 Welcome to the GitLab AMA and it's meetup of, it consists of your questions getting answered or getting waffled by me. I'm sure getting waffled is appropriate in English. My attempt at answering your questions. Simon opens it up. How was my birthday? It was really good because Karen, my wife, organized a birthday party for us together because her birthday was five days before, July 29th. So we invited a couple of friends and that was really fun. I think the noteworthy points were that we got a Susie's cake, which is really delicious birthday cake. We also got an edible arrangement with its all kind of fruit cut up and then dipped in chocolate. It wasn't the biggest success, but it looked really well. And we have this thing for the drinks. It's an inflatable mini pool or something. It's this high. It's pretty wide. And then you can put all your drinks in there and then pour ice over it. It's been an amazing party trick, but it was really fun on Friday night. So we asked, if a zombie burst into your room right now, what nearby object would you use to fight the zombie? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is this pen. So I think I'll die. Let's see what one another option is here. This thing looks pretty sturdy. Joy sick. So I'm probably going to die. And I got lots of monitors here, so maybe take one of those big ones. Clemente asked what he used to keep up with all the hacker news activity. I'm ashamed to admit I just check hacker news throughout the day. Just refresh the homepage. There's no special sauce to it. Edible arrangements are a nice way of saying here's some beautiful fruit to throw out. Hannah, as you are a fan of podcasts and if so, what's your favorite or go to podcast? I like them. I listen to them regularly when I was running more. Now I injured my foot and now I have to I'm on a stationary bike, which allows me to check my phone. So that's been one of the best things. Great podcasts are the A16Z podcast. Y Combinator has a great podcast. And then I check a blog for it, but marginal revolution and overcoming bias are two blogs. Econ blocks I read regularly. I'm kind of an economy nerd. So those sometimes have a podcast link. Yes, I'm going to be dead with that zombie. Ask will get lab staff get the opportunity to invest in or purchase good lab stock pre IPO. I think the answer is no there. William asked. There used to be a hacker news plugin for mentions of good lab channel but seems to have broken. Yes, we're trying to fix it. If you get to notify Lee and it's it's not been working so. Our community advocates are trying to restore it but so far no luck. Mark asked about a partnership. We're trying a lot to keep this call. Maybe we'll see how it goes but maybe allow this call to go to be public but to. Answer your question. No, just ask when we can we expect a new podcast to be released with talks about good lab. You did on the change log quota ratio the architect show. Yeah, when when a host of a podcast invite me I'll take I'll take any opportunity to talk about good lab. So they should email press get a lot of common or if you can make an intro that's that's welcome to. Jason asked what's an important part of the culture at get a lot that new employees don't tend to realize right away. Two things I think. One, everyone's kind of afraid because we're remote that it it's. There's little social interaction and I think we're doing a good job of facilitating that and it's you don't feel. It's not as lonely as people expect there were we're talking about things you can do. The coffee chance there's the team call so I think. That's above expectations and then I think they underestimate how hard it is to iterate like they're all like iteration is great and I love it and it's so beautiful and I iterated in my last job too. And then they come in here and then like, you got to do something much smaller than that. They're like, well I'm not finished yet. I don't want to. And they were like, no, you got to ship this and takes a while to get used to it. And you'll ask if you could change one thing about get lab what would it be a good lab.com that's more available. When it comes to get lab what are you most proud of this far. I'm proud of us shipping. I think it's I'm amazed every single month we have a release and then I look at the stuff we shipped and it's it's beyond belief it's beyond what any other company is able to accomplish and I think it's an amazing achievement and that that takes everyone in the company like that takes sales. Selling what we have instead of of of panicking our development teams with features that have to ship now that that takes support dealing with the stuff that isn't going well and helping to fix it. It takes everyone in the company to accomplish that we do accomplish that together and I think it's a superpower and and we're unstoppable as long as we keep shipping we're unstoppable. And there's a question in which I'll answer after stopping that recording. If a person with a karaoke machine burst into your room what song would you sing. Karen and I have a go to song it's from Greece. So probably that one but Karen would have to be here. She's probably already left for work. So then I do a Dutch song and it's called the Flieger, which is. It's about a kid whose mom passed away and he wrote a letter to her and he wants to deliver it to the heavens. So he has a kite and he lets up the kite with the letter to his mom. It's a big tear jerky and it's it's one of those kind of campy songs that I sang in my student days and I might have also performed it at a company event at Karen's family when we were just dating for half a year. Relationships survived that. Nothing to report on the CMO search. We're still searching. We have some good candidates, but we could always use more and and we're investing a lot of time but but nothing seems imminent. Ah, Jesus would you rather have a two year head start on groundbreaking product or two year head start on growth. You can pick only one. Jesus has been reading the interview with Mark Andreessen, which said that you have to pick the two year head start on growth. I read the same interview. And I think there's there's an underlying truth and then it's known in the valley like most things are not most groundbreaking companies, groundbreaking, most super successful companies, they don't innovate on product as much as they innovate on their business model. And I think ours is no exception. And I think our business model is that we are an open core company. So we work with the rest of the community. We co create with our customers. Instead of our customers all making their own DevOps solution by integrating all kinds of tools and and and doing that it's it's more than 2000 people that contributed co together to make that work. And that's a that's a new delivery business model the last innovation in business business models in our industry was Atlassian who said hey instead of having this very convoluted sales process. There's a big market for direct sales. We put the prices on our website. It's affordable and people can self order big innovation, big success. I think we learned from that what we learned is we have to have the prices on our website. And we for a certain part of the market direct sales is a very efficient way to do that and we need low like low price tiers. So we've done that we were hybrid sales organization. And there's less call us on our website and there's more. Here's the price if you want you can order it directly yourself. So that's what we need to keep doing because that was the last innovation in our industry. Now our innovation is this open core model where you co create with your customers. And that leads to great growth and a product advantage. We can bite off more product because we don't have to add the depth ourselves we can work with our customers to do it. So is that one or the other. I think it's I think it's both. So I'm not going to pick only one. My answer to your false dichotomy is. Agree that iteration MVC is the hardest thing to believe once you're over that and start shipping. It's amazing. Yes, Brandon. Exactly. Would I rather have wings or own a lightsaber and considering Bay Area traffic wings for sure. And yeah, rather not have to do something violent. Last play my play the video game and which was it. It was either explain that was what the joystick was for and there's a piece of rudder pedals right next to me here. Or it was I think Star Wars 2. But I'm stuck now in a level where there's some kind of round device and I have to go around it and and flip some switches but I constantly get shot down. I'm really bad and I cannot play the online games because I get slaughtered. Clamentize what are you most nervous about whenever you do an AMA whether whether we can make the rough courting public. Because I love to make them public afterwards. Simon asked, am I still doing flying lessons? No, I've like taken one flying lesson, but Karen said it was on the condition that I wouldn't do like the complete thing. Because it's a very a social thing like you got to do lots of solo flights so that's not a lot of fun for Karen. So the agreement is as long as I heads down working on good lab. I cannot take flying lessons, which is okay. Joe asked, what's the worst job you ever had? There was one that was hard physically and one that was hard psychologically. Physically it was my first job. My dad arranged it and it was getting potatoes out of the ground. Dutch people also known as potato eaters. They grow really well in the Netherlands. There was one farmer that was kind of too cheap to hire machinery to get the potatoes out of the ground. So he had his children and me go on our knees and get the potatoes out. It sucked not too much because the pay was very low but because I was kind of competing with the farmer's son who was way better at this and way faster than me. So I felt really incompetent. Also it was kind of back breaking work. I think I did it for like two afternoons and afterwards I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur. The other really bad job I had was at the end of university. I did an internship and I had a boss who already knew he was going away and everyone in the company knew except he forbid everyone in the company from telling me. So I was like the only person that didn't know and because she knew she was going away, she acted way different and it was really bad boss to work for. And I had a really miserable time. I felt extremely depressed in my little cubicle. After that I got a really nice boss which is like the best boss I've ever had. But like not being transparent when you could have been really cost a lot of anxiety for me. Venga boys are too unlimited for worst popular Dutch musical group ever. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, there's no limit, there is no limit, no mountain too high. And actually I know more too unlimited songs than you'd figure like take me away to paradise, lots, lots of Dutch songs I know. Kyla, what's the best career advice you've ever received? It's online and it says do something between the intersection of a few things. One is you got to be good at it. Two, you got to like it and three it has to be useful. So not very useful career advice is do something you love. Okay, that's one out of three. You got to make sure you get all three so it should be something that you like doing but you should also be competent at it. Like I like swimming but I'm not very good at it so I probably should not make my career out of it. I like karaoke singing but I'm not very good at it. So something you love that you're good at and it's useful for society. A certain stuff which is much harder to make a living because there's much more competition. Like if you like being part of a band and you're really good at it, there's not a lot of demand for that. Like there's a lot of other people trying and only a few people earning a living. So figure out something where there's more demand and then your odds of success are greater. I also asked how tall I was when I was farming for those potatoes. I think I was 16 so probably 6'8", which I'm now I think. Clemente asked, would you ever consider buying a house in the Bay Area? Yes, but I'm not in a rush. I think the market is still due for correction and they're very expensive and I don't have the money. Sue asked, if you could design your dream house, what are some of the rooms you'd have? Oh wow, that's a nice question. So if it's going to be like a super big one, probably have a fitness room, a game room. The thing that's working right now is our board room where you come in, you have all these televisions. Like everyone comes in like wow. And they totally forget that it's like a work-life apartment and it's kind of a weird situation. They're like super impressed by all the dashboards that we put up there. So I'd have something like that again. Yeah, something like that. If it was a company, I like the companies where you don't have to go to security, but there's meeting rooms before security. So if you have visitors, you can just all meet there. I'm not sure how that factors into a personal house. Clemente asked, what would you have done if GitLab failed while you were bootstrapping it? Phew, that's a good question. I still had my day job, so that was good. Now Madden was already working on it full-time, but I've worked on Madden before on other stuff. So we would have found something else. So I'd still be doing Ruby on Rails. If GitLab would fail now, which I don't expect and I don't hope, but I'd go start probably something with eLearning or maybe with Meltano or something like that. So now to ask what advice would you give to new GitLabbers? I would say the first month is pretty rough because there's so many things to learn. So people report feeling a bit lonely actually, but they also report that it's better after the first month. So keep doing those virtual coffee breaks and it's normal and it's going to get better. And when we say everyone can contribute, we mean it. So let's keep those merge requests coming to improve things. Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur or was it more a function of GitLab and the opportunity here? So GitLab is like my fourth company, so I think I always wanted it. It's a combination of different things. I hate interviewing, so I feel really bad every time I'm on the other side of the interview, which I regularly am. I know how stressful it is and sometimes I forget for a minute and I have to remind myself like, if I was in day shoes, interviewing sucks. It's kind of super hard selling yourself, which isn't super comfortable. But I tend to like see things where I'm just really excited about wanting to make a business out of it. And the first one was selling infrared receivers and that was in my first year at university. And later on I did something with a friend where we had an app store for web applications. And the third one, I wasn't a shareholder, but I incorporated the company was the first employee of Hubot Works. We made recreational submarines. I think I'm 6'8". Oh, Cindy, insightful question. Your experience as an intern must have shaped your value for transparency. What experience has shaped some of the other values? Yeah, so lots of our values come from stuff I didn't like at other companies that worked at. There where efficiency comes from, like, don't waste our time. Now, in general, like Dutch people are like that. We're per worked hour. They're one of the most efficient workforces in the world. We don't like waiting. We don't like needless coordination and things like that. And I've seen some big companies and big government organizations where I worked at that shaped that value. Results, I think it's just more results like make everything else possible. But it's also more fun to be focused on results. And I've been in cultures where like you stay with your bum and your seat until your manager was gone. And I think it's just ridiculous. You're actually like biting your time. You have nothing else to do and you're just waiting. Because this is going to be public, it's kind of hard to talk about the exact examples because I don't want to throw those companies under the bus. But a lot of this came from that. I've also been at a company where everyone was hired from like the same student fraternity. But that's a really bad idea. So I believe in diversity in and of itself. But I've also seen what can happen if you're not doing that. You're hiring people that are all the same. Adio asks, what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given? It's hard to weigh them. But one really insightful one is from one of our investors who said to run a successful growth company. You need at least 60% margins. I thought like that's ridiculous. You don't need 60% margins. You can think a great company can have 20% margins. But there's a lot of truth in that. If you have 60% margins, you can invest in sales and marketing to keep growing the company. Do you want to consider moving back to the Netherlands in the future? Maybe, but probably not. We're really happy here. I feel very fortunate to be able to live in San Francisco. I like that the people here are very talented, very ambitious and the opportunity is here to do great things. You see people doing great things. And I want to be there where that happens. Of course, the weather and nature also don't hurt. Mike appreciates the positive feedback I gave during the interview. Thanks for that. I still have some way to go, but I'm getting better at it. Suria, who are your best friends? Also, I think we would be great best friends. Well, Suria, I think the same. Can you please put in a coffee chat with me? So if you're up for that, a virtual coffee break. My best friend is a guy who's also here in the Bay Area. His name is Jose and he runs a company called Sasuke. And he doesn't like me saying this. This is going to be public. So he's going to be angry, but he's actually curing cancer. He's working on a thing for local drug delivery. And he's doing it with a click chemistry. And I think it has a lot of potential. He's also a super, super nice person and super thoughtful. And I saw him yesterday. And we reminisced a bit that we did a trip to Peru together. It was great. He was a tour guide, but also he proposed to his now fiance. So that's my best friend. Bianca asks, how do you see MVC apply to roles like partnerships and sales? Yeah, to, to, instead of making a big plan, so MVC's minimum viable change. And in a partnership, you don't want to make one big plan and then take nine months to bring that to fruition. But you want to do many small things together, like do blog posts, do a talk together, do a small technical thing, instead of building this elaborate thing. What will be my GitLab? Hi, cool. That's a great question, but it's, it's too hard to do on this call. Cool, I'll stop the recording.