The Exchanges

Q In terms of the way that you design your org, is each one of those sort of five areas of marketing owned by like a single threaded leader? Or is there some other sort of way that you configure the team and why?

A We actually, when we came up with the framework, when I first started, we went back and forth on this a lot. And so at GitLab, we really believe on having a DRI for everything, a directly responsible individual. And then of course there's a ton of contributors. And so there will be several of my VPs that contribute To each of them. Awareness is an example. Pretty much everybody on the team is working in some way for more awareness, but I would say that's the number one tracking mechanism that I give for my vice president of corporate communications, because that person is responsible for getting the message out to the world, doing the thought leadership, getting that awareness out there. But you could argue our VP of products. Marketing has a big hand in that. Our VP of community and DevRel for the dev mindshare. So, so each of them has a directly responsible, uh, individual assigned, but their job, it's not a, I don't see it as a journey as a line. It's a circle because we keep selling to the accounts over and over. So for, for me, it's everybody contributes to all of it, some more heavily to others, and one leads each of them.

AI assessment note: “each of them has a directly responsible, uh, individual assigned”

Q Can you talk a little bit more about the promises and maybe how you landed on the specific framework that you all use?

A So this is, this is something that, you know, our CEO and, and all of the, all of the executives in the company worked on together. I mean, Sid very much so believes in open source. He's, he's built a company with Demetri on top of it, but it's all about helping people understand for us the why behind we're doing things that we're doing. So, so one example is we try to stay true to our core that when a feature is open source, we won't wake up one day, And just change it to be part of a free tier. That, that's one of the promises we have. Um, another one we have is that we'll always release an open source, the tests that we have for an open source feature. We'll share that with the world. And so, um, those are two examples. Like I said, we have 11 of them. I'm happy to, to go through more of them, but it's going through and it was speaking with the community, understanding the community on what's really, really important so we can continue To bring them along while we also become a commercially available product. And this, this all happened, um, of course, before we went public, the, the team did a bunch of work together. So, so we made sure we weren't underserving the community because now we're this public fast growing company.

AI assessment note: “speaking with the community, understanding the community on what's really, really important”

Q of zooming back out and switching gears, um, slightly. I'm interested if you in the future were to join sort of a more traditional closed source enterprise software company again, are there important ideas that you've learned in the context of GitLab that will sort of change the way that you work or think about marketing, even if there isn't an open course or in a part of the business?

A Yeah, there's several. First and foremost is because of how open source works just as a model in the market, transparency has to be front and center. Um, everybody has to understand what, what's being contributed. Everybody has to understand why things are going the way they are. And so, um, for me, and that, that's translated to us as a business. We are as transparent as we possibly can be as a public company, both internally and externally. And I think internally what that gives is, is a sense of being part of the mission and part of the team versus just somebody working at a company that's, that's taking a bunch of orders. Really a real example there that I absolutely love. So I've, I've been reporting to a CEO for several, uh, different companies now, and this is the first company where I actually know everything after we do an earnings call and our windows open and our CFO goes on the roadshow. I understand what they're saying and not just me. He sends out a slack to the entire company of the sentiment, the overall themes and sentiment from investors. And like, how cool is that to be an engineer first time in your career and understanding from the CFO, What people investing in our company and under in, in really putting, putting their hope behind are thinking about what we're doing. And so I feel like that engineer might go to another company and be, uh, really upset to fi…

AI assessment note: “the first thing I would push culturally is as much transparency”

Q Are there sort of questions you keep going back to over and over again as you're having these conversations?

A Yeah, so, I mean, I, I'm asking them first and foremost, and I just asked, we have an executive advisory board, and I just asked them these questions the other day, because it's a, it's a mix of industries, is, well, first and foremost, I always ask them to explain GitLab to me. Tell me what GitLab does. Instead of telling them, tell me, and they all say something slightly different. What is the value It provides. And this was a big eye-opener for my team because they were all in this executive advisory board meeting we did a few weeks ago. We had from three different customers in three different industries say three different things because the person in finance cared, of course, a lot about security. The person that works at a car company cared a lot about the competitive landscape and getting ahead and moving faster. And then there was another customer, I forget which industry that was, that really cared about efficiency and wanted to understand how efficient processes were. And so those are kind of the three that I start with. And it's been, it's been fascinating that, and it's okay that they're not repeating the same thing. It'd be, it'd be really bad if they just all said like one feature in our products, because that means our expansion opportunity is really low there. But that's, that's really the first three that I dig into to try to understand. Um, and then, and then …

AI assessment note: “I always ask them to explain GitLab to me. Tell me what GitLab does.”

Q What do you think of the downsides of being so transparent? Like it can't all be, it can't be like a free lunch, I would assume.

A Well, I run crisis, um, for the company. So for those of you that don't know what crisis is, it's control of the narrative when we've all seen companies have like an email screenshot leak. And this happens to like Salesforce every week. It feels like right now, or, or a clip from an all hands that somebody gave. And so we have a lot of pride in the company and what we're doing and a lot of trust, but you are always going to have a bad actor at some point. You know, not agree with something, go speak out. And because everything is so open for us, that, that can be a risk. And, and we have to understand that. And so what we do is we, we, again, we just try to be open and honest about when we can communicate things and the why behind why we can't. And then when things happen, we, we have the team that can help understand how to do it better next time. And the thing we stand really true to is I, I never have wanted, and I know the team would agree with me, just One bad instance, one bad actor to spoil it for everybody else. So while we have had these things happen and every company has, it's not like we're like, all right, we're changing everything. We're just going to completely become a closed. And so that's the other, and that, that gives the team a sense of, okay, I never want to be that person. I'm mad that there was a person that did that. And how can we help everybody unders…

AI assessment note: “because everything is so open for us, that, that can be a risk.”

Q be, I think for most of your career, you Worked in more traditional closed source software. And so now that you've sort of immersed yourself in what GitLab is doing, I'm really interested in like, what are the big ideas or the things that matter most when you compare and contrast marketing in the context of an open source company versus marketing in the context of a closed source company?

A Yeah, I think the, the interesting thing while, while you're right, all of the companies that I've been a part of leading up to this, uh, were closed. Um, closed core, closed source. But when I think back to my time, I, I worked at Tableau software few careers back. And what was interesting about their customer base is they wanted to do more with Tableau's product. And we did have a way to do that. You could crack open, they called it the, the viz and you could customize it. And we saw these large enterprise customers being very successful doing it. Now, the downside to that is customer A is making all these changes and doing this, these powerful things. Customer B wasn't benefiting from it at all, and they might have to go do it again on their own. And so when I joined GitLab and I started understanding the true value of being an open core, started as an open source, now open core public company, that value is repeatable. So as customers are contributing code to our platform, we are able to share that as part of our platform with the entire world. So it sort of opens up all the contributors in the world. To be part of our team and part of our development and innovation and really helps with our speed of innovation.

AI assessment note: “started understanding the true value of being an open core”