David DeSanto: preference

Transcript context

…Got it. One more tactical question about remote work. What's your time zones policy? How do you align time zones and get people talking and not bothering each other when they're asleep? That is a good question. So we focus on asynchronous communication first, and so that means that key decisions that involve people who are in a time zone where the meeting's not occurring, that waits until they're back online because the directly responsible individual or DRI as we say here. We also focus on making sure the meetings that do happen are optional and are both recorded as we talked about at the beginning, but also have really good notes. And so that way someone who's in a different time zone can read that and consume that when they're online. Our goal is to make sure we're as inclusive as possible, and so that includes even leadership roles. Our leader of our product portfolio for our SaaS platforms, which are Gitlab.com and Gitlab dedicated, he lives in Germany, but he is a leader at GitLab and his product team is in the US. I think he's got someone in South America, people in Western Europe and so forth. And so that means that he may not be online when parts of his team are online, but if he's communicating asynchronously and giving clear outcomes and empowering the people who make the decision, it's okay that they may not have overlap. I had a leader in our team who was in Tel Aviv. At that point I still lived in the middle of the United States. We had a half hour overlap in our day, but she was always highly efficient as a leader and her team was also geographically dispersed and they were highly effective. And to give you the way I've looked at it, it means that you can empower the people around you so that you don't have to worry about those meetings that happen at weird times of the day for you. A good example, if I can't make it to a leader or a meeting that is more APAC time friendly, maybe that's where a lot of the team members are. I have leaders on the west coast of the United States who will take that call and they're empowered to do that. And so that's how we deal with it. We are in 60 countries or over 60 countries at this point. We've had to be very careful to be inclusive and that's what drives those things. Well, note-taking, recorded meetings, that asynchronous focus on communication. I was just thinking that with all the recordings you've done, you could train an LLM to basically run your business at this point. I imagine engineers are thinking about that.…

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