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We've got some pretty ambitious targets, that's definitely part of that... But I think we're selling in the right way, and in a so-called long-term greedy scenario. |
When Doug Hanna, our chief operating officer came on board, him and I spent a lot of time talking about open source, and the whole value creation/value capture dynamic, and he actually came up with the golden goose analogy, and started preaching it to the entire sales team. So it's back to making sure we have the right... |
And on the engineering side, our whole engineering team is super-supportive of what the sales team is doing. I said it's collaborative, and I don't say that lightly, because I think a lot of times the relationship between engineering and sales can get kind of contentious, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely. |
**Raj Dutt:** And engineers were like "Oh my god, what did the sales team just tell the customer? What did they sell?" And sales people are like, "Oh my god, why can't the engineering team give me product that I can sell? They're screwing everything up." And there's a lot of natural tendency, I think, to finger-point..... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's interesting in your story that I've heard so far is the between the lines, which is sometimes -- I won't "often", I'll just say "sometimes". Sometimes when you begin a sales team, you make mistakes, and those people aren't around long. It seems like the people you've brought on - maybe there'... |
I think that's a really interesting thing that a lot of open source companies should understand very well, to have a good balance between their engineers and their sales teams, like we're talking about here... But often what you'll see happen is a sales team will get brought on, and the upside won't be there, or they'v... |
**Raj Dutt:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...when you could have been much stronger earlier. |
**Raj Dutt:** There's probably a few reasons for that. Let's never underestimate luck in a lot of this, for one... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure, sure. Good job on that luck. |
**Raj Dutt:** Right. \[laughs\] No, I'm kind of half-joking with that... But in all seriousness, I think the two reasons I can think of is 1) just hiring the right people, at the right time. That's part of it. When Graham came in -- Graham is a pretty young guy. He makes me feel old, I should say. He came in from Mongo... |
\[52:12\] Hiring the right people is so important... And that's another lesson learned at Voxel. One of the things that we did at Grafana Labs that was very different is we hired a VP of People Ops, Alex Farrell, back when we were about 25 people. People Ops is the new fangled, cool word for HR... And let me tell you, ... |
This role isn't just to find new people. Alice is absolutely what I like to call a culture carrier within the company. It's to not only recruit people, find the right people, but to make sure that people are aligned, that the culture is maintained... And I think that she's been instrumental. I mean, she's definitely be... |
We've been lucky enough at Grafana Labs to have incredibly low people attrition. It's insane. Over the last six years I think I could count the number of people who've left the company on one hand. Maybe one and a half hands. I certainly don't have to start counting toes. So I think a lot of it comes down to culture, i... |
Graham and Doug and Dave have all helped us in very different and unique and timely ways for us over the last couple of years. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think you'll hear people say "culture", and it seems cliché... But I disagree. I think it's cliché if you can't back it up. When you just say "Oh, it's just about culture", and you can't really back it up. But what you're saying is that you've found the right people to make certain organizational ... |
**Raj Dutt:** Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That isn't exactly culture; I would say that's wise development of a company, but the way that people interact and the respect that engineers and sales have for the necessary sides of the business - that is culture. Understanding the golden goose phenomenon, understanding those things and making sur... |
**Raj Dutt:** \[56:07\] Yeah, it's actually an interesting story, because when we started the company, Torkel, our co-founder, the guy that actually wrote Grafana, he's always been based on Stockholm, Sweden. I was living in New York at the time, and our third co-founder, our CTO, Anthony, he's based in Perth Australia... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Distributed. Yeah, wow... |
**Raj Dutt:** And the worst possible timezone alignment... And we kind of had this idea that we wanted to be a distributed company, but we opened up offices in New York and Stockholm. And what happened over the course of our first few years is I'd say we evolved, or regressed even, into being a remote-friendly company,... |
So we kind of regressed to being a remote-friendly company... And then I actually have to give a lot of credit to Tom Wilkie, our VP of product - we made a very deliberate decision a few years ago, and we said "Well, we're regressing to being remote-friendly. And what we really wanna do is be remote-first." So then we ... |
We felt we could solve the problem both by hiring people away from our hubs, but also making some operational and cultural changes. If we were gonna have a meeting in the office, we'd still have it over Zoom... Which was crazy, because "Why do that?" We'd start doing things in asynchronous communication methods, instea... |
At this point, I really don't think the average Grafanista really cares one way or another where they are... So we kind of became truly remote-first. And that's now reflected in our hiring policies, it's reflected in -- aside from the suckiness of the Covid situation, it's kind of business as usual for us. At Grafana L... |
Some people like coming into an office, and that's fine. Some people wanna be in that environment, some people don't. We have a few people, for example, in France, and we ended up opening a small WeWork there, because some of our employees were telling us that they wanna have somewhere to go to; that's fine. But you al... |
So yeah, we've definitely doubled down on remote-first, and I'm a big believer that that is the future of work, particularly for software companies... And maybe especially so for open source software companies, where we're kind of working hand-in-hand with the community, which is also global. We're working asynchronous... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:00:20.11\] You mentioned regressing, and then being mindful of that; that requires some checks and balances and leadership, to say "Where are we going? How are we doing?" Health-wise, in terms of an organization, when you realize you're regressing and then you made that change two years ago, di... |
**Raj Dutt:** I'd say it was a dramatic change, but it wasn't like a sudden change. It definitely took some time to effect that change. And I think the main thing we were trying to optimize for was there was a feeling, a very real feeling that if you were a senior person in Grafana Labs, or someone who was really tryin... |
So we always wanted to hire people wherever they were, and we wanted to be very global in our talent search. I think there was a feeling both held by people at the edges, as well as senior leadership, that we were hamstringing ourselves in our ability to do that because of this divide. And I think now that that divide ... |
People even move. In Covid times we've had quite a few people decide to move around, and that's fine. We were definitely used to working in this environment, but because we were remote-first, we also got the team together a lot. We used to have in-person get-togethers, either company-wide, or team by team, project by p... |
The last time we got the whole company together was late last year - or this last summer, I should say - the whole company went to Los Angeles for our annual conference, and we took the whole company to Vegas for a few days after that, and that was tons of fun. But now we've lost all of that, the last 4-5 months, and I... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Raj Dutt:** \[01:03:46.24\] We used to have onboarding every quarter, where if you joined Grafana Labs, you would be offered to go to either -- to somewhere, whether that was Stockholm, or New York, or London, or somewhere like that, and meet as many people as you could. And we'd fly in other people, other leaders, a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Connection, the relationships. |
**Raj Dutt:** Exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The underestimated things do really matter in teams. |
**Raj Dutt:** Yup, exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Do I actually like you?", you know what I mean? "What makes me like you more?" |
**Raj Dutt:** Yeah. It's a lot harder to be d\*\*\* to someone (pardon my French) online if you've met with them in-person and had a beer with them, you know what I mean? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right, absolutely. We have a show here on Changelog called Brain Science, and we talk a lot about the necessity of relationship... And that's what it really is all about. We're humans, right? Sure, we're making software, we're building companies, we're doing different things, we're engineerin... |
**Raj Dutt:** Absolutely. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure, what Grafana does for is a tool, but it's not really just about that. It's about being a useful thing for people. That's really what it comes down to. You've got to double-down on the human touch. |
**Raj Dutt:** 100% agree. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. And it seems even cliché to say that, so I hate even saying it like that, but that's the truth. You have to prioritize the people. That's why we've gotta say it every day, because people undervalue it. They just skip it. |
**Raj Dutt:** Yup, 100% agree. And I think it's easy to -- you know, that human interaction is so important, and doubly so when you're remote-first. You need to mix that in, and that's what we really missed the last 4-5 months. We've hired a lot of people since Covid, and not being able to get the teams together and me... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's way different. It's awkwardly different, sometimes. Even conferencing... In our neck of the woods, in the tech world, conferences are every day prior to Covid. The hallway track was what it was all about. And no knock against any organization out there doing a conference, by no means, but remot... |
As a speaker going to a conference you're not getting to build your network as much, because you're really just to some degree phoning it in. Maybe you're giving a prerecorded talk - which is great; you're still getting your name out there. There's nothing against that, and we have to do what we can do in our given cir... |
**Raj Dutt:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There was OSCON each year, you know what I mean? And going to OSCON - what a big deal that was. Or even KubeCon, and the growth rate of that conference. These are two pinnacle open source cloud infrastructure conferences that were killing it. All Things Open. These are great conferences that are now... |
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