Growing an Open Company

Growing an Open Company
GitLab
Job - @jobvo
@jobvo - jobvandervoort.com

GitLab is where you bring
your ideas to production
Single platform for modern developers. Code review,
CI, CD, monitoring in one package.

>250,000
organizations
NASA, IBM, Redhat, CERN, SONY, Uber, EA, Alibaba, Airbnb, etc..

A short history of GitLab

Open Source
Started in 2011 by Dmitriy, who didn't have
running water

"I want to work on GitLab
full time"
— Dmitriy, still without running water

2014: Founding of GitLab BV
5 engineers, 1 sales

2015
Y Combinator

2015
seed + A round
Khosla Ventures; Ashton Kutcher; Michael Dell
~6M

2016
B RoundAugust capital; Khosla Ventures
~20M

~160 employees
about.gitlab.com/team

What's special?

zerooﬃces

Everything
open
(except private information)

Remote-only

Everyone works from
home
or a coworking space

We can hire the best
people.

Everything open?

GitLab comes in two
ﬂavors

Community Edition
gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce
MIT Expat license

Enterprise Edition
gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee
Proprietary

Everything in building
GitLab happens on public
repositories on
GitLab.com..

..even the development of
GitLab Enterprise Edition
gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee

Our proprietary software
is publicly readable.

You can see what it is,
what it does,

And as a customer, you
can even contribute!

But that's not all that is
open..

All our repositories, issue
trackers, CI/CD, internal
tools, are all public and
open source on
GitLab.com.

All our 'internal'
documentation, our
methods, HR policies,
processes, function
deﬁnitions are all open
source.

about.gitlab.com/
handbook
gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com

This means that we've
eliminated the diﬀerence
between external and
internal contributor.

Everyone can contribute.

Half-way summary
—Everyone is at home working in their pyjamas
—Everything is open
—GitLab allows GitLab to build GitLab

How do we actually get
things done?

People should be able to
work whenever, wherever
they want and can..

but still be productive and
collaborative

Rule #1
Work asynchronously

Working asynchronously
means writing everything
down.

"Who will document this?"
"Who will create an
issue?"

Use tech to your
advantage, for instance
using chatops:
/gitlab-ce issue new
Awesome new button

Make everyone able to
contribute. Not just
engineers.
Everyone at GitLab can
create a merge request
and commit changes.@jobvo - jobvandervoort.com

Rule 1.1
Keep a single source of
truth

Rule 2
Set clear expectations
and give independence

Build iteratively and avoid
'walls of text'
Keep product specs
simple.
about.gitlab.com/handbook/product

Rule 3
Over communicate and
make opportunities to
bond frequently

Daily team call
—5 minutes going over agenda
—25 minutes sharing what you did for fun last week

Summits

Travel to meet colleagues

Rule 4
Build something great.

Almost everything we
build in GitLab has been
driven by people being
excited about it.

about.gitlab.com
GitLab.com is has unlimited free
private, public repos, free CI,
unlimited free collaborators and is
awesome.

Questions?
Job van der Voort
@jobvo

Growing an Open Company

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