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GitLab / CEO 101 / 22 Mar 2019
GitLab / CEO 101 / 22 Mar 2019
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From YouTube: March 20 AMA with CEO Sid Sijbrandij

Description

NOTES
Q: Are you concerned about any potential legal actions from another company?
A: We did an internal investigation. If there is legal action we'll do it external too.

Q: How happy are you with how we have scaled as a company, culture-wise and communication-wise? Has it gone as you expected?
A: Much better than expected. Values are great. Big problem is re-enforcement of practices:
No short meetings, we need to be more efficient. YouTube visibility https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/youtube/#visibility

Q: Do you think there’s an upper-limit to the handbook-first approach? More people contributing means more changes, will there be a point where employees can no longer keep up? Or maybe a point in which it’s too much content to digest for onboarding?
A: Consume on-demand, what and when you need. Handbook is a guide, except for the code of conduct portion. It should be checked first to see where the company has landed before on a discussed subject but if there is a better way, it should not be used as law.

Q: What inspired the CEO shadow initiative?
A: Goal is to give leaders within GitLab a whole perspective of the company. We want leaders who understand of how the company works and can make global improvements.
Erica Lindberg is on Day 2. She is making handbook edits left and right.

Q:What can we do to ensure we’re not slowing down?
A: Engineering? 10 MRs per person per month.

Q: What feature of GitLab still needs to be added according to your opinion?
A: Defend. Secure team is adding this.

Q: If you had to make a choice between the USA or the Netherlands, which country would you choose?
A: Don’t plan to move from San Francisco, which has a high concentration of talented and ambitious people. Love organization building, the speed and scale with which it happens is amazing. Talked to someone who is making a slingshot to shoot something into space.

Q: What's the best part of your day?
A: Group conversations. Enjoy hearing how each group is improving their department.

Q: I heard that we will be only keeping 90 days of data in Slack, is the reason to re-enforce practices of using GitLab and creating issues?
A:Our informal conversations happen in Slack to a large extent. Imagine how weird it would be if someone put a microphone on you and recorded your whole day. Don’t think it’s appropriate.
- It would be great to have more things in issues and merge requests.
- Slack is like a day-long meeting. DMs are bad.
- Additionally, Sid, what is your perspective of the feedback given on the Slack retention issue so far?

Q: Can we import the Questions channel data into a knowledge base?
A: #questions channel should result in an edit to the handbook. No sense in going back; go forward. Treat Slack

Q: Do you see remote only organizations rapidly becoming more accepted and commonplace?
A: All remote is going to be the future. We’re not the biggest remote company so far, but we’re leading the way. Everyone should be an ambassador for all-remote work.

Q: How do you see the company changing fundamentally, if necessarily at all, as it more than doubles in headcount over 2019?
A: We’re planning for 1000+ people. As we get bigger, there will be more layers of management. Automating onboarding will be important instead of 50 checkboxes.

Q: As a company, we value velocity over predictability. How are you, personally, balancing these two items?
A: By making the minimum thing. Many times when I have an idea, I’ll just put it out as a suggestion for a relevant report. Most of the time that person makes a minimal change, or say, “I won’t do that.” I meet a lot of people, and I want to share this information with the rest of the company. For example, yesterday I copied and pasted an e-mail I received in the #ceo channel.

Q: What are you most excited about for contribute coming up?
A: We have better systems in place; it’s going to feel more like a produced event. I hope we can keep the intimacy of the excursions.

Q: Any thoughts on yesterday’s announcement about Atlassian acquiring AgileCraft?
A: Shows a big need for value-stream analytics, high-level roadmaps. We’re right in adding that in our Plan stage. Confirms there is a lot of demand for that. Atlassian is a company with many products that you have to integrate together; contrast that with the benefit of a single application without handoffs.

Q:Since we are doubling in headcount every year, I’d like to hear your thoughts about making more with less.
A: I do want every person to have a big impact. Example stats: 10 MRs a developer. Our security requirements are going to increase. We’re going to be a public company and have FIPS certification. We want to make people more effective, fewer roadblocks.

A

Hey everyone I'm sit I'm, a co-founder and CEO here at gitlab, and this is an ami, ama and you've put in eight questions already, for which I'm very grateful and do you want to verbalize your question.

A

Dance, not here, I'll read it up for him. Am I concerned about potential legal action from another company?

A

We did an internal investigation that turned out that we think that were there in the right and that we did the right thing if there's legal action from another company. The first thing we'll do is reach out to an external counsel, to kind of redo the internal investigation, to make sure that were 100%, sure and we're not just biased towards ourselves, and we have just have someone else check that also you want to verbalize your question. I.

B

Said I literally came in sorry, I was a little bit late. Yeah I was just curious to see how happy you are with how we scaled as a company culture, wise, but also communications wise is it? Could you have imagined what it was going to be like, and are you happy with how we're currently operating yeah.

A

Thanks.

B

To that you.

A

Were just on time, it's got much better day than I anticipated. Many people said: you'll hit various types of walls at 150, 300 people, 400 people.

A

We haven't hit those walls and I. Think, for example, the reinforcement of our values is gone much better than I ever dare to dream. Most companies kind of devalues kind of dilute as they get bigger, I. Think for us we have more concentrated people are more aware or more are seeing that that we make decisions based on them. So that's that's been a great help. I think the biggest problem I see is in kind of reinforcement of practices.

A

For example, we have the practice of short meetings but I'm hearing from new people joining the company that most of the meetings have are not short meetings, so you don't get time for a bio break. They don't have time for a snack. They don't have time to respond to an urgent message in between meetings. I think! That's! It's not good! That's that's stressful, it's I would almost say, and you mean, but it's not that dire, but it's not good. So we're trying to solve that.

A

Make sure that checking that box in in Google Calendar is something that's in the onboarding giving more explanations why we do it. Another thing is, for example, YouTube visibility. It's going really well with posting more to the YouTube on filter program, for example, people post it unlisted, which it shouldn't be. It should be either private just for people at the company or to be public. um It's like these day-to-day things and I now for sometimes feel like I'm I'm kind of the enforcer, and it shouldn't be it's it's annoying for people.

A

If it's a CEO who says something it's it's, it has a bigger impact on them. Then it would just be a co-worker but I'm not seeing people speak up. I'm, not seeing people speak up in meetings about it and I wonder how we how we can incentivize that I'd hate it for it to be like a separate role, that someone would be the enforcer in the company they of our communication practices, so I'm thinking about up and I don't have a solution, I'm open to suggestions.

A

Lyle! Do you want to verbalize your question.

A

Well, you think, there's an upper limit to the handbook. First approach, more contributions feeds more changes. Will they be a point for him? Please can no longer keep up. That's a great point. I, don't think, there's a limit to it. I think. If you don't write it down, you have to apparently learn through the grapevine which is way more inefficient. I. Don't think it should be a goal that everyone can read the entire handbook. That's that's, obviously not not gonna scale.

A

So if you're 2,000 pages now I have read all of it, so it's very important to kind of consume on the mat. But then, when you need it and if you like, for example, work in engineering, you Pro will be doing your homeboy you're, not gonna, read all the stuff about marketing and sales, it's available for you. If you need it or if you need to collaborate or if you're wondering about something. So it's very important that the organization of the handbook is right and that there's lots of cross links, I.

C

Think one of the weaknesses I see said is that as the handbook grows, it becomes more and more like law and less and less like a suggestion and people started using it and sort of as a weapon almost in discussion. So it's like well, the head book says this and we start arguing about like it's specific words and I. Don't know if that was the intent. Oh that's.

A

A great remark, thanks for that I hope it's on the head book usage page, but the handbook is a guidebook. It's not a law book. It's not what you should do. It's like. Hey. We thought about this. Previously, this reform came out but last time, but you should use your judgment and, if there's a better way to do it, just do it the better way. If you think that by the way applies to other people too, which should be the case in 99% of the cases just change the handbook, it is may what's not good.

A

It's like if you're not even aware what the handbook says. You haven't really given a lot of far to the problem, and you just do something: that's that's not ideal. Like then a co-worker will say hey well, this is what the handbook says and the response should be hey. Oh that's, interesting, I didn't know, I'll, probably change it, but if you've got the hamburger like on this case, it's different. That's why we hire people and not robots, execute handbook. You should always use judgment and it's it's a it's a hint. It's not it's!

A

Most of the sections are not the law. I think we have a code of conduct, that is, that is legal, but all of the other things are not so maybe it's important to even separate that more saying, like hey the code of conduct, is the only part of the handbook. That is something you should always adhere to and all the other things are optional to just suggestions.

A

For example, I just mentioned short meetings. If you intentionally make a meeting 60 minutes because you think it simply better fit, that's great I. Don't argue about that if you make it 60 minutes, because it's a default in Google Calendar, just you just didn't know that we have a practice of short meetings, that's not great, and so it's it's you're allowed to deviate from.

A

Clemons, do you want to verbalize your question.

A

So to Clement I saw at the CEO shadow initiative and what inspired it I think that wrote down Cole. So we share that a bit. The goal of the program is to give turn the future directors and senior leaders and overview of all the aspects of the company. This leads to leadership. Who is able to do global optimizations?

A

We want leaders that get laughs, we don't just see their specific departments but to have an understanding of how the entire company works and how they can make an improvement that benefits the entire company. But that's very hard, if you haven't seen the entire company and as we grow bigger, it's not just the executive team that we need to grow. Actually it wasn't. I opened one of our advisors in South Africa said: look now. Your executive team is good. It's great!

A

It's all fine, but it's about that next generation of leaders growing those some optimizing for that I'm I'm, reducing my privacy and kallenberg is on a you, can butcher and a to video, and it's a very tiring thing to do. I think the outcome is pretty awesome. Person isn't much better on understanding of the company and she's also making it as a handbook girl, FM right while she goes to it Filipe on a verbalize. Your question sure.

D

Thank you, I'm, follow record. This is something asked maybe six months ago already, but I have the feeling that the answer would be might be different this time. What do we ensure that we're not throwing down because I think that's one of your biggest fear or gitlab.

A

Yeah, so in engineering engineering is harder to measure like sales is pretty quantitative. Close iacv marketing generates pipeline they're, both to both doing okay that were both kind of trafficking to plan engineering.

A

The main metric I focus on is a much oppressed per engineer, promotes and we've seen that number slip from 10 to about 77.7.

A

Now you could say, like it's easy to gain that number, but actually, if you gained that number you're gonna split up work in more marshal crisis, which is something we want people to do because we know it makes me look faster.

A

So please gain this number and I was concerned and Eric was also concerned, so Eric, our VP of engineering, you know started at initiative to like figure out what's happening and why it's going down, but already we're seeing the effect of focusing on it and for this month it's looking pretty good we're up to high-low 6/6 off lo digit, which means that for the month we're gonna get pretty close back to ten. So one of the things was that we weren't counting things. There were security fixes that were happening in that private repo.

A

So we fixed that, but still like very afraid for slowing down and the most important thing is like are they broke, looks like an incremental new person coming in. Do they have an easier or harder time contributing to our code base, so we're keeping an eye on all those factors trying to be informed by quantitative things and and a measure measure measure, but that doesn't mean that if, if you see something that you think should be better, please go to Eric because he's super interested in it and so am I.

A

Thank you go thanks for that. You go. You want to verbalize your question. Yeah.

E

Thanks it, so what feature of get lat do you think still needs to be edit? According to your opinion,.

A

Well, the the biggest missing thing that we have on our homepage is our defend category, so we have kind of the proactive security and get up where you test your code, you test for vulnerabilities, you do all these things before you release something, but still you might. You might miss something, and we also need reactive security when people do are able to like penetrate your application.

A

You want to be able to detect that to respond to that and that the fences is missing and I'm really excited to secure team I think is shipping the first thing in defense, even though we don't have a team for each other, if you're gonna start with I think the Web Application Firewall. So at least we have one of those features and I look forward to that being a thing like our stem end stage, I want to talk about your next question. Yeah.

E

If you could or had to choose between the melons or us of what country, wouldn't we know, there's there's both of benefits.

A

And and drawbacks for my for me personally, I don't plan to move from the US and the main thing is in it's not so much us, but San Francisco, which has a very high concentration of very talented and ambitious people and kind of the infrastructure to enable them and I. Think that's very fascinated.

A

I love, like organization building and- and this be which it happens here in the scale, is amazing.

A

I guess state I was at a dinner party and when you talk to a person who's doing making a slingshot which can send stuff into space so like their carve out a big mountain, they were all something really fast and then they accelerated fast enough in vacuum that it then they open up the tube, send the finger. It's gonna fly to the atmosphere and gamma community usage and in the geostationary, but come in an orbit around the planet. Earth does not immediately drop down. That's just this is berserk but yeah.

A

Yes, the dinner parties, where you meet those speak in between all the SAS EPS and all the other stuff.

A

So he asked for someone to verbalize I think people should listen to stories up waiting for the first volunteer.

F

What is the best part of your day.

A

I I love our conversations a lot seeing kind of the progress if I think the most motivational thing in work is progress, progressing what you produce in your career and in the company as a whole, maybe even in the industry, so groove conversation stuff. If I have a good day, it's the first thing, I do and I don't have any meetings before and I can support a bit and then it starts off with a conversation or people are talking about how they're advancing the goals of one department I. Think that's great.

A

Also, we can get to ask questions.

A

That's my favorite part of that II.

A

Person you want to verbalize your question.

G

Yeah I heard that will be only keeping 90 days of data and slack going forward and I was wondering. Is that the reason for that to reinforce those best practices that we share about trend, transparency and collaboration? Is that kind of a reason why we did it? And if that's the case, are we wanting more people to do more emergent and more discussions within issues rather than slack? I know that with slack and I'm sorry I know it slack.

G

Private dm's is on the rise right and I feel like that kind of goes against the the company norms and values a little bit yeah.

A

Thanks for that, it's not the reason we're doing it, but it might be a good side effect. The reason we're doing it and is that our informal communication happens on slack to allergic sets or other companies. It's kind of walking the hallways for us. It's on slack! Imagine how weird it would be that you had you come into the office and the first you come by the security guard and the first thing they do they put in a microphone on you, you're recorded for the entire day and to keep all the recordings.

A

That's a bit. How slack feels to me and I? Don't think it's I, don't think it's appropriate, considering how we use the medium I do hope that well it's it's not why we do it, but it would be great if we get more things asynchronous in issues and Mercer cos. It's like is like a day-long meeting like a meeting, that's always happening and the more we can get out of that the better and especially that our esteemed the use of TMS. So, by sending someone to DM, you put a certain urgency on it.

A

Like it's hard to see, history and worse, like every co-working cannot see what's happening. My people are forced to sit an open, open floor plan office buildings so that they can kind of over here. What colleagues are doing? Luckily, we don't have that we have peace and quiet, but what we need from individual people is like if you need something from someone posted in a public channel and I've mentioned a person, so other people can see what's going on. Is that houses coordinated? So hopefully, hopefully that will happen happen more um true.

A

You want to verbalize your question. Sorry.

B

Can I just interrupt please sure.

A

Yes, yes, that's great! It's a grateful with.

B

The with slack and getting rid of everything that's over 90 days old. Can we keep all the data that we have in the questions channel and put it into some kind of a knowledgebase yeah.

A

I think what it says in the questions channel that to thank the person that answered the question you should make an edit to that book right now. That's not happening so I, don't think, there's there's any sense in going back, I think it's more about going forward. We should treat slack as a fringe of all resource. No one's gonna, like using slack search to find something is not a great experience.

A

You need it kind of in the appropriate place in that book and that should be a modus operandi, treating it as a as a fungible thing and thanking the person who'll answer the question by saying: I had it at this 210 book in the place I searched for it. Yeah.

B

Thank you thank.

F

You I think I was next unless we don't answer this, but um just to hop in here number 10 was: do you see remotely organizations becoming sort of more accepting commonplace? I've personally had multiple people reach out to me to sort of try to figure out how we work, how effectively we can work remote of such scale, because others will having problems. Another multi-site not fully remote, but clearly there are same problems in that workflow and yeah. I was curious. If imagine you get tons and tons of inbound on this stuff. Yeah.

A

For sure so I'm hoping to do pick my brain meetings, I put them on YouTube, unfiltered I did another one I think yesterday, oh.

A

Remote, it's gonna, it's gonna be the new trends like first it broke down having everyone in one location. Now, there's being that like half remote, hybrid companies, don't really work so remote is, is gonna, be a big thing over the next few years and where is leading in that we're not the biggest over my company, we're pretty close and we're much more public about what we do and we're pretty far for about how we run the organization.

A

So there's an enormous opportunity for us to lead the way here and right virtue of that be seen as a a place to work for help with our employer brand and attract more great new people, so I'm trying to contribute there as much and as I can that's. He is trying to help there by improving our older mode, culture, page and I. Think it's it's.

A

It's also something I expect an incoming chief people officer to help it, but in the meantime please do if you find something into that, if record those talks, tweet about it, etc, spread the word it shouldn't be just meets it. Every one of us should be an ambassador for all remote work, I'm, sorry for skipping over you, thanks for speaking up drew. You have the next question.

H

Yeah, so it I've gotten various estimates of like eight hundred to a thousand people from different people at the company. But when we're when we're gonna scale up in headcount so drastically, are there changes that you see coming that we're actively going to make and do you think there's like adaptations that are gonna intentionally happen or is it? Are we gonna, try and maintain as far as we can and just kind of correct for what ends up happening? Yeah.

A

Thanks for that, won't be the planning for the end of the fiscal year, so end of January is over 1100 people, so we're likely to be over a thousand people at that point. Well, it's right on it. There's no drastic changes, I think, but as we get bigger, there's more layers of management and we need to accommodate for that as we hire more people, onboarding is more important, so provisioning systems automatically instead of 50 check boxes and your onboarding issue is something we'll be working on.

A

So all kinds of changes, I, don't I, don't think, there's anything fundamental that will be broken, but maybe we'll find out and we'll try to fix it. If that comes up, oh thank Christ. Thank you.

A

Once this question is as a company, we value philosophy over predictability. How are you personally balancing those two items.

A

By making by doing the minimum thing so many times when I have an idea, I will not like spend a lot of time on it. I will just put it as a suggestion to a relevant for a part of me and they also hopefully well luckily, most of the time they do a minimal thing to to kind of change the process or make it make a change.

A

How many times, hopefully- and luckily they say I- won't do that, which also helps that, instead of having a few things that I spend a lot of time on I try to be the eyes and ears. I meet a lot of people I'm in a unique position. So I want to kind of share that information with the rest of the company and with my reports as much as possible.

A

So, for example, yesterday there was an email, I got I thought might be relevant, I just copy pasted it in the CEO challenge, so that everyone in a company can see it MMB. You want to verbalize your question. Yeah.

G

With a lot of new stuff coming this year, what are you most excited about for contribute, 2019, yeah,.

A

I'm excited it's every time. It turns out to be a great experience. I have high expectations. It's comprehensive law. Stein is bigger, so that's gonna be interesting. It's also. We got a much bigger corporate marketing, offense team, so there's more space for likely it will be better branded than the last time we have an event system. We have better systems in place. It's gonna feel more like a produced event, which is which is also exciting.

A

I hope we can keep the intimacy of the excursions and your own conference setting, but it's it's gonna, be awesome to see how it's better produced and whether we can keep those things at scale. Simon, wanna, verbalize. Your question sure.

H

I said what were your biggest learnings from OSL s?.

A

Yeah, maybe someone can link my presentation from coastal s, I think what Amazon did with Alice a search for can commoditize, that is pretty too whole commercial open source software model on its head, like everyone was expecting this to come, but it's now happening where the hyper clouds are competing with the commercial open source software companies- and I.

A

Commoditizing the things they charge for I think that's a very interesting development I'm, not particularly happy with it, but I think it's Amazon is doing what they should be doing. It sits there and their users interest and, as a company will have to try to accommodate that I meet a presentation about how I think yeah our bio-based open for mobile helps a bit there. Christopher.

C

One a revelation.

A

Or question sure.

C

Thing said: do we have another Amell tonneau type of initiative being considered just curious to come? There's thoughts about expanding the company's breadth, different directions, ya know.

A

Currently, we have no ideas for other products, not saying no to them. If we find out a great idea we'll do that I think the biggest initiative under my consideration is how what we do in China. Where do we keep the distance? Where do we partner? But if we go at it ourselves or what we can launch, you start up.

A

There I think there's a China dock that everyone can find, but with our current thoughts of spending some cycles there and that's kind of a billion dollar, maybe 10 million all our decision, you go I'm a revelation question.

A

You go ask any fonts of the announcement about Atlassian acquiring agile craft.

D

Yeah.

A

For sure I think it shows that there's a big need for customers to have value stream analytics to have toes to have as like a high level, roadmap and I think it confirms that customers need that and we're right in adding that in our planned stage we have Adele portfolio management with value stream management.

A

This confirms that there's a lot of demand for that and that we could keep chipping that and a lysine is not a common company of more and more separate products that you have to kind of integrate yourself together, which I think helps to contrast it to give up approach of a single location. Do you think yields a lot of benefits by able to see information in contracts and not have these handoffs?

A

Thank you. Well. Mia. You want to verbalize your question. Yes,.

C

Sure so my question is, since we are doubling, you have to count everywhere, hear your thoughts about making more with less yeah.

A

I think it's it's not inevitable, but it is okay. As long as our revenue keeps close to tripling our headcount keeps finding more than doubling I think that's fine. We don't have to worry worried about that. We should keep an eye on the revenue, but I do want every single person to have as big of an impact as other people got and you're on the test, automation and team.

A

Your your your team is doing a great job of like obsessing over that half of our testing environment and making sure that people don't get rat tests. If they haven't made a mistake, that's super important. We want to keep everyone effective. I mentioned earlier temperature passed per engineer per month. Like that's, that's the kind of stats. We keep an eye on to see like our people feedback down by additional stuff. They have to do because our chassis is going to go.

A

Yes, the security requirements are going to increase, yes, we're going to be fit certified and all these things in the future. Yes, we'll be a public company and we have to incorporate all those things. We want to incorporate that. How many people come more effective, less more effective because we automated it more because there's a better one morning, there's fewer roadblocks, there's people watching out for it certain things you don't all have to do that. So that's that's going to be interesting to try to keep that speed things.

A

Everyone we're at the end of time, maybe see you in the company call thanks again for all the questions three initiate.