GitLab’s Eric Johnson on Radical OpenCore Transparency

02/03/21 • 32 min

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In this episode, we’re talking to Eric Johnson, the EVP of Engineering at GitLab.

Eric oversees a distributed team of engineers at GitLab, which is one of the world’s biggest all-remote companies. And no, it’s not covid-remote -- the company is natively remote, with 1,200 people across 67 countries.

GitLab is an open-source DevOps platform that makes software development faster and easier. It has over 100,000 customers serving millions of users. We’ll hear from Eric about the technical culture inside the company that makes the platform so valuable to developers at both enterprises and startups -- and how it’s operated remotely for nearly a decade.

GitLab’s culture is based on radical transparency. Everything is meticulously documented, shared, and publicly edited. That’s a crucial piece of bringing everyone together in a remote environment. It can also be a challenge for technical executives and managers.

So why create this kind of culture in the first place?

As Eric explains, it helps remote teams make decisions very quickly, with confidence. It’s also a core piece of the platform itself -- setting it apart from other DevOps providers.

In this episode, we’re talking to Eric Johnson, the EVP of Engineering at GitLab.

So why create this kind of culture in the first place?

As Eric explains, it helps remote teams make decisions very quickly, with confidence. It’s also a core piece of the platform itself -- setting it apart from other DevOps providers.

Previous Episode

Dropbox’s Akhil Gupta on ‘Brutal Prioritization’

This week’s episode is all about magic pockets, nickels, cupcakes, and brutal prioritization. It’s a conversation with Akhil Gupta, the general manager and VP of enterprise at Dropbox.

Before that, he was the VP of engineering and the head of infrastructure -- running a 500-person engineering team that helped create the technical foundation for the Dropbox we know today.

Steve and Quentin will talk with Akhil about how Dropbox scaled reliably from 2,000 users in 2008 to hundreds of millions of registered users today.

Back in 2012, when Akhil first joined the company from Google, there were 30 engineers. Dropbox had emerged as a leading cloud storage provider, but it faced a clear choice: should it build its own storage or rely on the public cloud? Enter "Magic Pocket."

And that technical challenge forced him to adopt a simple philosophy: brutal prioritization.

“My anxiety always is when you get too many people in a company, you start creating problems and you start losing focus because you have so much new energy, you are growing fast and you can say, let me solve every single problem. So I wanted to give a signal to the team saying, we need to always prioritize. And prioritization is hard, prioritization is painful. And hence the word brutal,” says Akhil.

This podcast is produced by Post Script Audio in collaboration with General Catalyst.

Next Episode

Snowflake’s Christian Kleinerman on Breaking Limits of Data Warehousing

In this episode: Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake.

Snowflake is a pioneering data warehouse platform that helps companies make sense of massive amounts of information in the public cloud.

It currently manages 250 petabytes of data. It runs 515 million daily workloads for customers across finance, health care, government, education, manufacturing and more. It raised a billion and a half dollars from investors, including Salesforce and Berkshire Hathaway.

Snowflake became one of the year’s biggest tech stories. In the fall of 2020, it went public -- becoming the biggest software IPO in history. The company’s share price doubled on the first day of trading.

Christian is the database expert behind Snowflake’s product evolution and growth. We’re going to talk with him about what the company is doing differently to organize, manage and retrieve massive sets of data -- and why, when he first heard about what the startup was doing, it sounded too good to be true.

Christian was previously the director of product management at YouTube. And before that, he led the data warehouse product and business at Microsoft.

This podcast is a production of General Catalyst.