Episode 27: Leading with Values: Sid Sijbrandij joins Matt Mullenweg to talk about GitLab, Transparency and Growing a Distributed Company

Howdy everybody, and welcome to The Distributed Podcast. I am your host, Matt Mullenweg. Today's guest is a like-minded leader of a software company that is driven by its values, supports open source, and happens to be distributed too. Sid C. Brandy is the co-founder and CEO of GitLab, a fast-growing and a single— a fast-growing company and a single application for the entire DevOps cycle. GitLab has been distributed basically from the beginning. Last May, 2 months into the pandemic, Sid made some predictions that we'll talk about today. Even more so, Sid very often talks about the values that drive GitLab and how they're experiencing each day as a growing company, a really rapidly growing company, actually. So it's rare to get to talk to someone who's been such an advocate for distributed teams as long. And also, as a full disclosure, um, I am a board observer of GitLab, so I've had an inside view to some of what y'all have been building. And it's been amazing to have a seat at that table. So Sid, thank you so much for joining.

Yeah, welcome and thanks for being at that table at GitLab.

Yeah, talk to me. Let's start off with just a little bit of the values that you, you hold as a company, because I think every company has a poster on the wall and you have one on your distributor wall. But how does it actually come into play for y'all?

Yeah, I think you can tell how serious a company is about its values in two ways. How often they update the values. Our values got updated over 300 times last calendar year. So it is, it is a living document. And then the other thing is how do they reinforce the values? We have now 20 ways to reinforce our values. So it's not that, had that document, does it matter? It is, are they really lived? And for them to be lived, they have to be alive themselves and they have to frequently kind of be kind of reinforced and be alive in that way.

I saw you could reinforce the values by complimenting people, but you could also put a virtual background with one of the values on? That's one of the 20 things?

Yeah, if you see my Zoom, I'll always have 6 logos above me. And those represent our 6 values. And yeah, I like the complimenting as well. We have a thanks channel. In that thanks channel, people thank each other, and then people can comment. And they frequently do that with emojis that represent our values. And then we keep count of like who was particularly good in expressing certain values throughout the year.

Do you tie them into performance reviews? Like, do people talk about the values as part of performance reviews?

With those emojis, that is linked to our annual event. And we select the people kind of who best represent a certain value. And those emojis are used to create a shortlist and a group of people decides who best represented it. So it's kind of input. It's not ideal, but it gives a good way to make a shortlist. And then yes, performance reviews, the values tie into that, but also into hiring decisions. And for example, I think the most important thing is promotion documents. Every promotion, document at GitLab is shared with everyone in the company, and its primary structure is the values.

To put you on the spot, can you name the 6 values?

Yeah, we had 13 values before, and even I couldn't name them, so that was a good reminder to rationalize. So our values spell the word credit. It's the credit we give each other by assuming good intent. The first C stands for collaboration, the R stands for results, the E for efficiency, the DIP for diversity, inclusion, and belonging, the I stands for iteration, and the T for transparency.

Hmm, I guess with D you kind of expanded it, it stands for multiple words, but that works.

Yeah, it was like first it was D and I, and now that we add belonging, it But, uh, we, I'm open to changing the whole thing, but I think having one letter per value is defensible.

Since you have a backronym or an acronym that spells things out, does that make it harder to add values of certain letters or make it more incentivized, like certain letters to be added? Like maybe it would be easy to add a value with an S, but it would be hard to add a value that started with an X. Yeah.

I guess there's a certain amount of sunk cost there or inertia to overcome to change it. I think there hasn't been a big push to add a value. We've had diversity change to diversity and inclusion and now diversity, inclusion, and belonging. That's been the major thing. Other than that, people talk about like, how do the values relate to each other? And we have a lot of sub-values. So for example, today I'm having a call with Dara and Dara said, look, some of our sub-values are more important than others. So the 6 values I mentioned are our core values, but then we have kind of sub-values that are kind of, that relate to certain examples and that make it more concrete because otherwise it's just words and they're very vague. Open to interpretation. The sub-values makes them actionable. And, uh, there are— her very good point was some, some of our sub-values are more important and more actionable than others. So maybe we should call some of them, or maybe we should, uh, we should elevate some of them.

What were some of the values you got rid of or renamed? Or so, like, what were some of the 7 that got cut out?

Yeah, I forgot about them, so that's good. But I think we found some overlap. What we, the exercise we did is we wrote down all the values we had, wrote down some that we thought we should have and started grouping them. And we came to this and actually it wasn't a big exercise. It was me and my CEO coach who did that. One afternoon in a couple of hours, and then I proposed it, and it was clearly better, and that's how that happened.

Now, this is probably a good time to introduce the GitLab Handbook. So, all of these values and the 20 ways you can put them into effect and everything like that is all public on your website.

Yeah, I think our handbook is now over 10,000 pages, and it has all of our kind of processes and procedures, like how you work and not the, just the boring ISO stuff, but really like what you would need to know if you join our company.

What does ISO stand for?

Sorry, I come, I'm from Europe and a lot of companies are, follow the ISO standards for documenting process. And that left a big impression on me because those ISO handbooks were not what really happened in those companies. There was like the written ISO process, which you could update once a year, and that was what people really did. So there was the paper handbook they haven't touched in 2 months, and there were like the sticky notes on the computer, how to really do things. And I was like, look, if you're gonna have something, it should be easy to change because like how you work changes every day. So It should be a living thing that people use every day and gets updated every day.

So, let's say I'm an employee at GitLab and I would like to update one of the values. Could I submit? The entire handbook's in Git, in GitLab. I could submit like a merge request?

For sure, you don't have to be an employee. You don't even have to be a board observer. You can just, anyone in the world can make a suggestion to improve them., and then if you think I should have a look at it, I suggest you @mention me on Twitter or send me a DM, but you, most of the time also people kind of check it out and escalate it within the company. We have a values Slack channel that will probably pay some attention to it.

And so to give people a sense of the scale, there's 10,000 pages, but these are very, very distinct. So like it has like onboarding. Do you still have the org chart and everything on there?

Yeah, for sure.

Um, salary. And occasionally you'll run again into something that links to like an internal Google Doc that you only have access to as a GitLab employee. But there is, um, yeah, what I can only describe as a radical transparency that the organization practices that's different than I've seen really anywhere else, even other companies that really practice a ton of open source thinking.

Yeah, and I think what's been cool, I gave a talk to YC at Y Combinator recently, and there was a bit of what would GitLab do. So if you have a question, a startup, the first thing is like try to see, like Google the question with GitLab and see if it's already in our handbook. And that's probably a decent starting point. And that's just because we kind of document a lot of mundane stuff. Like, I don't know, I'm not sure we documented trademark registrations, but it would totally be like something we document. So because we document so many kind of mundane sales, marketing, engineering processes, it's a good starting off point if you have to make something yourself.

You know, there's often CEO back channels where you'll ping another CEO and be like, so how does this work at your company? Or what do you do for this? And I would say that you are the one I ping that 99.9% of the time, it's a link to your public handbook. And I mean, you don't say, Matt, let me Google that for you. But I've started just, I'm probably pinging you a little less because just everything is on the website. I'm like, oh, how does GitLab do sales onboarding? And I know you brought your time to productivity down quite a bit and your time to hire, like some things you've been improving. So that's all there. Including like what you're trying to improve.

Matt, rest assured that every time I send a link, I'm just very, very proud that we've written it down. It's not dinging anybody for not looking it up. It is very counterintuitive that that is out there, and it's big. So, it's not— Google really helps, but it's not always easy to find something.

What's something that listeners might find surprising that you have public on the handbook?

I think kind of our compensation ranges is maybe not as surprising anymore, but it's always something people care a lot about. I think all the mundane stuff, like how we interact with Hacker News, like people in the team should probably not post GitLab articles to that. We don't want to be perceived as astroturfing. Disclose who you are. I think there's just a whole lot of mundane things. I think what's really interesting is our engineering metrics. So in engineering, we pay very close attention to what we call the MR rate, how many merge requests did an engineer make over a month, or did the team make over a month, correlated to the team size. And we found if you push on that, people start making the changes that they make smaller to kind of increase that rate, which is great because then it becomes easier to write, easier to test, easier to review, and the whole process becomes more efficient.

That's interesting because developer productivity is notoriously hard to track and measure. What is the rate that you aim— this engineered GitLab might aim for?

Yeah, so we're around 8 8 right now.

Merge requests per month?

Yep.

Oh, that's, um, I expected the number— is that where you want to be or is that where you're at?

Yeah, we always want to be a little bit higher, so like 9, 10-ish would be great, but we're also in the middle of a global pandemic, so we, we have not pushed very hard on it recently. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's It also differs a bit between teams and what they're assigned to, but I think it's a great rate. And I think the awesome thing is it only counts if you actually got it all the way to the end user, people started using your code. And I think that helps to keep things small and to reinforce one of our top 3 values, iteration.

How fast does GitLab iterate?

So I think it's very important to quickly get things out to users, but I think in the end, it is like, how productive is an individual? So I think that 8.8 captures our productivity.

Is it 8.8?

8.8, sorry, 8.8 merge requests.

Per month. But, you know, to that question, you ship major new releases, is it once a month? And have for like a bajillion months?

Yeah, we now, I think we get code into production after it's merged within 12 hours. So released on GitLab.com and it's a continuous process. We just bundle it up per month because we have a lot of self-managed users. They kind of need a version number., to, to make it digestible and a blog post to make it digestible, but it's really continuous release. And every month we have over 50 substantial things that we, that we ship, at least substantial enough to mention in the release post. So I think we're extremely productive considering the whole company is about 1,200 people and engineering, uh, on features is, uh, is about 500 people.

Wow. So you mentioned maybe working with ISO in the past. Was there anything earlier in your experience or life, personal or work, that drove you to create a company which was so ruthlessly documented and relentlessly documented and, uh, and process-driven, but in a really, really positive and enabling way?

Yeah, I, I think a lot of GitLab values can be explained by kind of my scar tissue. And I did a lot of things. I built recreational submarines. I was a part-time civil servant. I worked at Procter Gamble and IBM. I thought it was so inefficient if you have to ask somebody else, like, how is this done? And it's not just inefficient for the people onboarding, but I think it's most inefficient when you have to change something. If you want to change something, what you had to do is you had to build up all that context for like, this is what I'm talking about. And then say, okay, in this part, we're going to change and then kind of present that to the whole company. And then a person onboarding a month later would not have that presentation. So like, how does it How does that work? It kind of works, but it's really silly. And I think one of the biggest benefits of having a handbook is that you can change something and it's, you don't have to build up all the context because the context exists in all the links from the documents. Everyone understands what you're talking about. And it's relatively easy to change. It's easy to make the suggestion. Anybody can do it. It's easy to discuss that suggestion.. And then when that is merged, when that is pulled in, it's clear to everyone from then on that that is effective.

By the way, this has been very influential on me as well, in that I've been asking a lot, actually for a few years now, like, why can't we make more of our stuff public? And the answer is generally just it takes time. It is not like a real reason that anything in our internal field guide needs to be private, most of it. And, uh, so that makes me think that if you do this from the beginning, it's, it's just so much easier. So like, I would encourage anyone listening that's curious about this, just start publishing things as soon as possible. Um, what about, what would you say to people who think like, it's scary, or we have things that are proprietary company, or like, if our competitors know what we're going to do, they're going to be able to outmaneuver us?

Yeah, I think There's a page at the bottom of our strategy page from Peter Drucker. Strategy is a commodity and execution is an art. I think the really great companies, they have a super obvious strategy. They just do it better than anybody else. I think if you depend on your strategy being a secret, it's first of all very hard. Some of your people are going to quit and then talk to the competition. So it's very hard to keep it secret. I think it's actually very hard for everyone in your organization to know your strategy. Most companies I've been with, like, people didn't even understand the company and the strategy, the people who work there. So I think in general, optimize for more people knowing your strategy, not fewer people knowing it. And we found that having our roadmaps public and things like that has been a big benefit. It's been such a big benefit that we might have inspired our competitors who are now also publishing their roadmaps.

And you are in a highly, highly competitive space.

Yeah, and I think a lot of the things you do are not differentiating. Like, no one's going to buy from GitLab because of our accounts reconciliation process. Like people don't care, but it should be efficient and then the best we can do, but it's not like we lose our ability to compete if our competitor implements the same process. In general, people have a super hard time embracing even just best practices, let alone their competitors' practices. So, and I think you lose a lot and you win a lot. I think transparency and sunlight, kind of makes you do better work. You get a bigger, an easier ability to change. And I think that, yeah, there's a bit of like hesitation that's from being afraid. I think that doesn't make sense. I think what does make sense is that it's more work. When you want to make a change, kind of changing it in the right context takes more work than firing off an email. So I think while the change is more work, it's more durable. So over time you could start reaping the benefits, but it's a short term, it's more work, and then that pays off over the long term.

And that's because, this is my understanding, that the change isn't actually, isn't real until it's in the handbook, right?

Yep.

So we can't say we're going to do this for a month and then we'll put it in the handbook later.

Oh no, that doesn't work. So we're very adamant about handbook first. The only way you can communicate a change is when it's done in the handbook. And then commonly you just refer to the diff, like this is what changed, you link directly to it. What we cannot have is someone emailing, presenting, talking about a change that's not in the handbook. Because if you instill in the company, oh, you can document it later, it's not going to happen. Like people have jobs to do. They'll move on. And so it's been one of the hardest things to enforce in the company to work handbook first, but it prevents what happens at 99% of the companies where the knowledge base is very big, but it's most of it, a lot of it is out of date.

What's maybe underappreciated about this approach as well is that due to the fact everything is in version control, You have essentially like an organizational blockchain of every way the company has run and every change and who made that change and when it happened, going back to when the handbook started, which, was it at the very beginning of GitLab or a little later in its life?

Yeah, no, from 2015, so from when we were 10 people. So I think someday, hopefully, if we continue growing, some organizational researcher is going to have a field day because I think we're the best documented instance of kind of a really steep growth trajectory for startup and how your processes change and what's important. And it's all kind of, it's to the letter dated and everything else. You could see all the comments. I think that's going to be an amazing research if you're into organizational research.

It is, it is the code that runs the organization. Which I think, like you said, super fascinating. I hope it gets studied.

Yeah, look, we both have a software engineering background, and I think we just moved on to a higher level language, namely English.

It's less deterministic for sure, I don't know.

Yeah, and it's hard to troubleshoot, and there's no tests for it, and there's no indentations. Well, the indentation standards are pretty okay, but It's much harder, but it's much more powerful.

To give a sense for the listeners who might not be familiar with GitLab, you mentioned 10 people in 2015. What are some of the growth milestones since then in terms of people? And I think some valuation has even been public in the press.

Yeah, so I think our craziest year was 2019 where we tripled. To from 300 to 1,000 or something. Wow. We're now 1,300 people and the last public metric we shared was a valuation of $6 billion.

That's pretty incredible because I think that, you know, one of the criticisms, I don't know if you heard this much in the early days of GitLab, but that distributed or remote companies or open source companies are— can be nice lifestyle businesses, or some of these approaches work if you're like Basecamp and only 50 or 60 people, but it doesn't turn into like hyperscale or blitzscaling, as Reid Hoffman might say. But you did that. You went from 300 to 900 or 1,000 in a 12-month-ish period. What broke that year? Yeah.

Actually, not a lot. It was kind of hard to do recruiting at such a scale, and I think we relied a lot on inbound. So we got 15,000 applications every month, and I think now that we grow a bit less fast, we're better able to kind of reach out to people who will add diversity to the company. And anytime you grow faster, that's tougher. I think I have to thank you because WordPress was like the number one example to convince investors that we'd be able to scale fast as a distributed company, an all-remote company. So thank you for giving that example. I don't think we could have convinced them otherwise. And now looking back on it, I'm like, how can you scale when you don't have a handbook, when you have not documented things? Like, that is ridiculous. If like two-thirds of the people at the end of the year are new, like, how do you do that? So I think having all these practices has enabled us to scale. And I think in general, all remote, you don't have to do special things for it. You just have to do things that would be good for any company, and you're forced to do them sooner.

There's stories I hear from friends that have hyperscaled around, like, they can't find enough desks in the office, and so they're squeezing people into the same desk and things, which is such a quaint concept if everyone has their own office because they work wherever they're coming from. So I wonder what might be like I've heard that kids now don't know what the disk icon represents, a floppy disk. And so when they see like a floppy disk, they're like, oh cool, you 3D printed a save icon. You know, they've totally lost the original metaphor. So I wonder if there's other metaphors around work that have completely changed, maybe permanently even now with the pandemic.

Yeah, it seems that most companies are going back to the office, but I think, I don't know, I look, I look back on cubicles as like super outdated, and I think one day we'll look back on open plan offices as something super outdated. Like, how could you be productive there?

How does your values impact your meetups or your meetings?

Sorry. Transparency impacted that most meetings, like my calendar is, most meetings are shared with the rest of the company. In advance, you, because of efficiency, you link a Google Doc with the agenda and then the notes are taken inline and most documents are open to the entire company.

So while we're meeting, someone will be sort of taking notes on the shared Google Doc. Yeah, multiple people will be. People will have both up on the screen.

Yeah, multiple people will be taking notes. And if you ask questions, you also commonly like put them in written before and then you get to verbalize them.

Are there any external meetings, like let's say the board, that you also run in a similar manner?

Yes, we are blessed with board members who have an open mind, and I'm learning a lot about how to run better board meetings with their feedback. But they've embraced this running it from a document, and that's been super successful. They actually start putting in questions like days before,, and we already start answering them. So when the board meeting actually comes around, a lot of things are like, well, that's already answered, we can skip that. And like any board meeting, like, we can fill the time, but it's just they have much more opportunity to get their questions answered.

It also requires a lot of pre-work. So do you want to talk about, like, what you expect people to do before a meeting and for board meetings, I imagine internal meetings as well.

Yeah, board meetings are quite special. They require more work than any other meeting. Of course, you can Google GitLab board meetings, but I'll do some of the highlights. I think we, one thing that we do throughout all meetings is no presentations in the meeting. It's been one of the toughest things to enforce. People really like to a captive audience. So before the board meeting, I will send out a video with my overview. Our go-to-market leaders from sales and marketing will send out a video where they review that. My notes kind of sound like an earnings call because we kind of aspire one day to be a public company. So those videos are sent up front, plus a deck, plus a doc for them to ask their questions.

To give a sense for the scale, for like how many slides, how long the documents, etc.?

I think our worst has been like 140 slides, which is not good. So I think now we're back to like 60 slides or something like that. And I think what's essential is like, okay, how do you allocate the time in the meeting? So we have 3 key questions or key discussion points that we state up front. This is what we like to talk about as a company. So as a company, we're going, we're thinking about this new product offering, give us feedback. About the pricing, about the implementation, about the rollout. What do you foresee? As a company, we're struggling with XYZ. Do you know people who might be able to help? What do you think about our current approach? I think it's board members who want to help. They will give you advice. If you don't ask, if you don't indicate what you need help on, they'll start helping you on stuff you don't need help with, which can be a big distraction. So make— channel all that energy into something that they can help with because they'll do a great job. And we spend most of the time on that. And then there's a Q&A, which they can ask about anything. But that's been a really big improvement. And I think that should be true for every meeting in general. In our internal meetings, I say my policy is I want to discuss a proposal. I do not want to do brainstorming or something like that. Have a proposal and we can review it. That's a much more better spend of all of our time.

So if everyone asks the questions before and reads everything and watches everything before and you answer them before, you don't run out of stuff to do in the meeting?

No, you don't, because people build on each other. And even if you kind of might have like try to answer the question, many times we still verbalize the question. So, I mentioned an example of something that where people would say, "Oh, it's already answered. We can skip it." That tends to be about trivial stuff. If it's important, like we don't skip it. We're like, "Hey, you asked this question even though it's already answered." So, they present the question. Yeah, they present the question and frequently you learn more. They will say it in a certain way. They will have more intonation. They'll have enthusiasm or worry or or be pensive or other things, and they'll tend to say more. Like, it's easier speaking than writing, so they tend to elaborate a bit more. And then we call it reenactment. We reenact the question and answer so that the answer— the answer people too, they reenact their answer. And then hearing all of that in the rest of the room, now suddenly, now that they've heard that, they have something to add as well. So, no, we don't run out of stuff.

It makes sense for why the sort of reenactment of the question and answer might give additional information that's not on the page, but couldn't you make that same argument for the entire presentation?

Yes, and so I think it's really good to, if you want to present, to do that. Just record it and send it to everyone up front, asynchronous, and don't wait for this super expensive synchronous time to do it.

So it's maybe about the amount of time, like—

I think meetings are for back and forth.

Because interrupting a presentation could be good, right? Like, we're having a real-time conversation, so we can jump in like I just did.

Yeah, I think that's the benefit of this, right? We can go back and forth. I think interruptions are great because, like, if I say too much or too little, it's easy to kind of give me feedback in the moment. I think most presentations, especially remote, there's not enough interruptions. Interruptions are awkward because the delay, because it's kind of hard to say, to hear someone kind of breathing in to ask a question. Maybe you can look at who's unmuting their mic, but it's much harder. So, we find that in general, there's not a lot of interruptions, so you might as well just do your presentation and then have people ask questions during the meeting.

A hybrid meeting makes that especially hard. And I remember when I first joined, I was, I thought everyone was going to be remote. Everyone else was in the room. I think I was like the only one remote. And it was very, very difficult to both hear and jump in.

Yeah, that's hybrids. Hybrid is horrible. And I'm very glad that our board meetings are now all remote.

Yeah. And I remember we also talked about like sending people some microphones, some other things, because 'cause there was some varying audio quality.

Yeah, we did that. Thanks for the suggestion. And a lot of board members received that Sennheiser microphone you suggested.

It's like the cheapest way to make a meeting better. If you're gonna have a couple hours together, the collective value at that time is huge, particularly 'cause you have so much of the team there. Like, might as well spend a couple hundred bucks to make it sound better.

Yeah, it's a $100,000 meeting. You better make the most of it. And I send a lot of people I meet with, I send them cameras and microphones kind of as a thank you for meeting or just to help them out.

You know, to go back to transparency as a value, like you have started broadcasting many meetings, not the board meeting, but like lots of others.

Yeah, so by default, we put our meetings on, GitLab Unfiltered on YouTube. So most meetings can probably be public, and we just livestream them from Zoom to YouTube.

The only other organization I'm aware of doing this is probably Mathematica, the Wolfram|Alpha stuff, Stephen Wolfram. But what is that like? So I've watched some of these, or I've tuned into some that are happening live because YouTube will ping me.

What, do you have trouble sleeping? Because most of these meetings are very boring, so I assume you watched them because you had trouble falling asleep.

Yeah, you know, I find it kind of fascinating because I am an organizational voyeur. I'm very fascinated on how different companies work and how they solve problems. And also I feel like it's a duty as a, as someone trying to contribute to GitLab to get to know the organization as well as possible. But also YouTube pings me about it because you're one of the only channels I follow that like does live broadcast. Basically all the time. Um, who watches these besides GitLab employees? Has anything interesting ever come out of that?

I think it's been great in, um, finding and convincing, uh, potential team members. So I think like what you always want to know is like what is that company like on the inside. You go talk to people, you go have lunch with someone who works there and they say stuff, but there's nothing like being in the meeting, right? That boring meeting that no one cares about on Thursday at 3 PM about some boring subject where everyone is kind of bored. Like that's what a company is really like. So I think it's amazing for potential team members and people watch that and like, okay, this is a boring meeting, but it's a better boring meeting than at my own company because like they're efficient about stuff. They're transparent with each other. They're really goal-oriented. There's, they try to like, try to make action, try to come to actions and to agreements. It's well documented, people screen share, people try to contribute, people are positive, people assume good intent. This is better boring than the company I'm at now. And then they apply for a job.

So all of your sort of culture around meetings, does it make them more exciting?

No, I don't think they get more exciting. I think they get more effective.

Hmm. This approach to meeting culture sounds very efficient, but how do people get to know each other better?

Yeah, you have to organize that too. So, I think one of our biggest lessons is to be intentional around informal communication. There's a webpage we have with 20 ways to kind of stimulate informal communication. And most of it is like, have a meeting but have it explicitly not be about work. And that is tough, and the concept doesn't always translate well. I just had a meeting with a country manager of us, um, an international country manager, and like, we try to signal to him, hey, this is going to be a coffee chat, it's going to be a social call, this is here's how Coffee Chats works. And still, like, I can't imagine out of the blue you're going to talk with the CEO. You have some backup slides about the business. And he did that. He had the slides ready, but he's like, oh, this is a different meeting than I expected. And it's a coffee chat. So it's informal and can be a bit about work or a bit about private life. I wanted to kind of set the tone. This was just getting to know each other better and get a feel for how he was experiencing his work and our support for what he was doing. So, and that's one example. We got a ton. But I think what's most important is that you make it okay to do that because it feels really weird. It feels like somehow when you're on Zoom, it feels like you should be working. And then people are not always working, but they're always like not working when they're not on Zoom. And you have to make it okay, like, hey, two of us are in a call and we're not working, and that's okay, and we can just hang out together. So that water cooler chat, organizing that, that's been hard. I think we're the most effective at it. That doesn't mean it's perfect, and we, we do try to augment it with in-person meetings where that's a lot easier to do.

Yeah, so if I were to try to be more social in a more goal-driven meeting, would that get shut down, or do you have some space for people to goof off a little?

Yeah, I think it's appreciated when the meeting hasn't started yet. So people at GitLab tend to come early to meetings, so in the first few minutes, you kind of joke around a bit. And I had an interaction like that today in a meeting where I joined 3 minutes early and we had some banter, but then we tend to start on the dot, so on the top or the bottom of the hour.

Literally on the dot, like almost to the second, correct? Tell me about your personal thoughts on timeliness. Does this translate into your personal life as well as professional and how have you gotten the whole culture, because you have people from dozens of countries, to make this important?

Yeah, I think we set the standard like, hey, you start on time, you don't wait for people to arrive. So if you say in a meeting, we have quorum or everyone's here and so we start, I will remind you, no, we're starting because it's time and everyone is here because we start on time and we don't wait for them. And then also very important, you end on time. And we do speedy meetings at GitLab, which is a setting in Google Calendar that means 25 or 50 minutes, not 30 or 60. So you have some time in between the meetings to do whatever you want to do.

And for you, how important are meetings to how you do work? Like, how much of your week is meetings?

Most of my week is meetings. I think if you kind of radiate a lot of information, it's a very efficient way to work. If for me also, it's because it's interactive, it's easy to ask for a little more, a little less information, and to speed things up. So I think there's a bit of a burden on the other side, but I'm, because I tend to be on the busy side, I optimize for my own time. And I think also as the company kind of progressed, I get more and more interrupt-driven where I just have to respond to things. So I kind of set up the mechanisms that force me to, that send out pings where I just have to respond to.

Now, in terms of other unusual things that probably hits transparency as well, you have a shadow program. Could you talk a little bit about that? And is it just for you, or is it also other roles in the company?

Yeah, so it's called the CEO Shadow Program, and it's 2 people who go to most of my meetings. And the idea is we're a functional organization. As a CEO, I'm the level at which all those parts come together. So it's an opportunity for them to look across, see more than just their own function, and see all those other functions. So it's, uh, it's 2 weeks. It's an opportunity to learn and get a broad perspective. They also have to work. They take a lot of notes during meetings, and they sometimes get assigned small changes to the handbook that come up during the meeting. I think it's a great opportunity. Look at the bottom of the CEO Shadow page. You'll find videos from alumni and how they experience the program, and I— hopefully it's a way to create kind of that next level of leadership at GitLab.

How's it evolved over time? It used to be one person, now it's two, or—

It used to be three weeks, so I was inspired— first of all, it was triggered by when I was recruiting for a chief of staff, and they say, well, it's great because with the chief of staff you have one person a year that kind of, you graduate one person a year that knows the entire organization. And I was like, wow, that's not fast enough. So I'm like, how about 3 weeks? See one, do one, teach one, which is kind of a medical thing. And then they were, well, the see one made a ton of sense to learn from the old person. The teach one makes a ton of sense, but to do one is kind of, well, when you see one, you can do one. So we cut out the middle week also to make it more approachable for people who couldn't be away from their family when it was still in person. Now, luckily, as the world moved, like, I have a lot of external meetings and those used to be in person, but I think that even after the pandemic, a lot of those can keep happening online. So we might keep the program remote to keep it more accessible from other places.

Places. Yeah, and I recall when I was a board member, you even were like, hey, is it— is this— can this shadow join this meeting? And for some of them it made sense, and for some I think we were going to discuss something private, so I was like, well, maybe not this one.

Yep. Um, yeah, so meetings and things like that.

How do people respond to it?

Um, I think, well, people never tell you the negative stuff, so maybe some people are weirded out but in general gets a really positive reception, and I think it drives home that we're a really transparent company. You have to be pretty transparent, have a high bar for like sharing, or not a high bar, but be comfortable with sharing things to even have such a program. So I think in the meeting with external parties, they exemplify our values.

And what would you do, you know, I think a common question people would have, well, we could do that, but what if something private comes up? So what do you do both for the shadows if something private comes up or sensitive and for these projects?

You say by shadows and I say it a lot. I think I said it 3 times yesterday.

Oh, okay.

But we tend to, it happens mostly during one-on-ones where we have to discuss performance of one of the reports of my reports.

So your one-on-ones are really 3-on-ones.

Yeah, they're one-on-ones but with 2 shadows in the room. But what we tend to do is we put it on the the agenda. So, there's like confidential subject, and then at the end we, depending on how many there are, we take 5 or 10 minutes without the shadows.

And how about for these live broadcast meetings? Like, does ever anything come up that you need to take down later, or you turn off the broadcast? Maybe dealing with a specific customer issue or things you want to keep confidential?

Yeah, that happens as well. So, we just had our product key meeting, live streamed publicly to YouTube, and it was a question about CI abuse. And we don't want to have the people who abuse our CI minutes to have them be aware of how we are trying to counteract that. It's kind of a cat and mouse game. So there was one question about that. That gets placed at the bottom, in between the— I take it offline now. So we say, oh, there's now There were, I think, 8 public questions, and then we took it off air and we had 1 private question.

Hmm. And, you know, you've been remote distributed almost since you started, right?

Mm-hmm.

How has pandemic changed? How are these ways of people connecting? How's it working? Would you say it's like 50% as good as when you used to do meetups, or 80%? And how would you think about let's say pretend the world is fully healed and vaccinated and safe, what do you want to get back to in terms of in-person?

Yeah, I think meeting with external organizations has gotten so much better, just that everyone can get on Zoom and like audio and video quality and internet quality is so much better. And then we really are looking forward to the world opening up again, obviously is people are vaccinated and safe and we won't be suffering from this pandemic and then people don't have to fear for their loved ones and kids can go to school as they should be. But as a company, we're looking forward to doing local meetups. We used to have a— or we still have, but it's inactive— a travel stipend where you can just visit other team members. But most of all, we have a yearly get-together And this year we're hoping to have that in the kind of September timeframe. And I think we'll be able to make it with more than half of the team. So, super looking forward to that.

Applause for that. We actually decided to not do the Grand Meetup this year, our equivalent of this annual get-together, just because it's still unrolling so differently across 80 countries. That we're in, and you're probably in a similar— actually, how many countries are you in, do you know?

67.

67, yeah.

So, yeah, it's been a topic of conversation. It's clear right now that not everyone will be able to make it, not everywhere there will be vaccines. The majority of our team members are in America and Europe. America is looking like a lot of people will be vaccinated, Europe is also looking like September will be— there will be a lot of vaccinations, but it's a daily topic of conversation and it's not a clear-cut decision at all. We do think it's super important for us to have the event. Past events have been really a boost in morale, and so we're going to keep monitoring it. But for now, it's Sean.

It's kind of the beautiful paradox of distributed organizations is that, like, being distributed most of the time is fantastic, but then that makes getting in person, like, that much more fun and that much more exciting.

Yeah, it makes it more exciting, and also I think it allows you to do something extra special. Like, we do a week, we commonly go to a destination that's interesting, so, I think you're able to make it a little bit more of it. Yeah.

And how do you try to incorporate customers into these?

Yeah, we did that. It tended that, what tended to happen is that if they are at the actual event, they are the team members are no longer there for themselves, but for the customers, which makes sense, right? Customers are super important to us. But it didn't really work. So I think what might work is have kind of the team event and then tag on a few days where there's customers, but don't make that part of your team event. I think it was different for contributors, so contributors to GitLab, having them as part of the main event, that felt much more natural, and that's what we keep doing. The core team members commonly are invited.

So, at your company meetups, you'll have people attending who aren't part of the company?

Yes. We also once had a journalist attending. I think that was trickier.

Yeah, the one I remember going to, I think was in New Orleans, and it was interesting. Yeah, there was customers there, there was all sorts of different folks. You know, a lot of companies say kind of customers first, and I believe you explicitly don't. So what is first at GitLab?

I don't— I think results first. So whatever gets you to that result.

I feel like I read friends and family.

Ah yeah, friends and family first. Yes, that was a layup and I totally missed it.

No, it's no worries. Like, you know, I was just reading the handbook and that's not—

look, I don't think that there's an easy, like, Is it your contributors? Is it your suppliers? Is it your team members or is it your customers? I think picking between that is like, who's your favorite child? I think that's, it depends. I don't think there's a clear-cut answer.

It depends on the day who your favorite child is.

No, you're not going to pick a favorite and it depends on the question of what you're going to do and it shouldn't be based on favoritism. I think it's not about customers versus team members, it's about work versus your life outside of work and family and friends is a way to represent that. And there we have a clear opinion. Family and friends come first and work comes second. And I think, I think if you ask anybody in your friend group, like, what's more important to you, work or family and friends? Everyone's like, well, family and friends, obviously. And there's a lot of companies which kind of pretend that work is the most important thing in your life. And I never quite got that. It doesn't make sense to me. I think it's disingenuous and it forces everyone to pretend something. And I think by saying that explicitly, it opens up the possibility for people to say, hey, look, something important is happening with my family or my friends, and I'm going to take time off work to to pay attention to that, or I'm going to move, not going to be in this meeting because of that. I think that flexibility is a great benefit to people. It doesn't mean that at GitLab we don't work hard or we don't care about the result. We, I think, on average, we're very ambitious and put work— work is really important to most people at GitLab, but Yeah, we can just be, we don't have to pretend to like it more than our family and friends.

And have you been doing family and friend day, like days off for the whole company essentially? And how did that start? How's it going?

Yeah, during the pandemic, we saw productivity inch up and we saw the MR rate inch up, especially in the beginning. We're like, what's happening? It didn't make sense. Like, people had kids at school, were distracted, but what— people were super bored, so they just started filling that time with work. We're like, hey, this is, this is not probably not a sustainable thing, and I want to prevent burnout, uh, and wanna— we don't think this is the right thing. And to set kind of as a company a direction, uh, kind of indicate like what we thought about it, we said, hey, we're going to take some Fridays, we're going to treat them as holidays. So treat them as a holiday, it's everyone's off. Because you can tell people to take time off, but if you're the only one taking time off, then your inbox fills up with stuff that you have to take care of. Like, people, it's harder to do unless it's coordinated. It's easy to do when it's coordinated.

One of my favorite things about the GitLab Handbook is that there's also the FAQs. So often you'll hear about a policy and you're like, Google's 20% time or something like that. And you're like, okay, how does that work? And for you, you can actually look at the day for Family and Friends Day. And it has the questions like, well, what if I need to work? Cause I'm on call or something like that. And it's like, well, it's very common sense. It's like, well, talk to your manager, take the next business day if you can, like all these sorts of things. So I'm glad that's been going well. Do you do anything else on Fridays? That's different from other companies?

Oh yeah, no meeting Fridays. So we've now made that permanent. They were a big success. They're called Focus Fridays, and we try to not schedule Zoom meetings. I think for a lot of people, it's nice to have uninterrupted time where you can work on something without having a meeting in between. And Focus Fridays helps us to organize that.

I know other people do this on Wednesdays and things because they worry if they do it on Fridays, everyone just, I don't know, takes the day off or how do you end up with Friday?

Yeah, I think it enables people to take the day off if they think that's better.

Cool. I hope, I know there's some people who research organizational design and things like that. I really hope that more people study GitLab. One, because you're open to it. Literally they wouldn't even need your permission, so much is open. But two, I think one of the challenges in even talking to relatively new Gitlappers is that they internalize your culture so quickly that it becomes almost like water to a fish. They don't realize it's there, but there's really quite a bit that's like very unique and unusual and arguably controversial at other companies. And the way that you do things.

Yeah, thanks for that. And we're seeing that with the, the, the people who come back. So of the people who leave GitLab, they leave because there's a lot more options now, right? When the only way to work for an up-and-coming startup when they joined was in their area was GitLab, and now there's like a thousand options because everyone's hiring remote. So They, they make a move and then they're like, wow, this company, they do work remote, but they do it so much worse. And some of them bring the GitLab practices to their new company. So that's very cool. And some of them return to GitLab. But I think, yes, especially for people for who GitLab was their first remote job, they assume that remote means the GitLab practices., but it can be very different.

Our name for that internally is boomerang. People go, and it's actually, I really appreciate it. Like it's never great to lose a colleague you enjoy working with, but many of the folks who return have brought in some perspective and there's nothing that recreates actually working someplace else to say like, okay, this worked, this doesn't, this is what I know about Automattic now that I've been outside of it for a few years and been successful someplace else. And so I really find that a valuable, valuable input.

Yeah, me too. And I think we say you're the CEO of your own career, so it makes total sense to interview externally, even if you're not looking. And a lot of GitLab people get approached by companies because those companies know that GitLab team members have a lot of great remote work practices. So great if they end up advancing their careers because they spent time at GitLab.

We've started seeing the same thing, especially in 2021, where a bunch of companies are like, "Oh no, how do we do this distributed thing better? We've been doing it for a while, we want to get good at it." You know, I'm curious, you mentioned kind of like in-person being warmer, building trust, and I see how this kind of more scheduled, you know, social or non-work time can work internally. Because you can kind of force people to do it and it feels weird. But then once they do it, I imagine it feels better, right?

Yeah, exactly.

But for customers, I feel like there's almost like a prisoner's dilemma where no one's meeting with the client in person now. But, you know, let's say a few months, some salesperson in your very sales-driven organization is going to get on a plane from a competitor. And if you lose a deal because of that, then it's going to start almost like the, the dominoes falling of everyone feeling like they need to do that to for the client to take it seriously or to build a deeper relationship. You know, it's not just signaling, it can be actually true deepness of understanding the customer problem.

Yeah, I totally agree. Those kind of organized informal communication is, it has to be kind of sponsored by the company. Like the company has to tell you about it, give it a name, make it okay, help with scheduling. And it, It is hard to do that with external parties, and so we still have an exception process now where salespeople have to request meeting customers because of COVID but it's, it's certainly ramping up, and I think that's the in-person for external, especially customer meetings, is gonna come back.

What have you seen be effective for deepening relationships? 'cause you've grown a lot in the past year when you haven't been meeting people, for deepening relationships and building that kind of sales-driven trust and understanding when you can't get together in person?

Yeah, I think that there's been a big shift in that customers are now much more okay with taking Zoom meetings. I think I've not seen kind of informal communication during the meeting. There's no banter or stuff like that in the meeting. It's interesting, yeah. I think we've not been able to do that. I think I've personally done a lot more gift sending, which is like you figure out during a call something that might be relevant to the person and you send it because, well, that's a thing we can still do with COVID Other than that, I don't have any great suggestions. Hmm.

Oh, good to keep in mind. I know you'll share it when you do figure it out.

For sure. Yeah, that's a great question.

You know, explicitly remote is not a value, even though you're one of the most famous remote or distributed companies. Why not?

I think remote is a work practice that we have. I don't think it should be a value. Making it a value feels like a cart before the horse. Values are deeper principles. And I think it makes totally sense if you're transparent and you want to be effective and you want to have a diverse organization to be remote. Like, it's an outcome of that. I think making it a value feels strange.

So it's derived from these deeper values. You're like, well, if you want to do this, you kind of end up with distributed. But if there were a scenario where an office made sense for being more inclusive, more transparent, etc., you do that?

Yeah, I, I don't know. One time I argued, hey, should we have an office at a beach in Mexico for people to just hang out? Like, you can work, but you can still hang out in a kind of a nice atmosphere. And then, uh, people push me on like, oh, what's the first iteration? Like, well, I have a house in the Netherlands I hardly use, so people can just go there and see whether people like that. And then we did that. And what didn't end up happening was like, I said, hey, this week it's like coworking week at my place without me there. Do people want to join? And people were like, well, I'm not going to go with other people. And I said, okay, well, it's no longer coworking week, but you can just go to my place. And then that was amazingly popular. So to this day, we have the CEO house where you can just, as long as it's available, you can stay in my house for free. Um, so that works, but get all getting together didn't quite work. Maybe we should buy a small village of houses, but that's much expensive.

Uh, so are you still looking at that, or is there going to be a GitLab village somewhere?

Um, no, I, I've, I've given up on that, but, um, it's given up. It's not a priority, but maybe some of our team members hear this and like, village of houses in Mexico sounds interesting. So we'll see.

I have found I've also fantasized about something like that because it would be really fun to see colleagues more in a fun setting. And I know some companies have tried it. It just gets a little tricky. I mean, one thing that I would say that distributed companies don't develop a strong, uh, muscle for is like facilities management and managing a physical space, especially a high-volume one, or especially one that people actually live in, maybe with family and kids, etc., um, is a lot of overhead. And you start to get into something more like running a hotel than changing how DevOps works in the world or democratizing publishing. And so like it goes outside some core competencies and that point, there's lots of places you can pay to do that.

Yeah, I think if you go, hey, you're basically running a hotel, I totally agree. And that comes with a lot of things like you're responsible for making sure it's a great environment and that there's not any HR violations and that there's security people and things like that. So if you do a hotel, you might as well like bring the whole company together on the same week because like it's kind of nice to have a bigger group there. So you end up with a yearly event like we're having now instead of kind of a much smaller group, uh, somewhere for a year.

Our, you know, what I tried to do a few years ago was take the grand meetup, which was the whole company, and split it up because I, I kind of enjoyed the smaller ones when we were, you know, hundreds of people as opposed to more of a thousand. And Automattic is organized as almost essentially separate companies internally. So I thought it makes sense to split it up. But people pushed back so much that I kind of surrendered to that idea. I even announced on stage, this is our last Grand Meetup. And we just kept doing it, obviously stopped last year, but It is amazing how much people enjoy getting together and how much value that week comes. It's also stressful as well. Like, you're not around people for a while. I imagine this will be especially cute on the first one. And so like, it can be tiring to be surrounded by people constantly. But you can kind of iterate your way into better versions of that too. Like we often do a kind of a quiet zone. So it'll be like little area it's marked off where like you can go in here to just have no one talk to you. And so that's like, you know, kind of like a I just want to reset and recharge zone. And hotels are actually really nice because then people each have their own room and they can go back and recharge and things like, um, you know, kind of have their own private space, which gets trickier in like shared houses or Airbnbs or things that aren't hotels essentially.

Totally agree. It can get very overwhelming. We make a ton of things optional and we're super lenient if like people want to leave early or things like that. It can be overwhelming and it's, it's not for everyone, but I do, I do think that there's something to like having most of the company in one location and yeah, maybe someday that is like, I don't know, a stadium or something like that. And yeah, it will be very different. Yeah. You don't get to talk to everyone and it's a different vibe, but. It's different, but not necessarily worse.

People still go to conferences that are thousands or tens of thousands of people, and they get value out of it. It's just different from meeting every single other person. I also internally, it comes up for people saying, I feel like part of the reason this team is having friction is because we haven't had a meetup in a while. And I try to push back on that because, you know, there's lots of reasons why someone couldn't make a meetup, and we want to make sure we develop the the ability to have a team be super cohesive and aligned and everything, regardless of whether they're getting together in person or not. But I do personally miss it. And I think there's a real, a real desire to return to seeing people in person, which brings us a little bit to your Twitter thread. So this, you wrote this last May. Do you want to recap, or could you recap a little bit of these predictions you made in May of 2020? So about 2 months into the pandemic.

Oh wow, um, is this the one that's pinned on my Twitter profile?

It is pinned, yes. And it's still pinned, you know, a year later. So I thought it'd be a year later.

It was the only successful thing I've ever done on, on Twitter with a thousand retweets. So let's see, I haven't looked at it for a while. It's— yeah, yeah, no, I'll— the first, the first point is, um, remote work will be allowed at Twitter, Square, Facebook, and Shopify. Great. And that's— many of them are going to continue. Many companies are learning that their workers are just as or even more productive working from home. And I think that is true as far as I've heard of other people, but my sources might be a bit biased. But a lot of companies actually got more effective, like more work got done. It's just that people said they were unhappy, and I attribute that to not having enough informal communication. And I kind of acknowledge here that like I thought it took all these practices to do remote work right, and turns out without old GitLab practices, you could still do remote work and it still was better than in-office work. So kind of co-located work was even less useful than I thought. I think this is important. Somehow the lesson that companies deduce from this isn't that they should go all remote, This works really well, but that they should go hybrid, combining remote and co-located work. I think that hybrid is much harder and less likely to be successful, and I'm still of that opinion. So that's going to play out over the next couple of years. Also, these companies are going hybrid for the wrong reasons. Social bond building, culture, creativity, whiteboarding, and brainstorming needs to happen at the office. I totally disagree. You can do those things, but you have to organize it, just like you have to do facilities management. It doesn't happen automatically. Put some effort into it. I have a list of 17 reasons why Google Docs is better than whiteboarding. With the social bond building, yeah, you got to organize informal communication.

So it sounds like you agree with a lot of this still.

Yeah. Where do you think it went sideways?

Well, there's a few things there. In some ways, we are hybrid organizations in that we, in non-pandemic times, tell people we're going to get together for a few weeks out of the year, which technically is a hybrid, right? It's not fully, you're never going to see your employees.

I think the hybrid I'm rallying against is not that sometimes you bring everyone together or you have local meetups. The hybrid I'm rallying against is that some people are never remote and some people are never at the office. And I think that's gonna create like the A-teams and the B-teams with where the people in the office have an kind of an information and a visibility advantage.

Especially if things aren't documented or transparent, kinda like we described meetings earlier, a meeting where some people are in person and some people aren't is kind of the worst type of meeting, no matter how good the, the conference room system is. I think what people overweight is they, they look back at the office— well, one, they really want to see people again, just in general. They look at rose-colored glasses of like the best things that could possibly happen in office versus what actually happens in the office 99% of the time. And I think they overweight office and underweight commute. If you look at something that actually the meetup kind of version of hybrid does is we kind of amortize a really big commute, probably flying across the world, you know, a couple of times a year. And then you, you stay there at this place versus the kind of everyday driving 15 to 60 minutes each way to get to an office or commuting, I think can be— is actually the hardest thing on people. It's more about the commute than actually the office Yeah, I totally agree.

Like, I bet that most people commute longer than that they have like super valuable informal communication at the office. Like, how much water cooler talk are you going to do? But for most people, it's less than an hour, and their commute both ways is probably more than an hour. And it doesn't mean like, don't do water cooler talk anymore and don't do the commute. Like, do the— skip the commute and just organize that water cooler talk. Hmm.

And like you said, it can feel awkward at first, but then gets better. Y'all use the donut— I think Automattic uses this too, like a donut pairing bot, right?

Yeah. Do Not Be Strangers, a great plugin for Slack that for people who want to, kind of introduces them to one new team member every week at random, and you set up a call together. I think it's a bit weird, but you just send a calendar invite to someone for a coffee chat. I think it really helps if the company kind of names the concept. This is a coffee chat, it's informal, you don't have to prep anything, and then also introduces new team members to it. If you join GitLab, you have to do 12 coffee chats.

Hmm, wow. There's also something to the Like you do these as well, right? You lead by example in all this.

Yeah, I had a coffee chat yesterday. I encourage people to schedule them. I think it's really important to lead by example. Another big thing has been like taking time off. Yeah, I like my time off. I have an argument to do even more of it because I have to be a leader. And then I try to be really visible and talk about it a lot. So vacation and time off is not something that you have to be ashamed of or hide. It should be a point of pride. You're taking care of yourself.

That's something I need to get better at because I think pre-pandemic I was better at taking time off and talking about it. And then post-pandemic I've been a lot worse.

2 weeks ago I took half the week off. I just took off from noon and went biking for week.

Oh cool. In some ways, you know, I love thinking about how the distributed intentional version of this can be even better than in person. I've definitely seen and experienced where in-person social pairings can kind of by default fall into cliques, and not even maliciously, but folks who you sort of maybe know better or more comfortable with. But when you're randomly paired by a bot, it breaks up all the cliques because everyone's being randomly paired with everyone else.

Yeah, and I think, for example, if you're remote, it's easy to do a quiz about, like, guess whose team member does this or that. And then it's kind of interesting, gives you something to talk about. It's like, there's a reason there are pub quizzes. I think they're pretty easy to organize when you're remote, and it's easy to screen share, and everyone's online anyway. So Um, look, it's, it's also super fun to hang out in person. It's not a, we're not trying to find a substitute for that. Uh, we're find, trying to find a substitute like for some of the informal communication.

People underweight screen sharing too. Like I find myself often screen sharing like some Google Photos or something like that. Like you might take out your phone and show someone something. It's a, it's pretty, it's a nice way to kind of jump in and out of things.

I think, I think if you look at how, like per hour, how many times is the screen share button pressed, I guess that is a great indicator of how remote proficient an organization is.

Wow. That is probably a good place to end. Sid, where can people check out more about you and GitLab?

Yeah, if you type GitLab about, you'll find a good starting point or GitLab handbook if you want to dive into that 10,000 pages immediately.

What's your handle on Twitter?

@syteses, S-Y-T-E-S.

And more than most interviews, I would encourage listeners to really dive into these resources because there is, it's almost like a Wikipedia of GitLab, which also happens to be a Wikipedia for some of the best practices in the world for how to run a distributed organization. I truly believe that. And I find myself referring to it often. And thank you for doing that. It didn't start as the easy path. Maybe it's easy now to keep doing it, but when you started, it was probably not easy to convince the world, the investors, everyone else that you should publish every single thing about the internals of your company.

It was fun in the beginning. I tweeted out our OKRs and one of my investors said, I almost had a heart attack. So I was seeing, oh my goodness, 'You publish your OKRs? You shouldn't do that.' And I'm like, 'We've been doing that for years. It's fine.' But it's certainly gotten easier, and I'm really grateful for you clearing that path. And I think there's now a whole bunch of companies following in WordPress their footsteps.

The lane is getting wider. I think GitLab opened it quite a bit, and now, you know, both distributed and open source and open core, I think, is getting more and more common. As an exercise for the reader, I would encourage folks to check out— there's a lot of published READMEs on about.gitlab, which are basically like developer documentation but for people, and including a CEO one that talks about Sid's— well, describe it really quickly.

Um, yeah, if you Google GitLab CEO, you'll probably end up on my, my handbook page, and I just try to kind of define my interface. How do you interact? How do you get a meeting? Who's my EBA? But also like, what are my flaws? What are things that I frequently do wrong and how to be aware of that? If you wonder how to tell me, how to point me at those things to correct them. It used to have my favorite restaurants. Just makes— the whole goal is to kind of make someone more approachable. I think with remote, you have sometimes less of an opportunity to kind of be an observer. And so we do a lot of practices to make that easier. CEO Shadows, the live streaming of videos, of meetings, are examples., but we also try to just give a README, like this is how I tend to work, this is what I care about, this is how I'm best, here's how to enable me at processing information quickly.

I think one of the best compliments I could give GitLab is it's a very self-aware organization. So, and thank you for leading by example, and thank you for joining. You have been listening to the Distributed Podcast, with Sid C. Brandy of GitLab and Matt Mullenweg. Have a great day and see you next time.