GitLab / Fireside Chats/Interviews with Sid Sijbrandij

Alex MacCaw (CEO, Clearbit) and Matt Mochary (author of The Great CEO Within) interview GitLab co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij. The group was joined by GitLab CEO Shadow Wayne Haber and Head of Remote Darren Murph.

Topics ranged from GitLab's founding as an all-remote company, scaling a company with no offices, hiring the world's best talent, retaining talent, compensation and legal considerations, and structuring informal communication. The group also covered remote collaboration as well as second and third-order economic impacts of remote on society.

Links to related topics are below.

➞ Sid Sijbrandij's tweet thread on the dangers of hybrid-remote: https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720
➞ Download GitLab's Remote Playbook: http://allremote.info/
➞ GitLab's complete guide to all-remote: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/
➞ Learn more about GitLab's all-remote history: https://about.gitlab.com/company/history/#how-did-gitlab-become-an-all-remote-company
➞ Learn more about GitLab's values: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/
➞ Informal communication: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/informal-communication/
➞ Building culture in a remote environment: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/building-culture/
➞ Transitioning to remote: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/transition/
➞ Dangers of hybrid-remote: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/hybrid-remote/

In this talk from our All-Remote event, we go deep with GitLab’s co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij on his experience evolving the company very early on into being fully-remote. We also cover what he’s learned about propagating a strong, cohesive culture across a team of nearly 1,200 people, and why businesses will need to embrace remote work culture to endure.

Moderator: Kyle Doherty, Managing Director at General Catalyst
Panelist: Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO at GitLab

Read more about our product vision: http://bit.ly/2IyXDOX

Learn about FOSS & GitLab: http://bit.ly/2KegFjx

Get in touch with Sales: http://bit.ly/2IygR7z

Sid (co-founder and CEO) and Darren (Head of Remote) discuss GitLab's values and culture.

➜ Learn more about GitLab's values: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/

➜ GitLab's value hierarchy: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#hierarchy

➜ Learn more about GitLab's all-remote culture and processes: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/

➜ GitLab's biggest risks: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/biggest-risks/

➜ The importance of living out GitLab values and maintaining companywide support at scale: https://youtu.be/oRbEuSYwBAg

➜ Discussing GitLab Sub-values — 'No Ego' and 'Low Level of Shame': https://youtu.be/n9Gfe9p1tmA

➜ Associated merge request documenting takeaways from this interview into relevant places in the GitLab handbook: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/37695

✪ A list of questions and topics covered are below ✪

1. Were all six values documented at GitLab’s inception?
2. While the top-level values are somewhat common across organizations, the sub-values strike me as highly unique and serve to describe the nuance in what makes GitLab unique. Would you agree with that?
3. “Loss of the values that bind us” is in our Biggest Risks. We’re working to surface them as early as possible to applicants and make sure that new hires are given time to ingest them, but what else do you think the company needs to do as we scale?
4. Do you feel that all departments are given equal opportunity to internalize the values during onboarding? How are those in sales, compensated based on quota, encouraged to take time learning values rather than jumping straight into sales?
5. I was shocked at how real the values felt when I joined. Many feel like traps. Embracing GitLab values could get you blackballed or terminated at other organizations. How can we ensure that people give themselves permission to drop prior organizational baggage and embrace a fresh start and new values?
6. What’s the recommended approach for speaking up when you feel that values aren’t being lived (or they simply aren’t understood/someone isn’t aware of them)?
7. Many of the values seem to express a desire to not pass judgement on colleagues. In prior organizations, I’ve felt that a lack of perfection could lead to reprimand — that every move would be heavily judged. Is it intentional that GitLab’s values promote a less judgmental and more trusting atmosphere? What benefits have you seen from this, and why don’t more companies do this?
8. Does the Values Hierarchy exist to resolve disputes when two or more values could be argued to support two different outcomes?
9. Do you have a desire to see other companies copy and implement GitLab’s values? Have you seen any companies do this to date?
10. Have investors or outside parties remarked on our values in meaningful ways that you’d like to share?
11. Have you thought about new ways to reinforce our values? How would you recommend a team member propose new ways to reinforce values? An MR to our values page?

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform, delivered as a single application.

To see how much revenue this company is doing visit: http://getlatka.com now

For more content go to http://nathanlatka.com

Add Nathan on snapchat: nlatka
Like Nathan on Facebook for behind the scenes videos: http://nathanlatka.com/facebook
Follow Nathan on Instagram for rare photos and contests: http://nathanlatka.com/instagram

On this podcast from GitLab Commit Brooklyn, we’re discussing all the latest announcements, heroes, and exciting conversations taking place. We’re joined by GitLab CEO & Co-Founder Sid Sijbrandij, to take us through the myriad of news coming out of this inaugural event.

Traction Conf Vancouver 2019: http://tractionconf.io presented by Launch Academy, Boast.AI, and Microsoft for Startups.

GitLab is extreme, even for Silicon Valley: It has no headquarters and everyone works remotely, even the CEO.

The startup has more than 700 employees in 54 countries and plans to raise its headcount to about 1,000 by year-end.

In this session, CEO Sid Sijbrandij shares his playbook for building a hypergrowth company entirely remote, explaining how they adapted from remote engineering to remote sales, how they keep their culture in check, why being remote-only leads to higher company productivity, and key measures to have in place to drive growth with a remote team.

Moderated by Frederic Lardinois, TechCrunch.

GitLab is one of the most innovative tech companies that’s disrupting the industry. First and foremost, it’s an open-source company that’s making Linus Torvald’s Git usable for everyone by offering it as a project and commercializing it as a product.

But what’s really unique about GitLab is the way it runs the business. It’s a fully remote company with no headquarters. It has employees in 50 different countries and they work when they feel like working, from home. We sat down with the co-founder of GitLab - Sid Sijbrandij to talk about his unorthodox methods to build one of the most promising open-source companies.

To attend one of our AWS Loft events, visit us at one of our many locations - https://amzn.to/2F74h00
GitLab Co-founder & CEO, Sid Sijbrandij, Thrive Global CTO, Cheryl Porro, and InVision Vice President, Mike Davidson, sit down with Stewart Aslop, host of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, to discuss the relationship between building a startup and the unrelenting stress it can cause on remote workforces. From meditation apps to 20-min virtual coffee chats, the panel shares how getting creative and instilling a mindful culture can break down silos with remote teams, promote employee well-being, and boost engagement.

The panel also shares lessons learned from their journey to a high-growth startup, tips on staying motivated, and how to stay sane in a not always sane environment.

Kubernetes and the state of open source: We chat with Joe Beda

GitLab CEO, Sid Sijbrandij, sits down with Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda to talk about the future of open source.

Blog post: http://bit.ly/30w93gB
Read more about our product vision: http://bit.ly/2IyXDOX

Learn about FOSS & GitLab: http://bit.ly/2KegFjx

Get in touch with Sales: http://bit.ly/2IygR7z

No description provided.

GitLab has open source software at its core and was one of the first open core companies in the cloud native CI space. On this livestream from OSLS 2019, GitLab Co-Founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij will discuss what it takes to build an open core company and the role that open source plays in meeting the challenges of building any software at scale. The episode will also give Sid’s perspective on the significance of the new CD Foundation, announced at The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Leadership Summit, and GitLab’s involvement in its formation as a founding member.

Ali Rowghani, head of YC Continuity, talks to Gitlab CEO Sid Sijbrandij (W15) about how Gitlab has built a completely distributed company with 160 people (and growing). We filmed this conversation at Gitlab’s SF headquarters, where Sid is the only local employee. Sid’s biggest tip for success in scaling a distributed company: write everything down.

Listen up for…

2:41 – Gitlab values boring solutions: our product should be exceptional, but the company structure should be run-of-the-mill.

3:10 – “After a few days, they just started working from home” – Sid talks about how Gitlab didn’t really set out to create a distributed company — it just evolved naturally.

3:46 – Take an extra minute to write things down, so that you can save time and give people the tools they need to succeed. Everything from who starts a video conference, to OKRs for the whole company.

8:28 – What has been the most difficult part about building a company this way? Fundraising. It was difficult to convince investors that Gitlab could continue to scale the completely distributed company. They kept hearing, “You tick all of our boxes, except for this remote thing. That’s new and we can’t take a risk.”

10:02 – What type of person works best in this model, and what are the social components to make up for what people might miss from working at an office?

14:20 – What wisdom can Sid share for other YC companies (or any startup) who may want to try to grow a company this way? Be a broken record about writing everything down

Special appearance: Sid’s cat, Suzy, who is also based out of Gitlab’s SF HQ.


Note from Ali: We filmed this interview on January 26. We hope to get together with Sid to dig into GitLab's approach to transparency with customers, which was shown in a big way last week after we finished up this video. If you missed it, GitLab went so far as to livestream their team's real-time progress as they worked through a database incident.