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• Founder Sid Sijbrandij's personal views on working and staying with the company |
• Remote work culture at GitLab, where employees are encouraged to make their own choices and work from anywhere without needing permission |
• Development of company values and handbook, which was created in response to rapid growth and changing expectations for onboarding new employees |
• Philosophy of being "handbook-first," where changes and updates are made to the handbook before being communicated to employees through other means |
• Importance of intentional communication and design, especially in a remote work environment |
• Values of GitLab, represented by the acronym CREDIT (Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Transparency) |
• Process of refining and refreshing company values over time to ensure they remain relevant and effective |
• 5 dysfunctions of organizations: Absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results |
• Patrick Lencioni's book on the topic |
• GitLab's values and how they're reinforced through various practices, including a "no-work day" for employees to take time off with their families |
• The concept of "Family and Friends First, Work Second" and its significance in promoting work-life balance and employee well-being |
• Counting hours worked vs. focusing on results and productivity |
• The importance of giving employees autonomy and control over their work |
• Boundaries and employee needs in the workplace |
• Importance of clear rules and autonomy for progress and productivity |
• GitLab's future risks and goals (failing vs. success) |
• Community involvement in product development and improvements |
• Shifts in market perception and competition (DevOps platforms) |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sid Sijbrandij is the co-founder and CEO of GitLab, an all-remote company and complete DevOps platform. As a company they have their eyes set on taking the company public, and they're very outspoken about their culture, their open handbook, and how they work as an all-remote company... But I've alwa... |
Sid, what kind of person were you before GitLab? |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[laughs\] Still the same, hopefully... I was born and raised in the Netherlands. I'm the oldest of four siblings. My parents are still here, still together. I did well at school. While I did well learning-wise, I was teased a lot when I was younger. |
I went to university -- I was really good at physics in high school, so I figured I'd study that. I also enjoyed it -- it turns out that physics in university is a lot of math, which wasn't something I was particularly good at or particularly liked... So I switched to management science, which is kind of a combination ... |
The first year of university I saw this ad on the local marketplace for an infrared receiver, so you could skip to the next mp3 track. I'm like "That's amazing!", so I ordered one, and I checked out the website, which was on Geocities, which kind of dates me... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah. I loved Geocities. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[04:01\] Yeah. And it was open source, already at that time - the software, but also the hardware to run the device. And there was a big banner on the site that said "I'm not selling these." Like "Huh? That's weird. He IS selling them." And I figured out he didn't wanna deal with sending individual... |
After that, I had the option to get a job there permanently, and I was looking at strategy consulting... But I couldn't stop thinking about submarines, because my wife and I went to a boat fair and we saw a submarine there, and I kept calling the owner, the investor, like "Joe, hire me." There was nobody on the payroll... |
Luckily, nowadays it's a lot more professional at U-Boat Worx, but they're still around, and they make the most submarines in the world. That's kind of my story growing up... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. Well, let's back-track a little bit. I've got a couple questions and I don't wanna interrupt you, because I love hearing these kinds of stories of where people come from, who they are today - sure, definitely, you're still the same Sid. There's not much changed about you, except for may... |
You'd mentioned -- and I don't wanna go into this too deeply unless you want to, but you mentioned being teased. How did that affect you when you were younger? Was it hard for you to make friends, were you a loner? |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, I was a loner. It was hard to make friends. I struggled with finding joy in the social processes, and I wasn't good at it, I didn't particularly like it. I stood out and I figured I'd have to befriend some people; I'd befriended people at the bottom of the social ladder, who turned on me and s... |
Most of the time you go with common wisdom. One of our sub-values at GitLab is boring solutions. We don't try to reinvent the wheel. And sometimes you have to do something that doesn't make sense to the rest of the world. And that doesn't mean you're always right. I'm still the same person that had a failed startup; I ... |
At GitLab we got lucky, and I learned to follow -- when there's a conflict between what the world says and what you think yourself, I'm able to depend a bit more on what I think myself, and I think that's sometimes really handy. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:19\] See, that's what I mean by these details - your perspective of that time in your life, and how that sort of shaped you to be resilient as an entrepreneur, to sort of go against common wisdom. To me, that's awesome. If there's someone out there that was teased earlier in their life, and you... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** I like that. In high school if you stand out and if you're different, it's a problem. Later in life it's an asset to the diversity of thinking and perspectives. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I might paraphrase a little bit, because I didn't watch the full video, but I've got it in my list to check out, but I watch Tim Ferriss from time to time, because I think he's a pretty wise fella... And he was talking about being a specialist, or being a generalist. And he said the idea is to be a ... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, I like how what you learn in life -- I worked at a lot of organizations where I saw some things going really well and some things going not so well, and I love how when you start your own business you get to do things differently. And I don't think one organization is necessarily better than a... |
I've seen a lot of organizations where things have to fly under the radar, because as soon as you ask people for input, you owe them involvement in shaping the final decision. So you have initiatives flying under the radar for a long time, because as soon as you pop up, you wanna get to a conclusion quickly, otherwise ... |
There's many examples like that, where we've tried to learn from what you've seen in your life before, and try to improve upon it. It doesn't always work, and that's not an ultimate solution, but it's fun to try something different, and to articulate why, and try to add something to the world. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Would you say that some of your values - if not all your values - capitalize on vulnerability? I wouldn't wanna connect the dots, but you've had some vulnerability younger in your life, and that's a value I see being portrayed... Leveraging your vulnerability is pretty interesting, because it lets y... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[12:01\] Yeah, what we say is that allows us to do iteration and transparency. Some of our most important values is kind of a low level of shame. We're not afraid of sharing that something isn't perfect yet, which is necessary for iteration. If you wanna get something done quickly, it's not gonna b... |
One of the web pages I'm proudest of at GitLab is our Maturity page, which shows for every part of the product how good it is. By being frank about that, we can be open and we can iterate and we give ourselves room to ship something that isn't perfect, because we're not pretending it's perfect. I think that's really im... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It sounds like you value owning flaws, or owning just truth, really. Because sometimes the truth hurts (as that saying) and obviously being honest isn't being vulnerable, but being overly honest can be seen as a vulnerability. But you sort of capitalize on being overly honest, because that's -- you ... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, I think that the truth is the first step towards fixing something. Yeah, some things aren't great, aren't where they should be. Take the speed of gitlab.com. We want that speed to be higher. But you could argue with the benchmarks, because they're never perfect, and everything else... But if w... |
If you're in denial about things as an organization, it makes it really hard to remedy the underlying cost, because you're pretending there's nothing wrong. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well said. You mentioned earlier on you were interested in physics... It seems like you were also interested in psychology. Did you read any books in particular, any classes, any studies at all into psychology to understand vulnerability, shame, these kinds of things? |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** I think that every human is interested in psychology. One of my favorite Wikipedia pages is about common misperceptions. What I also like is mental models of how you view the world. Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo has a great blog post, and he even wrote a book about it - the mental models he finds r... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I couldn't help but quickly google "DuckDuckGo mental models" and find Gabriel's blog post, and I was skimming that for just a second... Skate to where the puck is going. That's an -ism, but it's definitely a concept to use to explain things, to explain how to do things in business even. You'd menti... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[16:06\] Yeah. There's so many core competencies... Conspicuous consumption, price elasticity. The list goes on and on. I'm actually reading the blog post now, during my accent removal classes, and it's been fun to go over them. Many I already know, but there's a lot of new ones, and it's fun to se... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I got into -- you said every human is, to some degree, interested in psychology. I could agree with that. Maybe not even self-admitted; not everybody wants to admit that. But I've kind of found some appreciation for it when I was studying behavioral economics, and I was just trying to find -- I got ... |
What we actually talked about recently - not mental models, but mental frameworks, which I believe are pretty much synonymous, but our framing of it was mental frameworks... How you view the world, how you see things, how you model what's in your brain, how you perceive the world and continue on. It was a fun show. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** And it helps you. For example, there's loss aversion. We count a dollar lost -- we experience it as much more painful than a dollar gained. So if you know that, all of a sudden you know why we do insurance. Insurance is overhead. We might as well just save, for everything but the largest expenses, t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** But it makes sense if you view it from the perspective of loss aversion, because you're okay with paying from insurance, you're not okay with taking some cash loss on things. So I think it's really interesting, and it's a great way to understand yourself and the rest of the world. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Let's dig deep into the early days of GitLab, and let's go back as far as you want to... When I recall the earliest days -- now, I've been around for (I would say) a while... Just to preface it, we began our primary show called The Changelog back in November 2009. So we just last year celebrat... |
And the early days, I can recall, was this perception that -- you know, GitHub was really popular, and then we see GitLab, and it's an open source version of it; change a few letters, very similar. Take us back to the earliest days of GitLab that you can recall. Why did you get involved, what was it for you? Why were y... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, so GitLab was created by my co-founder, Dmitriy. He created it because he needed it. He had two things he wanted to improve. He wanted running water, and he wanted better collaboration tools at work. And he started with the latter. When he created GitLab, it was to solve his own need, but he a... |
\[20:05\] That's when I saw it on Hacker News, and I thought "Oh, that's interesting." I'd recently become a developer; I became a developer later in life, and I was surprised that all the tools I used were open source. I was a Ruby on Rails developer, and it's amazing what ecosystem you get with Ruby on Rails, and all... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** So when they started GitLab, I thought that makes a ton of sense. These collaboration tools should be open source. I looked into it, I opened up the codebase, and the codebase was pristine. It was really high-quality, which is remarkable. Most of the time you either have the founder doing it in thei... |
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