David DeSanto: commitment

Transcript context

…I think what's really interesting about this is it's the epitome of, it's not the idea, it's the execution. You guys share so many of the things that most people keep secret and it's worked. I guess is there any lessons there of just like, it's actually a lot, the execution is what's separates you from everyone else. Someone could just basically copy everything you're doing in theory, build something like you built, but they haven't. Yeah, I think you're touching on actually when I interviewed in 2019, I actually asked Sid, our co-founder and CEO, a similar question. And I came from security in the GitLab and I said, hey, we don't share more than four or six weeks with a roadmap with customers and even sales because we were in the situation where we didn't want our great idea to be taken and built before we built it. And that had happened to me at other places I've worked. And so in that conversation with him, he basically said, "It's product's job to be ambitious instead engineering's job to meet that ambition." And if you think of it that way, and it's that collaboration between the two, it becomes less scary to put the information out. But you are right. We're very even transparent there. The thing that gets into what you mentioned, the ability to ship software, I'm floored by these numbers, but these are real numbers for us. We still ship 12 releases a year. It used to be on the 22nd of every month, it's now the third Thursday, so we don't have to have people work over a weekend, but we've done that for over a decade. And our last release put us at 149 releases that have come out essentially every month for the last little over 12 years. Someone listening to this may be like, okay, wow, we should try this sort of thing. Let's try to be transparent with everything, meetings everywhere, public handbook. Imagine this doesn't work for most companies. So a question just on my mind is, what do you think it takes for a company to work this way? What are some elements that need to be true for them to succeed being this transparent?…

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