies like Envision like WordPress that are very successful with old remote so I want to spread the word we're gonna hire someone for it but I think I would do that sooner and then maybe what are what are the hardest parts you know when the distributed team when it is a kind of a burden what are the most and what are the parts that you love the most about it beyond like efficiency the hardest part is like if you see some people are pinging back and forth and they're not helping on a video call together you're like come on like don't the fact that you can work asynchronously doesn't mean that you have to like if you just texting back and forth arguing you're gonna build up resentment and it dissipates when you help on a video call so I don't like what when that happens what was the second part of your question what's like that we talked about a lot of the obvious benefits of like you know saving the employees time and commute and you know the problems with cities and we talked about being able to hire people from all over the world great talent at the right cost but what's what's one what are some of the better parts of a distributed team that I guess are surprising to watch about a kind of efficiency of it I love the freedom that it gives people and their personal lives look at my Twitter stream right now there's an SDR that is just raving about how she's been able to travel people taking people going out with their kids at 11 a.m just the flexibility it gives you to take care of the most important things in your life I think that's amazing one of our sub-values is friends and family first work second and I think remote makes that easier and it's super impressive that I guess on the CEO or just the manager side of it that clearly you've been able also to manage that team to get incredible results at the same time of putting friends and family first so yeah that's very impressive and hopefully it can aspire to the same yeah you save people a bunch of time and take bullshit away and you're able to attract people that want to deliver great output and you enable them I think our iteration value also saves people a lot of coordination time prevents a lot of canceled things it's not just remote work it's other things as well but those are being big successes thank you Sid for your time with me I really appreciate it thank you