- GitLab is an open source software development tool that allows for collaboration on software projects.
- The company was started in 2011 by the co-founder, Dimitri, and gained popularity after being shared on Hacker News.
- GitLab has grown from 9 employees in 2015 to 160 employees, with headquarters in San Francisco and team members located in 37 different countries.
- The company operates with a remote work model, with most employees choosing to work from home.
- GitLab has a comprehensive handbook that covers all company processes and is constantly updated by employees, including contributions from outside the company.
- The CEO, Sid Sibrande, spends his time in meetings and video calls, with 10 direct reports.
- Building a distributed company posed challenges in terms of fundraising, as some investors were hesitant to invest in a remote work model.
- GitLab believes that not every personality type may be suited for remote work, but they have found success in creating an effective and strong company culture.

- GitLab encourages social interaction through team calls and virtual coffee breaks
- They value self-motivated and self-disciplined individuals
- They have recruiters located in different parts of the world
- The company organizes get-togethers and team-building activities
- The model of a distributed workforce is more effective for GitLab
- They believe there is no limit to how big the company can grow while being remote-only
- They emphasize the importance of writing down information in their handbook
- GitLab's mission is to enable everyone to contribute and change the culture from read-only to read and write.

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.

I run YC's Continuity Fund and I'm here with Sid Sibrande, an alumnus from the YC Winter Class of 2015, here to talk about the fascinating company that you run, GitLab, and how you built this organization.

So first tell us, in your words, tell us what GitLab does and why it's important.

So GitLab is an open source software development tool.

So we allow people to collaborate on software and it makes the software development process easier, faster, more efficient.

And built on open source, so talk about that, talk about the roots of the company and then sort of how you then have taken an open source platform and created a business out of it.

So GitLab was started by my co-founder Dimitri, he's now our CTO and he made it because he needed something like that himself.

In 2012 I saw it, I thought it makes so much sense that something you use to collaborate is also something you can contribute back to.

So I did a show Hacker News and I asked people, do you want to use GitLab as a service?

Because up to that time, you still had to install it yourself.

A year later, I figured out that for business, it was really hard to make money on the dot com.

But we had all kinds of really large companies asking us for more features.

And Dimitri tweeted, I want to work on GitLab full time.

And that's when we started growing faster.

We're sitting here in your headquarters in San Francisco, and how many people work here in headquarters?

So it's a headquarters head office with 1 person?

My wife's also here, she doesn't work at GitLab.

She keeps me company and we live upstairs.

So the other 159 people are in 37 different countries all around the world.

And they work from the location they prefer.

If you want to, we will pay for office space near your location, but most people opt to work from home.

So you've got 1 person here, you, you've got 159 people working in 37 different countries and in most situations working from home.

Yes, so far there are no 2 people in the same location.

Did you have the intention to build a company this way?

Or did it sort of come about and you decided to just kind of see how it went?

So we didn't want to like innovate in the way we structure our company.

Our product should be exceptional, but all the rest of the structure shouldn't be.

Dimitri was in the Ukraine, I was in the Netherlands.

And then I hired people in the Netherlands.

After a few days of coming to my place, where I had an extra desk, they kind of opted to work from home.

It was natural, We make collaboration software that makes this easier.

So I thought, okay, for development, apparently this is how it works.

And then when we graduated from YC, we bought this space, we put in a lot of desks, and we were like, bring on the salespeople.

And the salespeople came in, and after a few days, they started working from home.

But I had the option to say come to the office.

We don't care about where you perform your work.

So when did you decide to write your handbook?

And describe the handbook and how that came about.

It's over 500 pages of all the processes that we have.

And I wrote it because I don't like explaining things twice.

And we hire very intelligent people that you don't have to tell things twice, but we keep having new people the whole time.

So rather than telling a person 1 time, I take an extra minute to write it down, communicate that, and the next person can just read up on it.

And this handbook, for those of you who haven't seen it, I would really recommend taking a look.

But it really covers everything that an employee would need to know.

Can you talk about some of the chapters in the handbook and some of the topics covered from small to big?

Yeah, so we really try to capture everything.

So you have an onboarding, there's an onboarding issue.

It's about 80 things you and others have to do.

You get 1 for every new person that joins.

can see not only what you have to do, but also what others have to do for you.

So 1 thing that frustrated me in the past that some people didn't do their thing and you were blocked as an employee, but you didn't know that other people, who had to do what.

So we try to be really clear about that and give people all the tools that they need.

And some people start their onboarding before they get an offer because they can already see everything.

But it's also, there's also like processes, like even minute things.

So How do you start a video call and chat?

So the rule with us is you start it if you are not the last 1 that responded.

So just to take away all these small aggravations, all these small inefficiencies.

And it describes what every part of the company is working on, how they work on it, how they think about it.

So really try to nail that all down and every time someone asks a question, we try to edit the handbook, add the answer to that so that the next person doesn't have to ask.

And does the editing process, the process of keeping it current and fresh and the best ideas in there, is that also kind of done in an open source way or do you have any sort of governing board or any sort of editorial team that needs to make sure everything is okay?

So everyone's responsible for it and if it's about a certain department that department is responsible for it and it's open source so we get contributions even from outside the company.

So it's public for viewing and also for editing.

Mostly those people are not sending like 5 extra pages, it's mostly small edits, but it's always fun to see people contributing to it.

What do you spend your time doing as a leader now of a 160 person company that's distributed around the world?

How does, What does the pie chart of SIDS time look like?

Yeah, I don't think it's that different from other people.

I have lots of meetings throughout the day.

Do you work a normal workday or because of time zone issues, Are you taking an 11 p.m.

Conference call with people in Russia, that kind of thing?

I need some overlap with Europe, so I normally start 8 o'clock, which is not too bad.

And so meetings, how many direct reports do you have, for instance, as the CEO of the company?

So do you guys ever have conference calls or meetings where all of your direct reports are on at the same time.

Is that a part of how you run the company, or do you interact discreetly with each 1 of them?

I mostly try to do one-on-ones, because it's many, many interactions contain feedback, and if feedback is negative, then we try to keep the audience as small as possible.

So it'd be between a boss and a report, preferably.

Some of my direct reports are part of the executive team.

And in that, that is a weekly one-hour call.

In GitLab, we try to have fewer meetings and more asynchronous communication.

So we try to use issue trackers, Google Docs, chat to facilitate things so you don't deal with time zones, but more importantly, if it's a meeting, everyone is forced to spend time.

If you make it asynchronously, only the people that care about that subject have to invest time there.

What do you think that the toughest thing about building a company this way has been?

Yeah, because we had some great investors that I would really like to have invest in the company.

Luckily, we ended up with great investors too, but it was very hard to see that they said, okay, you take all the R boxes, except for this remote thing, that's new.

You might make it work, but it, we're the best fund, 1 of the best funds.

We have only that many board seats we can take.

You try to convince them that we're more effective, that we're doing a better job of onboarding people, that we have a stronger culture that's not diluted, but I think it gets stronger by written.

wasn't able to convince each and every 1.

But luckily we did end up with a great fund, August Capital, which is the Ilcev, that said, okay, let's have a look at how this is performing.

So they dove in, interviewed our senior management, whether it was actually working, and we managed to convince them.

Do you think that every personality type can work in a company like this?

Or do you think it takes a special person to be able to adapt to a situation where they're fairly isolated in terms of human to human contact with their colleagues?

Although obviously they're connected and they're video chatting and so on.

Do you think anyone can work in a company like this or do you try to screen for a particular kind of person?

So we try to, I think actually people tend to see more like social interaction at GitLab.

people just talk about their private lives for half an hour.

4 times a week, you have a team call where people talk about their private lives?

No, you're not obligated, but I think average attendance is between 80 and 100 people.

People, I don't know, do anything from show off their keyboard to showing their baby that is chewing their microphone cord at the same time.

And people make something special out of it.

So it's open to the whole company and 80 to 90 people participate?

And then we have the concept of virtual coffee breaks.

So if you just want to hang out with someone, it's okay, we have a name for it, virtual coffee breaks.

When you join the company, we force you to take 10 of them, so you get accustomed to the concept.

So we try to stimulate the water cooler talk.

So it's not the isolation that's the problem.

It is, there's Nobody watching you come in or come out.

So you have to be self-organized, self-disciplined to do that.

So you try to filter for that, for people who are self-motivated, self-disciplined.

Do you have recruiters all around the world?

1 of our recruiters lives in South Africa

We let the people we decline give an MPS score and the first results are 15 scores and they've all been a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5.

So we try to make sure people have a great experience.

Do people ever get to see each other in person?

So there's a budget if you just want to do a get together locally.

For example, we had lunch here today at the office.

And then we have a big get-together every 9 months

And it's a bit of work, but also a lot of just hanging around together, doing fun activities.

So tell me, for a YC company or any startup that started, and let's say they have 20, 30, 40 people and they're all pretty much in 1 single headquarters.

Do you think this model of a distributed workforce has to be all or nothing?

Do you have to start at the beginning as you did and just build it that way and have the processes and the handbooks and the communication practices that make it work?

Or is like a more of a hybrid model where you've got a headquarters, but you can also accommodate a lot of distributed people?

So obviously it's not impossible because I think every large organization, people are no longer in the same, teams are spread among buildings and countries.

But it's being remote only makes it easier because you're forced to write down more.

You have more artifacts that you can share.

If you have in-person communication, and frequently it's not written down, it's harder to share.

So I think it's just that we have an easier time than those companies.

Do you think there's any limit to how big you can grow in terms of your employee base running the company totally distributed?

Do you think you could have 10,000 people 1 day all working from home and interacting in this way, or is there a certain scale at which this model starts to break?

So far, it's working better as we grow bigger.

If we find out something else works better.

I think what other companies find if they go from on premises to having satellite offices or being a 1 office to satellite offices, the people in the satellite office tend to feel left out of gossip, of promotional opportunities, and that's something we've been able to avoid.

What would your I feel like this is a fascinating experiment in scaling the company and it seems like a scaling a company, it seems like it's going quite well.

1 of the things that's remarkable to me is roughly 2 years ago when you were at YC, I believe you said you were 9 people and you're about 160 people today.

So you're significantly bigger and have grown extremely rapidly in a very innovative model.

So I'm curious, as you know a lot of other YC companies, you know a lot of startups, what do you think the, share with us a couple of pieces of wisdom that you've gained in terms of scaling an organization this way.

So about any time we learn something about leadership, we put it on about GitLab.com slash handbook slash leadership, so I'd suggest they go there.

It's been hard in the beginning to get people to write in the handbook to make those changes, so I've been a broken record about can you write that down, can you create an issue for that, But if you do it long enough, that kind of starts filtering down and you start hearing other people say it within the company.

Yeah, getting people to write stuff down, that's been a huge challenge, but a very rewarding thing.

And sometimes people come back after a while like, you were so annoying about writing stuff down, but now I hear myself saying it myself because I think I find those situations where it hasn't been written down and people have to ask 1 another, it's super inefficient.

Last question, 5 years from now, when you're looking back on GitLab, what do you hope to achieve on that kind of a time frame?

What's your vision for GitLab over a 5 year time frame?

5 years, I don't mind if we're remote only or that we have offices where everyone is.

I want us to achieve our mission of everyone can contribute.

So we hope to be the tool that changes culture from read only to read and write.

Where now if you watch a movie, you can do it.

You get an end product, you get a binary.

And hopefully in the future, you get all the different video screens and all the different montages in the human readable format and you're able to contribute to that.

And we wanna make that possible for books, for software, for everything.


Speaker 0: Hi, my name is Ali Roghani. I run YC's Continuity Fund and I'm here with Sid Sibrande, an alumnus from the YC Winter Class of 2015, here to talk about the fascinating company that you run, GitLab, and how you built this organization.

Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker 0: So first tell us, in your words, tell us what GitLab does and why it's important.

Speaker 1: So GitLab is an open source software development tool. So we allow people to collaborate on software and it makes the software development process easier, faster, more efficient.

Speaker 0: And built on open source, so talk about that, talk about the roots of the company and then sort of how you then have taken an open source platform and created a business out of it.

Speaker 1: So GitLab was started by my co-founder Dimitri, he's now our CTO and he made it because he needed something like that himself. It started in 2011. In 2012 I saw it, I thought it makes so much sense that something you use to collaborate is also something you can contribute back to. All my tools were open source. So I did a show Hacker News and I asked people, do you want to use GitLab as a service?

Because up to that time, you still had to install it yourself. And Hacker News was very positive. Lots of people signed up. So that was the start. A year later, I figured out that for business, it was really hard to make money on the dot com.

But we had all kinds of really large companies asking us for more features. And Dimitri tweeted, I want to work on GitLab full time.

Speaker 0: So

Speaker 1: I started paying Dimitri. A year later, we incorporated. And a year later, we got into YC. And that's when we started growing faster. I think March of 2015, we graduated.

We were 9 people at the time. Now we're 160 people.

Speaker 0: Right. 160 people. We're sitting here in your headquarters in San Francisco, and how many people work here in headquarters?

Speaker 1: So normally it's just me.

Speaker 0: So it's a headquarters head office with 1 person?

Speaker 1: It's 1 person. My wife's also here, she doesn't work at GitLab. She keeps you company. She keeps me company and we live upstairs.

Speaker 0: Right. Wow.

Speaker 1: Amazing. So where are the other 140 people? So the other 159 people are in 37 different countries all around the world. And they work from the location they prefer. If you want to, we will pay for office space near your location, but most people opt to work from home.

Speaker 0: So you've got 1 person here, you, you've got 159 people working in 37 different countries and in most situations working from home. So probably 159 different locations. Is that right?

Speaker 1: Yes, so far there are no 2 people in the same location.

Speaker 0: Wow, that's amazing. So how does it work? Did you have the intention to build a company this way? Or did it sort of come about and you decided to just kind of see how it went?

Speaker 1: It came about. 1 of our values is boring solutions. So we didn't want to like innovate in the way we structure our company. We want to do a run of the mill company. Our product should be exceptional, but all the rest of the structure shouldn't be.

But it started remote. Dimitri was in the Ukraine, I was in the Netherlands. And then I hired people in the Netherlands. After a few days of coming to my place, where I had an extra desk, they kind of opted to work from home. It was natural, We make collaboration software that makes this easier.

So I thought, okay, for development, apparently this is how it works. And then when we graduated from YC, we bought this space, we put in a lot of desks, and we were like, bring on the salespeople. And the salespeople came in, and after a few days, they started working from home. And I never told them to. But I had the option to say come to the office.

But I didn't say that. We measure results. We care about results. We don't care about where you perform your work.

Speaker 0: So when did you decide to write your handbook? And describe the handbook and how that came about.

Speaker 1: Yeah, so the handbook is a public thing. It's on aboutgitlamb.com slash handbook. It's over 500 pages of all the processes that we have. And I wrote it because I don't like explaining things twice. We like efficiency.

And we hire very intelligent people that you don't have to tell things twice, but we keep having new people the whole time. So rather than telling a person 1 time, I take an extra minute to write it down, communicate that, and the next person can just read up on it.

Speaker 0: And this handbook, for those of you who haven't seen it, I would really recommend taking a look. But it really covers everything that an employee would need to know. Can you talk about some of the chapters in the handbook and some of the topics covered from small to big?

Speaker 1: Yeah, so we really try to capture everything. So you have an onboarding, there's an onboarding issue. It's about 80 things you and others have to do. You get 1 for every new person that joins.

Speaker 0: You

Speaker 1: can see not only what you have to do, but also what others have to do for you. So 1 thing that frustrated me in the past that some people didn't do their thing and you were blocked as an employee, but you didn't know that other people, who had to do what. So we try to be really clear about that and give people all the tools that they need. And some people start their onboarding before they get an offer because they can already see everything. But it's also, there's also like processes, like even minute things.

So How do you start a video call and chat? So the rule with us is you start it if you are not the last 1 that responded. So just to take away all these small aggravations, all these small inefficiencies. And it describes what every part of the company is working on, how they work on it, how they think about it. So really try to nail that all down and every time someone asks a question, we try to edit the handbook, add the answer to that so that the next person doesn't have to ask.

Speaker 0: And does the editing process, the process of keeping it current and fresh and the best ideas in there, is that also kind of done in an open source way or do you have any sort of governing board or any sort of editorial team that needs to make sure everything is okay?

Speaker 1: No, people are responsible. So everyone's responsible for it and if it's about a certain department that department is responsible for it and it's open source so we get contributions even from outside the company.

Speaker 0: Is that right? Even outside the company? Yeah. So it's public for viewing and also for editing.

Speaker 1: Our mission is everyone can contribute. Mostly those people are not sending like 5 extra pages, it's mostly small edits, but it's always fun to see people contributing to it.

Speaker 0: Fascinating. Tell us a little bit about your time. Where does your time go? What do you spend your time doing as a leader now of a 160 person company that's distributed around the world? How does, What does the pie chart of SIDS time look like?

Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think it's that different from other people. I have lots of meetings throughout the day. For me, most of them are video calls.

Speaker 0: Do you work a normal workday or because of time zone issues, Are you taking an 11 p.m. Conference call with people in Russia, that kind of thing?

Speaker 1: Not that. I need some overlap with Europe, so I normally start 8 o'clock, which is not too bad. Then I have calls until 5, 6, or 6 p.m.

Speaker 0: Okay, so

Speaker 1: pretty normal to work there. Pretty normal working.

Speaker 0: Right. And so meetings, how many direct reports do you have, for instance, as the CEO of the company?

Speaker 1: I have now 10 direct reports.

Speaker 0: So do you guys ever have conference calls or meetings where all of your direct reports are on at the same time. Is that a part of how you run the company, or do you interact discreetly with each 1 of them?

Speaker 1: I mostly try to do one-on-ones, because it's many, many interactions contain feedback, and if feedback is negative, then we try to keep the audience as small as possible. So it'd be between a boss and a report, preferably. We do have an executive team meeting. Some of my direct reports are part of the executive team. And in that, that is a weekly one-hour call.

In GitLab, we try to have fewer meetings and more asynchronous communication. So we try to use issue trackers, Google Docs, chat to facilitate things so you don't deal with time zones, but more importantly, if it's a meeting, everyone is forced to spend time. If you make it asynchronously, only the people that care about that subject have to invest time there.

Speaker 0: What do you think that the toughest thing about building a company this way has been? Fundraising. Fundraising for a distributed company.

Speaker 1: Yeah, because we had some great investors that I would really like to have invest in the company. Luckily, we ended up with great investors too, but it was very hard to see that they said, okay, you take all the R boxes, except for this remote thing, that's new. And we just, we can't take a risk. Like we just pattern match. You don't fit the pattern.

You might make it work, but it, we're the best fund, 1 of the best funds. We'll pick another 1. We have only that many board seats we can take. That was a really hard 1. You try to convince them that we're more effective, that we're doing a better job of onboarding people, that we have a stronger culture that's not diluted, but I think it gets stronger by written.

Speaker 0: But I

Speaker 1: wasn't able to convince each and every 1. But luckily we did end up with a great fund, August Capital, which is the Ilcev, that said, okay, let's have a look at how this is performing. So they dove in, interviewed our senior management, whether it was actually working, and we managed to convince them.

Speaker 0: Right. Terrific. Do you think that every personality type can work in a company like this? Or do you think it takes a special person to be able to adapt to a situation where they're fairly isolated in terms of human to human contact with their colleagues? Although obviously they're connected and they're video chatting and so on.

Do you think anyone can work in a company like this or do you try to screen for a particular kind of person?

Speaker 1: I don't think that it's isolated. So we try to, I think actually people tend to see more like social interaction at GitLab. Every 4 times a week we have a team call

Speaker 0: where

Speaker 1: people just talk about their private lives for half an hour.

Speaker 0: 4 times a week, you have a team call where people talk about their private lives? Yes. Wow. That's in the handbook. That's a must-do.

Speaker 1: No, you're not obligated, but I think average attendance is between 80 and 100 people. People like this. People, I don't know, do anything from show off their keyboard to showing their baby that is chewing their microphone cord at the same time. And people make something special out of it.

Speaker 0: So it's open to the whole company and 80 to 90 people participate? Yeah. Wow, so on a video conference? Yes. Okay, what tool do you use for that?

Speaker 1: Zoom, it's been great.

Speaker 0: Right, okay.

Speaker 1: And then we have the concept of virtual coffee breaks. So if you just want to hang out with someone, it's okay, we have a name for it, virtual coffee breaks. When you join the company, we force you to take 10 of them, so you get accustomed to the concept. So we try to stimulate the water cooler talk. So it's not the isolation that's the problem.

The problem is the motivation. It is, there's Nobody watching you come in or come out. So you have to be self-organized, self-disciplined to do that. I know everyone can do that.

Speaker 0: So you try to filter for that, for people who are self-motivated, self-disciplined.

Speaker 1: Result-oriented people.

Speaker 0: Right, right. Got it. How does recruiting work here? Do you have recruiters all around the world? Do you have them somewhere centrally?

Speaker 1: 1 of our recruiters lives in South Africa

Speaker 0: and

Speaker 1: 1 of them lives in the US. We let the people we decline give an MPS score and the first results are 15 scores and they've all been a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5. So we try to make sure people have a great experience.

Speaker 0: Do people ever get to see each other in person? Do you have company get togethers?

Speaker 1: We try to stimulate that. So there's a budget if you just want to do a get together locally. For example, we had lunch here today at the office.

Speaker 0: How many people came?

Speaker 1: Kirsten, I think about 10 people. And then we have a big get-together every 9 months

Speaker 0: and

Speaker 1: we had it 2 weeks ago in Cancun, Mexico.

Speaker 0: You Bring the whole company together.

Speaker 1: Bring the whole company for a week. And it's a bit of work, but also a lot of just hanging around together, doing fun activities.

Speaker 0: Right, wonderful. So tell me, for a YC company or any startup that started, and let's say they have 20, 30, 40 people and they're all pretty much in 1 single headquarters. Do you think this model of a distributed workforce has to be all or nothing? Do you have to start at the beginning as you did and just build it that way and have the processes and the handbooks and the communication practices that make it work? Or is like a more of a hybrid model where you've got a headquarters, but you can also accommodate a lot of distributed people?

Does that also work? What are your thoughts about that?

Speaker 1: It's harder to do it hybrid. So obviously it's not impossible because I think every large organization, people are no longer in the same, teams are spread among buildings and countries. So any large significant organization is

Speaker 0: going to have remote

Speaker 1: anyway. But it's being remote only makes it easier because you're forced to write down more. You have more artifacts that you can share. If you have in-person communication, and frequently it's not written down, it's harder to share. So I think it's just that we have an easier time than those companies.

Speaker 0: Do you think there's any limit to how big you can grow in terms of your employee base running the company totally distributed? Do you think you could have 10,000 people 1 day all working from home and interacting in this way, or is there a certain scale at which this model starts to break?

Speaker 1: So far, it's working better as we grow bigger. So I don't see it yet. We try to be not religious about it. If we find out something else works better. I think what other companies find if they go from on premises to having satellite offices or being a 1 office to satellite offices, the people in the satellite office tend to feel left out of gossip, of promotional opportunities, and that's something we've been able to avoid.

Speaker 0: That's fascinating. What would your I feel like this is a fascinating experiment in scaling the company and it seems like a scaling a company, it seems like it's going quite well. 1 of the things that's remarkable to me is roughly 2 years ago when you were at YC, I believe you said you were 9 people and you're about 160 people today. So you're significantly bigger and have grown extremely rapidly in a very innovative model. So I'm curious, as you know a lot of other YC companies, you know a lot of startups, what do you think the, share with us a couple of pieces of wisdom that you've gained in terms of scaling an organization this way.

Speaker 1: So we try to write down a lot. So about any time we learn something about leadership, we put it on about GitLab.com slash handbook slash leadership, so I'd suggest they go there. It's been hard in the beginning to get people to write in the handbook to make those changes, so I've been a broken record about can you write that down, can you create an issue for that, But if you do it long enough, that kind of starts filtering down and you start hearing other people say it within the company. Yeah, getting people to write stuff down, that's been a huge challenge, but a very rewarding thing. And sometimes people come back after a while like, you were so annoying about writing stuff down, but now I hear myself saying it myself because I think I find those situations where it hasn't been written down and people have to ask 1 another, it's super inefficient.

Speaker 0: Right, that's quite interesting. Last question, 5 years from now, when you're looking back on GitLab, what do you hope to achieve on that kind of a time frame? What's your vision for GitLab over a 5 year time frame?

Speaker 1: 5 years, I don't mind if we're remote only or that we have offices where everyone is. I'm fine with either. I want us to achieve our mission of everyone can contribute. So we hope to be the tool that changes culture from read only to read and write. Where now if you watch a movie, you can do it.

You get an end product, you get a binary. And hopefully in the future, you get all the different video screens and all the different montages in the human readable format and you're able to contribute to that. And we wanna make that possible for books, for software, for everything.

Speaker 0: Wonderful, That is an amazing mission. Thank you

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Gitlab's Secret to Managing 160 Employees in 160 Locations