we're ready to get started. Welcome everybody to our GitLab Summit in South Africa. Thank you for this wonderful country and city for hosting us. The agenda today looks a little bit like this, and I would like to say here that look at all these chairs and there's actually people in them. We are growing. We have some amazing members of our community here, including our team members, partners, users, contributors. And it's wonderful having everyone here today. And we'll go ahead and get this started. So our values here at GitLab are very important to us.  As we scale and as we grow, things can be a little bit uncomfortable because growth requires evolution and evolution requires change and it requires scale. And we've already seen that just in the last, I've been here for less than a year and I've already seen a lot of change. And it's wonderful to experience that change. It's wonderful to grow, but it's also uncomfortable. And when you think about evolution in life and what we go through, you can see that we've had a lot of examples of this through the world, whether you believe in traditional evolution or not, it doesn't really matter. There is proof. The Mexican cave fish is an example of an animal that's evolved. It lives in a cave. It's dark, it has no light, it no longer has eyes. It used to, they got rid of their eyes. There's some things here at GitLab have changed as well. I asked what some of the things that we've lost as we've grown and he mentioned amateur hour. Not quite sure what that is, but I think that it implies that we're doing things a little better now. We've got more process in place. We've got fewer bugs and mistakes as we release things and that's not a bad thing to remove some things. There's also examples of things just changing but still being there. And Darwin's Finches are an example of this. They were on the island, they had large big beaks to get big nuts out of the trees. Well, guess what? Life changed and they needed to have smaller beaks and so they evolved and now they have smaller beaks. We also have species that have developed gills so they can swim underwater. GitLab's also going through this evolution and you see it in our FGUs being extended to every eight weeks instead of every four. It's not ideal but it's necessary. You see our team calls as we struggle through and try to figure out the best way to have those. We even switched to calling them company calls. We now do breakouts, we now do smaller groups because it's hard to connect and have 300 people talk in a 30 minute call. So we're evolving that. And not all these changes will feel comfortable and not all of them will feel good but together we can get through them. We can make the company stronger and we can continue to grow our business and our team members and our community. But as we grow and as we evolve, we don't have to forsake our values. These values are what will get us there. They are what will make us successful and continue to be successful. And as we grow and as we evolve, we need to remember these values and make sure that we're doing so in a way that we're not forsaking them. And they really will be our friend and that basic DNA we have doesn't need to change as we grow. But we're here at the summit today and we have had a great nine, 10 months since the last one. And one of the things that I love is some of the things I get to see on Twitter. I wasn't a big Twitter person until GitLab and I quickly realized here I need to get more familiar with social media and it's been fun. But you see on Twitter the love for GitLab from developers and community members. You see on Twitter the love of remote work and then we're doing things not just great here but we're doing it differently and we're able to bring in 322 or 23 employee or team members I think we have in the here at GitLab and I think last summit we had closer to 187. So we're growing a lot and we're being able to continue to do that in a distributed environment. And we're a case study for other companies and I think we can continue to be so and teach others and that's appreciated. In addition, people love our development powers, our monthly releases, how much we can cram into those releases and how much we can stay true to open source and we're not compromising on our desire to be open source and that's appreciated as well that we can see when we look at the tweets going around. But now we're at the summit and the summit is different. We're used to working in our homes or our coffee shops or our we work spaces during the week and now we're here all together and we don't get that opportunity a lot and it can be overwhelming and it can be wonderful. It can be scary and it can be exciting. It can be exhausting and invigorating and so I kind of just threw this word map together with the different kind of feelings that come with this summit and we're all here together and some of us are a little bit more experienced and if you are and you've been to a summit before help the new year new team members, help them feel comfortable, make sure they feel welcomed in groups and conversations. If you're new then that's wonderful too because you can bring something new to this that we might not have experienced before and you can give us suggestions about how to make it better in the future. So there really is something we can all contribute here and hopefully we can all have a great time but why are we here? Why do we do this? We do this because relationships are important and I had the ability to form a lot of strong relationships over Zoom but actually being together with my team or with my team members and the team members here at GitLab, there's a different kind of connection that can be built and so really spend that time here over this week building those connections and building those relationships and make sure that effort and that enjoyment that you get from that carries you back to the workplace and help sustain us as we go through the rest of the year and then come together again in about another nine months. So really don't consider this a vacation, hate to say it, this really is about GitLab and being together as a community so let's really maximize that and benefit that as much as we can and then weave in a little bit of the you-time that you need also to make this work. So we're gonna do the fine print thing here, we represent GitLab, you saw that in some of Kirsten's emails, thank you for getting us here Kirsten and but I had to remind it here too, let's look out for each other. You look out for each other by making sure that we're safe and the people that you work with are safe but you also look out for each other to kind of help make sure your team members maybe aren't making a fool of themselves. I've mentioned before for those of you who heard me talk about feedback that I'm typically the type of person who if you have cilantro in your teeth, I'm gonna tell you, I'm not gonna let you walk around being embarrassed and you get back at night looking in the mirror and wow, why did no one tell me? So it's the same way when it comes to drinking at the summit or having a little too much fun and maybe getting a little bit silly. Be that person who looks over to your friend and says, hey, maybe it's time to go back up to your room. Don't help us avoid waking up with big giant regrets of embarrassment and I hate to say it but it happens and most of probably have had those moments in life where like, oh, what did I say? I'll probably have it right after this. So let's help each other out but also really do make sure that you take time for you. If you need a break, if you need a rest, that's okay. I'm myself not the most extroverted person and I love meeting new people and I love seeing everyone here but I do need my downtime with my book just to refuel a little bit. That doesn't mean that I'm doing something rolling here at the summit. If you're like that too, take that time but balance it out with each other and spending time with each other as well. So with that, I think I'm passing it off to Mike who is our Chief Revenue Officer and ready to tell you about his journey to making it here to GitLab. Thank you, Barbie. Can I have a quick show of hands? For whom is this your first GitLab summit? That is how fast we're growing and this is also my first summit. I've been here for about three months and Sid asked me if I'd share a little bit about how I made the decision and decided to join GitLab and it's a little awkward because the first phone call I got was from an investor of GitLab and the truth is I said, no, thank you. I don't wanna talk to GitLab. I didn't understand what GitLab was and where it was going and it was a mistake that I was luckily able to remedy later on but I was partly able to remedy that because I had three criteria that I was using to decide where the right place would be to spend the next few years of my life. And I thought I'd share those three criteria and a little bit about how that ended up applying to GitLab. It starts out with a company has to have a massive market. No matter what we do with product, sales, marketing, you can't make a small market any bigger. So by giant, I mean, billions and billions of dollars of opportunity, room for multiple big winners and at least one giant winner. The second criteria was a unique advantage. This company needs to bring a unique advantage to that massive market so that you have a chance to win because big markets bring big competition. Third criteria is that the company has to be worthy, worthy of its customers, worthy of the market, worthy of our teammates and worthy of our time and that's an important piece that makes spending that investment over the next four, 10, 15 years with that company worthwhile. So for all of those to matter, I feel that the company also has to be on a mission and that's a mission to be successful, unstoppable. There's a relentless pursuit that goal and I believe we are on that mission at GitLab. So let's talk a little bit about the massive market. When I talk about the massive market, I talk to an investor, I spent some time with Sid and read the handbook and I don't know if any of you had the same reaction I did. I said, wow, this is a really interesting business. That was my first takeaway. The second takeaway was, wow, there's a lot of detail in this handbook. I will admit I have not read every page yet. I think we're up to about 1,400 pages now. Still working on it, but I will get there and hopefully some of you will slow down and creating new pages, just enough for me to catch up. But when I applied those three criteria to GitLab, I decided to call an investor. And this investor happened to be on the board of a major competitor of ours, multi-billion dollar company. And I was calling to get two things. Number one, validate all of the numbers that Sid had shared with me about how enormous this market was. Number two, I wanted to hear all of the reasons why GitLab couldn't be successful, how they were gonna crush GitLab. How they were gonna, he said, stop. We don't even need to keep going. You should join GitLab. Okay, that was not what I expected. I was ready for you to tell me all the reasons why you were gonna beat GitLab. He said, GitLab's doing great. They are on to something, you should go there. He said, on a mission, they have an awesome company and there's no way that this market is gonna get any smaller. We see it keep getting bigger every day. So I thought I'd talk a little bit about what a big market is. Take hired car transportation, taxis, rental cars, Uber, Lyft. This is a $60 billion market. Most companies sell into markets like this by selling products and services to help that existing business. An example might be dispatch software. Lyft could have said, hey, let's sell a better way for all of the riders to book a ride. Best case, that's a $200 million market. Maybe you get 40% market share if you do a great job. That's $80 million. That's great, but it's $80 million. Instead, Uber and Lyft said, let's do, actually I'm gonna back up a little bit. Let's look at GitLab. GitLab and the DevOps market could pursue, say, license management. We could sell license management to companies and there's companies that sell every single one of these stages of the DevOps lifecycle. That would be a $500 million opportunity. Oh, maybe that's $200 million in revenue if you get 40% market share. Not bad, but like Lyft and Uber, they decided to actually upend the whole thing and run the entire business. They have grown in just a matter of a few years to where they now have 72 1.5% of the market share and the rental car companies now actually serve their business. They rent cars to drivers for Uber and Lyft. So they now do 40 billion in revenue and have 72% of the market. That's a lot better than 80 million. For us, we're doing the same thing. We're going after the whole market. We're gonna take a much better way to attack DevOps and prove the development process, help our customers deliver products, make developers happier and help all those companies to save money at the same time. So even a 10% market share of what is now a $20 billion opportunity, that means $2 billion in sales. Even that modest multiples takes the company 15 to $25 billion in market cap. That's a big market. I also decided to take a look at other companies that have been really successful. So if you've spent time with Sid, you know there's a lot that I got to learn in those first few conversations. I took some of that data and applied it to look at all of the IPOs in the enterprise in the last seven years. And this starts on the left and goes to the right of companies that were at the same stage as us when they were at $10 million in revenue, how fast were they growing? 20 million, 40, 60, when they had 100 million in revenue, were they growing at 70%, 50%, 30%. The green line there is the 80th percentile. That's some of the best IPOs in enterprise technology. Wanted to see how we compared, but why not to 80%? How about the 90th percentile? The big part of the technology. Octa, Workday, Twilio, Box, these are companies that grew north of 100% for a very long time and continued at 80 to 90% of growth even once they were north of $100 million in revenue. When I compared GitLab to those companies, we're actually on a path to be at or above those kind of companies. That's the cohort that we are in. This is a rare opportunity. I didn't feel it until I had those cards with Sid. I didn't believe it till I spent the time digging into this. This is a rare place and there's not many opportunities that you get in your career to have a product that fits a market that's this big with a team that can actually pursue it. So in order to pursue that giant market, you have to have a unique advantage. Clearly the numbers show that we have something. We have a unique advantage and what I found is that first and foremost, we have an amazing product that people love. Across all stages of DevOps, people would say we're crazy. How would you possibly deliver all stages of the DevOps lifecycle? Starting to hear from the customers, they not only love that story, love that direction, they believe that we're gonna deliver it. They already are using pieces of that lifecycle with us and they know that we're gonna chip away at every other piece of the lifecycle. And before I joined, I called some customers and they had that passion, but I got to feel it firsthand. Went to New York, spent some time with a large financial services customer. They bought 1,000 seats of premium in March of this year. I was meeting with them in June. In June, they had already deployed all 1,000 seats and they said they need more seats. Two weeks later, I was in London, got to be with the same company again, different office in London. At that point, in addition to more seats, they wanted to begin a proof of concept for ultimate. This is a company that went from first purchase to fully deployed to needing more seats to evaluating the highest tier that we offer in a matter of three and a half months. That is also a very rare thing. In my career, I've spent a lot of time helping companies to catch up to deployment, helping them to catch up to what we thought we were gonna be able to accomplish. This is the opposite. We're trying to catch up with how quickly they can move with our product. We should be really proud of what you've built. Some customers already pay more than a million dollars a year for what this team has built. That's a lot of money and that shows that they really get a lot of value of what you've built. The distributed model of GitLab, I think is something that many people have questions about. It's how I had the first customer conversation with CID. I wanted to believe and understand how this company could make a 3,500 person company and be a public company with a fully distributed model. I left that conversation, completely convinced that this company can make that happen. It takes a unique approach and we've got that. We don't fight for talent in Silicon Valley. We get to compete for the very best talent everywhere in the world. We get to select from a talent pool of billions of people. That's a big advantage. We get a more productive workplace. We get more diverse insight, more diverse people, more diverse input into our product. We're able to support our customers wherever they are in the world. We're already in 40 countries. Those top IPOs I showed you, the most diverse geographic companies have offices in about 18 countries. We're already in a much more distributed approach in how we can reach our market. We're also frugal and don't burn a lot of money. That means that every dollar we take in, we get to maybe three times the benefit that our competitors do. That's a big... In order to go on a mission, you need a fearless leader. I had to make this slide but I think a story will help a little bit. Sid and I were in New York together, meeting with customers, and we met with a large financial services company down on Wall Street. If those of you that have spent time in New York, Wall Street is actually a pretty long drive from Midtown in the middle of the day. Let's call it Mega Bank. We were at Mega Bank. And Mega Bank loved what Sid was saying. They wouldn't let us leave. It was awkward because we had to get up to Midtown for another meeting with another large bank. The car was in the fire lane. It was going to leave. We're walking out and they were literally tugging on Sid's things. It was a physical grab. It was kind of uncomfortable. Sid, I just want to hear a little bit more about CI. And Sid says, I'm sorry, we'll have to follow up later but we have to go. So we entered the hallway and I said, hey, one second, I just needed to hit the men's room. We'll head downstairs and grab the car. And Sid said, no. No time for bathrooms. We're leaving. And I didn't know what to say. And before I could say anything, the customer from Mega Bank turned to me and said, wow. So that's what it's like to work at Gidlab. So I said, what the heck? We're on a mission. Let's go. Went downstairs. And to be fair, we got in the car and Sid said, that was a big mistake. I'm so sorry. We're late. We were trying to get to midtown. I'm just trying to get going. And all that was going through my mind was this is awesome. This guy is so focused and so relentless that he's going to break through every possible obstacle. He's also going to iterate on the way and it's okay to use bathrooms. So we've got that cleared up. But that's the kind of leader that helps us to go get the entire DevOps market, the Uber and Lyft size market. That's why investors are queued up trying to put their money to work at a company like this that can put it to work in ways that nobody else can. Finally, I wanted a company that was worthy. And by worthy, I mean, not just worthy of customer's time, worthy of the investment everybody puts into it, but a worthy investment of my time that I can feel like we can make the world a little bit better while we're taking that big opportunity on. And with great success, you can do both. And I found an example when you think of companies that have actually done this, for those of you that are familiar with salesforce.com, salesforce is the number one company on Fortune's list of best companies to work for. They're also the fastest growing cloud company in the history of cloud. They do almost 10 billion in ARR. 10 billion in ARR, we're working on that. I know the sales team is going to get that soon. But they've also delivered over $230 million of donations in dollars to nonprofits. They've delivered 3.1 million volunteer hours from their teams. And they've got a commitment that they did deliver 1% of their equity, 1% of their profit, and 1% of their time to make the world a better place while they continue to be successful. And they can do both. And I'm confident that GitLab is the kind of place that can do both. Because we're showing the world a better way to work. I believe that my kids are going to work in a distributed company someday. And it's going to be the model that that company learned from GitLab. We can be the number one on Fortune's best place to work list. We can show our customers a better way to work as well. We're showing them how they can develop faster. They can actually have higher quality and better security while also delivering more quickly for their customers. And to the day that makes their customers happier, and it makes their team members happier. We're open. A lot of companies use this as a buzzword for us. I believe it's a foundation. And I think that foundation is so important because we're able to collaborate with our community. That community is our customers, it's our contributors, it's our users, it's our team in here, it's our significant others, our friends and partners who've joined us here today. That open approach is what gives us leverage. Again, closed companies can't copy that. There's not a way that they can get that advantage that we have. And finally, a company has to live its values. I have seen firsthand since I've joined that we live the values that Sid shared with me when we first started talking about GitLab. And when I go watch my one-on-ones with Sid, which are on YouTube, in 10 years, my kids will see these one-on-ones and they'll see how we ran this business. That we achieved that success in the right way. And that's gonna make me proud to be a part of this. So when I joined, I knew that we had to take advantage of all three of these opportunities. Massive market, we needed to have a unique advantage and be able to do that in a worthy way. Everything we need's in place, which leaves one thing. And that's execution. That means it's down to us. I knew that when I was joining that every day, every hour, every bit of effort that I put into this business can help us get to success. And that's fun for me. I enjoy knowing that the work I do can get us to that massive success. We're not held up by the market. We're not held up by an inefficient approach. We're not held up by a company that can't scale to the level we need to. That's fun for me. So I think it's a fun way to work. I wanna do two quick things before I close here. Number one, if you are not a GitLab employee, you're a significant other partner, friend, customer, otherwise not on the core GitLab team. Can you raise your hand real quick? So this is the community. This is in this room. There's already people here who are not in the core part of GitLab, and that's because GitLab is the whole community. I wanna thank you for taking the time to be here with us and be a part of this community and being on this journey with us, being on this mission. Thank you for taking that time. And second, I wanna thank all of you, including Sid, Dimitri, and all the GitLabbers for letting me join you on this massive and worthy mission. I'm excited about it, and I'm looking forward to the time ahead. So, onward, and we're gonna go get the $40 billion. Thank you, Mike. That was absolutely awesome. I wanna quickly hit on the progress we made since the last summit. That's not a year ago, that's nine months ago, and we more than doubled our AR. We're making it super hard for Mike to catch up to our hand that the onboarding actually got better. That is rare. Like the bigger the company bet, the more confusing it mostly is. So, we're trying to keep up there. So, everyone keep writing that, keep refactoring that, keep making it shorter. Say it as seriously as you can. I'm really, really proud of our infrastructure team, migrating GitLab.com to Google's cloud without incident. That is, we've come a long way, and there's gonna be hiccups along the road, but we now have the team and the processes in place to get there. And we're still on track to ship the complete DevOps lifecycle by this year. We went from just dev to DevOps, and we're on track to do that in a year. That is unprecedented, and I'm very proud of everyone who's contributing. I did a customer tour recently. And I learned a couple of things. In New York, I learned that nobody knows what we're doing. Literally, not a zero, not a single customer. And every one of them, we went in and we asked like, hey, do you know what we're doing? And they said, yeah, yeah, we read your blog, we're the biggest fans in the company of you, we totally know what you're doing. And then, oh, we're like, oh great, we don't have to tell them. And it turns out they think we do version control in a bit of CI. We're going so fast that the world has a hard time catching up. And we gotta keep telling that story. We're a single application for the whole DevOps lifecycle. In London, we learned that people really want that. They need that. They told a story of a programmer that joined the company, sat down, saw the tools they had to use. After a few hours, he got up and he walked out the door. A really talented programmer, they spent a lot of time and money to recruit, just didn't like their tool set. We want a GitLab to be the thing where you walk into a company and if it's not GitLab, you get up and walk away. In Amsterdam, a financial services company said, yeah, we're thinking about hiring some Ruby developers just to work on GitLab. What? Yeah, we know you help us and when we ask for a feature, you make it in a couple of months, but it's so essential to what we do, we want it in a couple of weeks so that the people will contribute it. If we can pull that off, if we can co-create with our customers, there's no way anyone can catch up to that. So let's make that happen. November 18, 2020, we're gonna IPO. And the first step on our journey is to end next year at 100 million ARR. Mike said, yeah, I know the projection said 97, so I kind of had the feeling you'll say this. Sorry, Mike, we rounded it up. We're gonna IPO because we're a transparent company. What is more transparent? And we picked this because Paul said, look, I'm not super comfortable with 2020. And we're like, yeah, but we set that date in 2015, so we gotta hit it. It's like, okay, let's do the latest possible date in the year. Let's do a Wednesday because that's a good date for IPOs, even CFOs are sometimes slightly superstitious. Maybe it has data. And let's do it before Thanksgiving, because after Thanksgiving, everything is closed. And I like picking a date, like this is crazy. No company picked the year of the IPO five years in advance. No company picked the date more than two years in advance. If we hit this, no one's ever done this before. We do it because it's efficient. It's efficient in small, medium, and large ways. In a very small way, me and Kirsten got our World Trade Center observatory deck tickets refunded.   And we came in and they said, sorry, it's foggy, you can't go. We're like, totally cool, understand. Thanks for telling us, can we have our money back, please? And he said, no, you can reschedule. We're like, we're on a plane in a few hours. We can reschedule. They're like, tough luck, just make it work. So Kirsten was gonna see whether we could hand off the tickets to someone else. I said, no, I know what date I'll be here. It will be either ringing the bell at Wall Street or pushing the button in Times Square for the NASDAQ. And it will be a bit busy on that Wednesday, but on Saturday, I'll make some time to visit here. So can you please put it in for the Saturday after November 2020? And the guy goes in his computer, he's doing it. He's like, 2020? He's like, the registration system goes six months up. I said, I'd like my money back, please. And we got our money back, so. In a medium way, if you start prepping for your IPO two years in advance, it's gonna cost half the money as it costs when you need to do it in a year. The more time you have, the more efficient the process. And we're all about efficiency, so that helps. The biggest benefit about agreeing as a company on a goal is that you can stop arguing about the goal. You can stop discussing that. And you can start discussing how to achieve it because this is not gonna be easy. It's gonna take each and every one of us. And we get, for the next two and a half years, we can spend our time figuring out how to get there. This became also deeply personal for me. I was with family, and I told this date, and my uncle said, why did you pick this date? Did you know? And I'm like, what are you talking about? The CFO picked the date. He's like, no. This would have been the 100th birthday of your granddad, your grand father. I'm like, what? My grandfather, he was very influential in our family, but not only that. He has the same title as me. He's a chartered engineer in the Netherlands. And his full name is Cetrin Sibrandi. And if you can spell that, I'll buy you a drink. As me. So when he passed away, it felt like part of me was dying because my name and title was in the newspaper, and everyone talked about that. So if we manage to hit that date, it will be a great celebration of his life as well. I wanna hit on two things. Our best decisions are taken despite management, taken despite me. In finance, there's this concept in order to have an advantage.  Everyone else has to think something else. For us, a single application was a ridiculous idea. Camille came to Dimitri and said, we gotta do this. We gotta integrate GitLab CI with GitLab. It would be so much better. And Dimitri was like, no, many sharp tools. Like it needs to be separate. Our monolith is too big to begin with. Let's not do that. And at a certain point, he relented and Dimitri came to me and I said, come on, Dimitri, you lost him out of the room. Doesn't make sense. And we relented because it's more efficient. It's more efficient to build code that way. It would save us some time releasing. But it ended up being so much better of a user experience. One UI, one concept as a user, one data store, one way to service information, a way for a whole company to collaborate, to be on the same page. That was not a decision from the top. Six years ago, to this day, this day, six years ago, I launched GitLab.company with a show hacker news post.  All the money would come for .com. We know how that turned out so far. We're gonna make money with .com, but we built this company, as we're here now, on our self-managed installation. So we gotta iterate. We gotta listen to users. And we require you to disagree and commit, but we don't require you to stop disagreeing. Barbie keeps disagreeing with me on certain subjects she cares about and championing them. That's expected of every single one in this company, because we're not the smartest guys in the room. We're not the smartest girls in the room.  The other thing is, we're really proud of what we do, what we achieve. And that's great. But we need to start getting proud about what we enable our users to do. If you look at a release post today, it's us saying what we shipped. There's not a single customer in there. There's not a single person that achieved something with our software. It's gotta stop being about us. It's gotta start being about what we enable our users to do. Now, every summit, I do a challenge. And the inspiration for this challenge was when Dimitri tried to use her own product. He needed a new Rails app and he wanted to use other DevOps. And guess what, it didn't work. It doesn't have database migrations. It doesn't have HTTPS. It's not practical. We gotta ship something we wanna use ourselves. So the challenge is make something that you wanna use, but that's too easy, because you can just say you'll use it. So we'll have someone that will be the judge of that. He's right there. His name is Greg. He's Barbie's husband. He's full of amazing stories. Ask him when he messed up in Steve Jobs' office, like great, great stories. You gotta convince him to move from GitHub because, shamefully, he's still on there. But guess what? We're shipping software that even our co-founder can't use, so low level of shame for us too. Every day, you'll present to Greg what other DevOps can do for him. And I'm very sure he'll come up with great suggestions. Work with him and convince him to move. The second part of the summit is generating more leads. We want people that are on GitHub Core and are interested more to raise their hands. We're not gonna put up an email paywall, or an email gate before our downloads. We want people to raise their hands themselves. So we're gonna put a menu item in GitLab. Because the installation has more than a few users that offer a free software services people will engage. Ship that. If you're interested in volunteering for any of this, so this takes not just engineers, also takes marketing, takes sales, takes services. Get here on the podium after everything is ended. Talk with Greg, or if you can't make that because of your excursion, join the channel.  And I will wear my giraffe suit, which I bought for the GitLab end party that night. Thank you very much. The next speaker is Mark. He's gonna do some storytime about our product vision. So yeah, I wanted to talk to you all about GitLab's product vision. Really at this point, I think, often most of you know what our vision is. I mean, Michael and Sid just talked about it, right? We're really close to delivering the complete DevOps lifecycle, all in a single application. And Josh, there he is. He's actually working on a demo of where we got so far up to and including GitLab 11.2.  Just kidding, no. He doesn't have a demo ready. But he's gonna record it, and then you guys can all watch that later. And I'm sure we'll get a blog post out there giving everybody a progress update on where we're at. But what I thought would be a little bit more interesting would be a little bit of the backstory. How do we get to this product vision? So with that, it's storytime. When I first heard of GitLab, I was working at a developer tools company and we had just delivered an integration with GitHub and one of our customers had asked to do a GitLab integration as well. I was like, GitLab, what's that? So I took a look and looked at the project and no offense to me, but it was an ugly knockoff open source GitHub. Just why would I bother doing this? So I ignored it and forgot about it. Couple years later, I was working at a different developer tools company and one of the product managers that worked for me was really excited about this competitor, GitLab. I need to say things like, GitLab's got CI now. And their entire roadmap is open in public. Now that's kind of crazy. So I kind of ignored them though because why would you care about this small little knockoff? And at most, it's a third rate competitor. We're not gonna do anything like that. It wasn't worth it. Just kind of ignored it. But a couple of months of him just grieving about GitLab and he was excited. He was irrationally excited about GitLab.   It looked really nice now. And it actually had more functionality than GitHub. I mean, not just that it had CI, but like the actual version control was better. Lots of functionality GitHub didn't ship for years after that. So this was really interesting. How did this happen?  There's actually a company now behind this and they've got investors and they're really digging in. They're still a small team, but really, really knocking it out of the park. They were just crushing it. And then I started to dig in a little bit more. And then I came across the handbook. And this is actually a screenshot from the values page and just to show that it looks actually different than our values today. Just like everything at GitLab, we iterate on that, but that's what our values were a couple years ago. So I took a look at that and everything was much, much smaller, but even our mission, our values, our roadmap, everything was just public and open source. And this came to me at a time when I was kind of getting frustrated with other startups that weren't writing down their values. So we may even knew what their values were. And here, GitLab had open sourced it along with everything else about their handbook. And the last thing is I found out that they were remote first. And even though I worked in the Bay Area, I really hated commuting to San Francisco. I actually didn't want to be locked into San Francisco anyway. And so all this stuff really, really intrigued me. And so I reached out to Yob and then started chatting with Sid. And I realized not only was this company doing really well, but there was also like a ton of ambition behind it. And so I started to open up about all the things that I wanted to do in the developer space. And it was, we're shockingly surprised how much Sid and I were on the same page, but what we wanted to do. And all these things that other companies, I wanted to do all this stuff and just ran into a wall, at GitLab there was no wall. You know, we had already started to move from version control into CI and we're well poised to go from CI into CD. And so this just really, really got me exciting and spoiler alert, I joined the company. And actually when I joined the company, Sid, to his credit, told me to kind of take it easy. Really just get to know the team, absorb the culture and just kind of soak it in. I was so excited that within two weeks I had written up a complete vision for CI CD at GitLab. And it had everything I had ever dreamed of as a developer, anything that I had ever thought of in this space. But for the first time I was seeing that maybe, just maybe this company could actually pull it off. And so we implemented environments and deployments and pipelines and slowly worked through the vision picking off these major chunks of the developer workflow. Well actually that's a lie, I say slowly, but we were shipping major chunks of this at a furious pace. I mean really iterating quicker than I had ever imagined. I was actually really, really proud of the team for what they were able to deliver. Kicking out these major iterations so quickly. And I actually came from companies where I was really proud of how fast we iterated. But things that would take a company maybe almost up to a year just to sort of plan things out and slot them into a release and then talk, et cetera. All these things take time and we were just shipping things in months. It was really, really amazing. And then about a year ago we had covered so much of the CI CD workflow that we started running into a wall. See, as a developer I had always thought that it was really important to cover this entire scope from idea to production. And then maybe when you got to production you do a little monitoring to make sure you didn't break anything when you shipped it. But truly operations, that was on the other side of a wall. We were making developer tools. This was a developer company. Operations, that's clearly a separate thing. Or is it? Maybe this isn't a wall. Maybe there's nothing there. Maybe it's imaginary. I felt just like Neo in the Matrix swallowing the red pill and my eyes opened and I see that there's no wall. And with that GitLab was moving into DevOps. So within a month or two CID, Nye and others had crafted a vision for 2018 where GitLab goes beyond dev into DevOps. But not just any DevOps, the complete DevOps life cycle where we shipped something for every major part of software development and operations all within a single application. Because did I mention GitLab's ambitious? Now to come to something this big, we knew we were going really into breadth over depth territory. I mean, as a user experience centric PM, this is really uncomfortable. I mean, we're shipping a lot of these minimum viable changes or MVCs. And they really kind of amount to a foundation or scaffolding, but pretty bare bones. But by getting the entire vision out there, everybody can understand internally and externally people can see where we're going. And then the community can help flesh it out. And now customers are even hiring people to help flesh this out. And so together we can iterate to a lovable product. You know, not just a minimum viable product anymore but a lovable product. As a side note, Sid at one point told me, don't worry, we'll ship the breadth of DevOps in 2018 and then next year we can worry about the depth. And I kind of quickly responded, yeah, right. Next year we'll do DevSecOps and then we'll have even more scope. Well, it turns out it was wrong because it didn't take a whole year. Two months later, Sid's like, security's really important. And we started to talk about DevSec and BizOps. I don't even think it was 2018 yet and we had already started doing that. So anyway, back to the story. The thing is, vision is working. Prospects love it. When we talk to customers, their eyes light up. People really want this. They love the vision. Sometimes they're skeptical but they want it. They want it to exist. And this product, the entire scope of the software development lifecycle, it's what I've always wanted as a developer. I didn't want to have to make it myself but I wanted it to exist. But no other company could do this. Now it's not like they didn't have the time or money or people to do it. They didn't have the drive, ambition, determination, whatever. They all put up imaginary walls. At GitLab there is no wall. Of course we can do this. And not only can we do this, we have an obligation to do this. This product needs to exist. Many people could have done it but we were the only ones that could accept that low level of shame with shipping small iterations so quickly. And we're the only ones that have the guts to do it. There is no wall. We tore down the wall between version control and CI. We're tearing down the wall between dev and ops. And if you think there's some magic wall around dev ops, think again, there is no wall.  Designers, product managers, executives. Yeah, they're all fair game. Because remember, our mission is everyone can contribute. And we're building on the strengths of an ever-expanding software development life cycle. But there are no limits. There is no wall. And the funny thing is about imaginary walls, when you're on the other side and you look back and you realize like, what was I afraid of? There is no wall. Okay, so we're again talking details now, the fine print. We're all going out to our excursions after this and it should be a wonderful day. We've got Table Mountain. We've got Robin Island. We've got wine tasting. We have penguins. We have cultural tours. Whatever you chose in your most recent Slack channel for this event, which is some announcements, it'll have a list of what you chose and what time it's leaving. The first group to go is Robin Island. You will need your passports or you will not be getting on the boat. So make sure you have those and you should already have your red wristband from Kirsten and you are leaving first. So the times on those sheets are not the time that you should start thinking about showing up. They're the times the bus will pull away. So if you are going to Robin Island, you will need to make sure you're on that bus and ready to go by 11 and there's lunches to pick up and you should know your details. And right now we're going to go ahead and have those who are going to participate with a challenge. You do have some time to come up here. We have finished in good time. But with that, I also, given that we have finished in good time, are there any questions that you would like to ask anyone from the leadership team before you go on? I don't know if I'm going to speak in the last 10 minutes. No? So if you're going to Robin Island, start asking questions and you're not leaving. My favorite color? Oh, that's an easy one, red. Why? Because it's the color for passion and love and living and life. I'm too afraid of Kirsten to answer that question. Okay, so in the top nine months, what are the biggest? Last nine months, biggest win. I will say that I don't like this answer because it's not very globally, but I would say getting us off of Trinite so quickly. I've never seen such a hard-faring effort and I know not everyone understands this, but Trinite's very, very expensive and when you get to a larger employee number, it doesn't make sense to be using them at all and to be able to roll off of that so quickly and to get new benefits in place that are more advantageous to our workforce in terms of higher coverage levels and higher benefit plans and adding services that we didn't have before, like infertility treatments, which I'm really happy that we were able to do, but to do all that so quickly was an absolutely horrible thing ever by Brittany and the whole team, so way to go, people ops team, you did great. We have a mic up here, I thought. Yeah, there we go. Is that one working? Yeah, there we go. For me, I think the biggest win, I'm gonna actually blend into a couple of things because the most important thing that I've seen even in these three months has been the shift in both the conversation with customers and the way they've been thinking about our business from source control to complete DevOps and in that three months, I've seen customers move from what we've been talking about as a vision to them actually understanding that vision and I think what Sid described is our customers don't understand that. That's the biggest win is when they finally get that understanding. I was in Washington, DC a couple of weeks ago with a large government organization that is already a customer, but they are moving from their first 500 seats to their next 500 seats. In that conversation, we went through their top budget priorities and they said there's actually not top priorities, there's only three. Our entire budget is allocated for number one, time to market, number two, uptime, high availability, number three, and I actually called them three number five, security, and they called it number five is because security is not allowed to block number one or number two. And all three of those, their entire budget allocation is what we do. When you talk about complete DevOps, that actually addresses the entire spend, the top three priorities they have in their organization. That's the biggest win for me is when I see this vision actually being understood by customers and that particular customer has now moved from a conversation of adding the next 500 to another 4,000 users because they can actually benefit from all of those capabilities across all of their users. So I know that Paul's gonna bring that one in. We already put it in the commit, so look forward to that one, Paul. Cool, thanks for the question. The most significant thing we did is our number one goal at the company. We hit our incremental ACV numbers. As long as we keep doing that, we can deal with a lot of other stuff going off the rails. The thing that was most broken at GitLab was GitLab.com. And we now have the team and the processes in place to make GitLab.com ready for mission critical applications. So that will be my number two thing. The number three thing was we scaled. Like nothing got majorly broken. Like we managed to recruit the people we wanted to recruit. Finance managed to keep up and closing the books, sometimes even a bit fasting. Like all the different things that can break at the company, if you're more than doubling every year, it didn't happen as far as I can tell, which is also starting to become a problem as we go bigger, but it's amazing that you're going at this breakneck speed and not everything is on fire. So those would be my three highlights for the last nine months. Thanks for that question. Mark, you want to give your top three? So actually Michael kind of stole my first one. It's obviously the dev observation is a big important thing for me, but for me, what was really exciting was really aligning around that. Nine months ago, we sort of had some bubbling ideas about what this meant, but having the entire organization, just the product side and engineering, but sales and marketing, everything, and our customers in particular really rallying around this, that was really big. And the other one kind of alluded to and actually Michael kind of slipped that in during his talk, but we have people paying us more than a million dollars. Like that is really, like it's great to have the aggregate number, but individual customers paying us more than a million dollars, that's huge. That's a big milestone for me, at least. And the last thing is, was it you? Was it you? No. The other thing was it's iteration. Just give a shout out to that. Everything at GitLab iterates, not just the product, the team, the company, our values iterated, I showed that before, but as we've grown to 300 plus people now, what's amazing is we haven't gone through a period where just everything falls apart. And a company is where that happens. A hundred people, you gotta reorg, everything goes wrong. 200 people, you gotta reorg again, because everything you just did now doesn't work anymore. And somehow we've iterated our way and just everything just has gotten better and continuously improved all the way up here. And I don't see any reason that's not gonna keep going. So that's a big one for me. Okay, any other questions? Now we met our goal of three, so we're good? Okay. Oh, I love this question. I feel it's a big milestone. How do we make sure it's not the end all? Thank you, Clement, for that. I was gonna be un-transparent about that one because Barbie told me, hey, that everyone knows there's a world beyond that. I said, no, I got you covered, Barbie. Nine months before the IPO, we'll start shifting division. We'll say, hey, the IPO is just a step along the way. Our next goal is, and we'll think of something that makes McBride uncomfortable, probably like billion dollars, AR or something like that. We'll think of the next milestone beyond that. So you're gonna see us focusing on IPO, but it's just a step along the way. It's just another fundraising event. And before the IPO actually happens, we'll already have put our sight on the next thing. So the IPO is not our end goal. Investors didn't invest in our company to IPO, and that's it, and we're gone. They wanna buy stock at IPO. They think we're gonna go a really long way. It's a $20 billion market. Best case, you get 40% of it. Macro dies down a bit, 10x multiplier. You can all do the math. That's a really, really big and valuable company. And that's what we're out to build. We're not here to IPO. We're here to build an enduring software company. We're gonna do that by creating a whole lot of value for our users and then capturing a tiny portion of that. Thank you so much. And with that, let's go and have some fun this week.


Hello friends! How are we doing? Welcome back to my channel, I am Megan. Today we're going to be chatting about the series that I think Booktube is snoozing on. They're snoozing, they're like what are you doing Booktube? Wake up Pearl, wake up! These are basically just the series I think are severely underrated and I thought you know I chat a lot here about oh I need to read these series, I need to get caught up on series, am I reading enough series? But like let's actually chat about some of the ones I've loved, right? Let's let's get rid of the negativity, let's bring in the positivity and let's get excited for some great series in my opinion that more people should be reading. So yeah it's just the book series that I think more people should read and more people should get excited about book series you might not have heard about before but I think are worth your time. Pretty simple vlog but I just felt like we needed some series positivity, not a vlog, little vlog, did her bit of a lie there. Pretty simple video but I felt like we needed some series positivity so let's just get into it. Number one on this list, you know I had to do it, this series is probably the only series on this list I have never heard another Booktube speak about unless they're reading it like for a themed video where I have mentioned it so they read it kind of thing. The Lady Hardcastle Mysteries. The Lady Hardcastle Mysteries, okay? The Lady Hardcastle Mysteries. I can't believe that, I actually can't believe that. This is how many I've read, one, two, three, four, five, six, I'm just about to read the seventh this month hopefully. But this is Lady Hardcastle Mysteries where like in 1910s-ish England, kind of Edwardian England were following Lady Hardcastle and her maid flyer. They have retired from a past life of escapades and excitement to this town called Litter and Cotterel and you think, oh it's going to be quaint like a little English village with the pub and the house and though it's the murder hotspot of the world girls. So each book is the cozy kind of murder mystery. Them solving mysteries, murders, some other mysteries. And I know I've spoken to you about this a lot but I love them. I love them. I love them. So yeah, the first one, I'll just hold that up because the stack is heavy. The first one is A Quiet Life in the Country. My favorite one is probably still the second one in the Market for Murder.  The relationship between Lady Hardcastle and Flow is beautiful but you need to read the audiobooks, okay? The narrator for the audiobooks could like snap me across the face and I'd say thank you. Like she's changed my life. She, at this point she's changed my life. I love the audiobooks for this. A lot of them are on the script. I always have a code by the way down below for you to get two months free of script. I also have a code for you to get a month free of audible with one free audiobook and if you're a prime member you get two free audiobooks. Or I have a code for 30 days free of Kindle Limited. So just so you know. And I always link the links for these as well if you want to buy them through an affiliate code from me. If you want to help me out you know. I've only just started doing this. I never did affiliate codes but I just like why not? Why not just stick them down there? And I think the three the three child codes are probably the best, best deal for you. Anyways, getting distracted. Yeah most of these are on script. The most recent one that I need to read isn't. I feel like a few of them that I did listen to on there have disappeared. With script things can come and go. I mean things can be there for a while and then be gone and then be back. But most of them are on script and I just love them. I just love them. I'm obsessed. Their relationship is one of my favorite relationships. They've become comfort characters for me. I feel like the whole series now is kind of going to be like a 4.55. Like all the books that I read because I'm just so attached. I'm so invested. I'm so deep into this world. It's a very interesting relationship because obviously Flo is her maid but they are equals you know. But they kind of like take the mick out of the dynamic of the relationship. Lady Holocaust often calls her like tiny servant or something like that. I've always growing up loved like the Victorian and Wardium kind of settings in England. You know yes it may be romanticizing it somewhat. But it's a crazy mystery what do I expect? But I just love them. I think they deserve so much more hype. I just think they're just such a great time.  So you gotta go read them guys. Like I know I sometimes I don't vlog them now because I'm so deep into the series. Like sometimes I just read them in my own time but I cannot recommend them enough. Next we have The Themis Files by Sylvain Nouvelle. I don't have the first one. The first one's Sleeping Giant. This is a very difficult series to pitch to because like the series goes I think some of the beauty of it is it goes wild. Like it goes crazy. Like I can't tell you anything but the first like 50 pages of the first book. It is sci-fi and the first book with discovering some like very large body parts that looks like they could belong to some kind of machine or robot and is it to do with aliens? That's basically all you need to know. Now I don't know if these were popular on Booktube before I was on Booktube. I don't know if they had a bit of a heyday back in the day but I haven't heard a ton of people speak about them. When did this second one come out? It's come out in 2017. Okay so like a little while ago. But again another book. You have to read the audiobooks for these okay. These are all told through interviews basically. So all through books are told through interviews, recorded conversations, diary entries, some of them. And it has a full cast audiobooks right. Oh my god. Oh my god guys. Oh my god. Those actors. Those actors. They said I'm gonna put my whole into this. My whole act to see into this. They are so good. They are so good. I just love full cast audiobooks. When I read a book that could be a full cast or like a book with a podcast element in it and they don't do like full cast sound effects music like what's the point? What is the point? What's the point? If you're not gonna give me it in the audiobook go give me it. Where's the flavour? Where's the flavour in this? The first two are great. The last one only human wasn't my favourite. I don't think it necessarily needed to exist. Or it could have been like a novella or something. I don't know. The third one it's still good but it didn't need to happen. The first two are great. I loved the direction it took in Waking Gods. You have these characters that you go on this journey with but also a lot of characters come and go. Like the series is not afraid for some you know. Like I guess everyone's a bit expendable in this series and like I said it goes on such a journey that I kind of want you to go into it blind but I just think this is such a fun sci-fi series and I never think I've had Gabby speak about it but I haven't heard many people speak about this series. Then I have a graphic novel series that I don't hear a ton of people speak about and that is the Sheets graphic novel series. We've got Sheets and Delicates by Bruna Thunna. I think I heard Ariel Bissette talk about this back in the day and I know Bruna Thunna does some stuff for their podcast books and bound podcasts as well. I love this. I love it. Particularly Delicates. I think Sheets was like a four star for me. Strong. This was five stars. Okay and the third one in this series is coming out I think next month sometime. We're following I think her name is Marjorie. I'm pretty sure it's her name Marjorie. Yeah I think she's about 13 and her mother has recently passed away and she is kind of running her family's laundromat at 13 because her dad is on this you know in his grief unable to do that. The first book is really about her and this ghost that she meets called Wendell and all the ghosts in this book like look like Halloween ghosts like Sheets. That's why it's called Sheets because the laundromat and the Sheets. I've connected the two dots.   What is her name? Eliza. We meet Eliza who is being bullied at school and it's kind of her story. I think the third one is probably going to be Wendell's story particularly because we don't really know how Wendell passed away but they're just a lovely graphic novel series. Definitely up there is one of my favorites. Let me show you we've got a lot of like blue and purple tones. Let me show you. Is that focused? I hope so. Can you see? It's like all blue and purples. It's really beautiful. As if it's blurred by Lemony Snicket. That was a combo I was not expecting. I just think if you're looking for a new graphic novel series that is heartwarming but also tackles some difficult topics. I just think this is such a great series and I'm so excited for the third one. Okay guys. The next series I don't know if it can be cast as like underrated Booktube sleeping on it because I do know some people have read this now okay but like it's not enough. It's never enough. I believe Booktube is sleeping on these. Let me tell you the truth in it. You think I just think I mean like guys if you're new here favorite series of all time. Favorite series of all time. So my favorite book's all time. I've only reread the first one once. I've never reread the second and third. I'm like putting it off.  I think the second one is my favorite. Like I could verily have very very happily. If I was on a desert island let's say like I only take one series it would be this. I could very happily read this for the rest of my life and nothing else. Another one you need the audiobook okay. I discovered this first one Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter on a whim. I remember I was doing like a murder mystery vlog. This isn't necessarily murder mystery but I was trying to find like another book for the vlog and I just scrambled. It's scrum diddy-umptious. Stumbled. I crossed this book on script and my life has never been the same. I love this. So if you don't know the Athena Club Mysteries, we're following daughters and female versions of men from Catholic Torian literature. So we've got Mary Jekyll and Diana Hyde. We have Justine Frankenstein. We have Catherine Morro and Beatrice Rappuccini are kind of our main group of girlies but then we have like some other ones like Lucinda Van Helsing in a later book. Oh my gosh so good. It's them solving mysteries together but it's their sister hurt. I'm like listen I'm not a big character girlie but I would die for each and every one of them. Do you know that there was supposed to be a TV show? There was supposed to be a TV show. It never happened. Oh I would kill. I would kill. I just love them. I've always said if I ever win the lottery I am setting up a publishing house and I am just paying Theodore Goss to write more of this series forever. It's a lot of fantasies and when I feel the fantasy it is my reality. I'm not kidding. I am not kidding. I would do that with my money. If I ever win the lottery and suddenly like I wouldn't tell you because I'm not telling you if I win the lottery because no you shouldn't tell people. Don't even tell your family if I'm honest. I wouldn't tell you but like if you see Theodore Goss there's like a new imprint and uh suddenly what it's publishing is Theodore Goss books. I've come into some money okay and that's what I'm putting it into. I love these more than anything in the world. I can't explain to you how incredible they are. I love the writing. I love a good Victorian setting. I'm a bit of you know I've loved Victorian history since I was a kid.  What do they say that? But I just love them. I love them. I love them. I love them. The second book is way too long but like I don't care. It has no reason to be this long. It's like 700, 800 pages. No 700 pages. It has no reason to be that long but am I complaining? No. I love it. So in my opinion this series put cheapy sleeping on it. More of you should read it. More of you should love it. The idea that someone doesn't love this series I can't even, I can't even, I can't even fathom that because I need to reread the second one soon don't I? Thing is I've planned all my videos out for the rest of the year and I've got like 10,000 books to read but like I think I need to make time. Maybe I'll do it right at the end of the year when I'm probably like done reading. If I get ahead of my reading I'll be done and I can just maybe reread these at the end of the year. Then we have a YA series, a YA fantasy series. Listen I don't love it as much as that. I don't love anything as much as that but I do think that it is a bit underrated and I do think more people should read them and that is The Ravens' Geology by Cass Morgan and Danielle Page. I'd say this is one of the only like jewel, author, co-written books that I've loved. There's a few others but I don't tend, sometimes they like don't vibe with me. I've never read Cass Morgan or Danielle Page. Cass Morgan wrote the 100 series and Danielle Page wrote the Dorothy Must Die series and this is basically witches in a sorority coven and we follow like two different perspectives. I think they each kind of wrote one of the perspectives but the books do feel cohesive and that's what you read tonight. There's a bit of romance, it's YA but it's set at university and I think it does a great job of like doing YA university. University is an interesting place right because so much of the adult books we read set at university are like drugs, murders, sex, dangerous things you know what I mean? I didn't feel a lot different at university to how I felt in secondary school really and I think there's space for YA set university as well. I think there is okay, I think that's, some people think that's a controversial statement. I think there's space and room for that because like we don't all have to be drug, sex, rock and roll at university. Me and Tom were just in bed playing Pokemon most of the time, I'm honest. No drugs involved. I just think this is a series I don't hear a lot people speak about. These are both like four stars to me but I think they're just a solid YA witchy book. If you like witches this could be one to put on your list for like autumn time. Then one series that I had like kind of mixed experiences with but I do want to give a shout out and that is The Forward Collection. Now this is exclusive I think on Audible, they're all short stories, they each order books about like an hour long each of them and they're all sci-fi basically. We've got many different authors, I'm trying to remember who, like Andy Weir, Blake Crouch, Veronica Roth, there's six, who am I forgetting? I can't remember, anyways. But I found my favorite in this series was the first one, Arc by Veronica Roth. It's just this story, I think it's like the end of the world. There's a spaceship leaving Earth and we're following these scientists who have been like, they've been cataloging stuff on Earth before they leave Earth. Humanity has and there's like these, they're specializing flowers. I think these people, it's a very emotional short story. I made me want to read Veronica Roth. I've never read Veronica Roth before. I've now read Poster Girl, which I did enjoy, but like this short story made me cry, right? And I just think it's a fun little series of these short stories with varying levels of success. But I think they were pretty interesting and unique ideas for sci-fi where the world could go. So listen, I didn't give them all like, I think some of them like three stars, do you know what I mean? But that Veronica Roth one is still one of my favorite short stories I've ever read. And I've never heard anyone speak about this short story series. So if you have Audable, I feel like they're included in the membership. I don't feel like you have to use a credit to listen to them. Otherwise, I don't think I would have listened to them. So go check it out if you've ever wanted to give it a try. And then my final series that Booktube is sleeping on, I think this series, I've now had anyone speak about it, I think they only have like 200 ratings on Goodreads, some of the books in this series, like no one's read this series. But it is the Forgotten Women series by Zing Sing. I love these. So I've read the writers and the leaders. I have two more to read, which I think are the artists and the scientists. And it's basically talking about forgotten women, dark history, which is my favorite flavor of history. They all have, oh, I love how I'm going on the pages that don't have them, but each story is accompanied by a beautiful piece of artwork about the woman. And we just have about three pages going through their lives and what they did. And I just think like, I love women, okay? I love history about women. And I think that they're quite short. They're just a great little thing to read to like educate you on some history that is forgotten, right? History is so male dominated. And I just think let's push back on that. By far my favorite was the leaders. The thing about the writers was they were all writers. First with the leaders, there was people leading in different ways. The writers ended up feeling a bit repetitive for me. I don't know if the artists and the scientists will feel the same. I don't know. It was just like everyone liked writing. It wasn't something to be liked. It was something to be understood from an academic perspective. Obviously, you're not an academic. No. And I love writing. I love books. But I don't know. There wasn't as much variation in this one as there was in this one, because this one there was like four parts. So we had the rebels, the warriors, the rulers, the activists, the reformers.  So I think I enjoyed that a bit more. But I just think the fact that these only have like 200 ratings, some of them on Goodreads, it's severely underrated. And I just think if you're interested in fiction, if you're interested about women's history, this is the series that you should be picking up. Okay, that is the series that I think Booktube is sleeping on. Feel free to let me know if you think actually some of these are pretty popular on Booktube. I mean, here's the thing, I know some people are afraid to change case, but it will never be hyped enough to me. I know I'm delusional when it comes to this book. I know I'm clouded. I know I just don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. But let me know what some series you've loved are that you think Booktube is sleeping on because I always need more to read evidently. Like I'm actually, I'm running out. I'm running out, seriously. So let me know some series that you think Booktube is sleeping on and I will see you very soon in another video. Bye!


You've talked a lot, you're on record talking about the quite rapid process through which innovative tech startups become kind of grumpy and meshed incumbents, both just with the state and more generally in their business practices. That topic has come up a lot recently with the Twitter files and you know the sort of revelations of the ways that companies collaborated willingly I think in many cases but maybe with a looming threat as well with government agencies around misinformation and other questions. It seems to be like we're going to be in for more of that, that this sort of blurring of the lines between public and private is our fate. Is that what it looks like to you and if so you know is that ultimately a thing that threatens innovation or are there ways in which it could potentially speed things along? Yeah so look the textbook view of the American economy is that it's a free market competition and companies are fighting it out and different toothpaste companies are trying to sell you different toothpaste and it's a largely competitive market and then every once in a while there's an externality that requires government intervention and then you get these weird things like the too big to fail banks or whatever but those are the exceptions to the general working in the free market system. I can tell you my experience having been now in startups for 30 years is that the opposite is true specifically that James Burnham was right that we passed from you know the original model of capitalism which he called bourgeois capitalism which is what we still think capitalism is we passed into a different model which he called managerial capitalism you know some some decades back and the the the actual correct model of how the US economy works is it is mostly a process of oligopolies cartels and monopolies and they most it's mostly them you know for it's basically big companies forming up into oligopolies cartels and monopolies and doing all the things that you expect oligopolies cartels and monopolies to do and then they jointly basically corrupt and capture the regulatory and government process and so they they end up controlling their regulators and so most sectors of the economy are a conspiracy between the big incumbents and their putative regulators and the purpose of the conspiracy is to perpetuate the long-term existence of those monopolies and cartels and to block new competition like so so that's where that's where I've come out on to me that completely explains the education system both k through 12 and the college university system it completely explains the healthcare system it completely explains the housing crisis it completely explains 2008 the financial crisis and the bailouts it completely explains the twitter files like I think that's precisely what what has been happening in tech and so if you're if you're if you're if you're if you're open to that interpretation of how the world works and how the country works and how the economy works then like a lot of things start to make a tremendous amount of sense and then I you know I think that what the twitter files is is it's basically an x-ray of a specific instance of that happening which and this is just factional what we now know from the twitter files is that a very large number of people in government by the way some of them political and you know some of them like politicians but also some of them bureaucrats right and so some of the members of the right deep state right which either you know as we know the deep state either does not exist or if it does exist it's good right one or the other I think most people that's what I've heard yeah that's what I've heard there's a recent book on that that apparently makes that case very very clearly so let's just say like the permanent bureaucracy or again what James Burnham would say is like the managerial class in government right the sort of permanent cadre of professionals in government who basically manage everything and you know those people and then also people on the outside who they fund as their proxies right with government money with taxpayer money right have been exerting enormous pressure on twitter to block sensor dot dot dot dot dot you know and and you know what looks to me like a straightforward constitutional case for deprivation of constitutional rights you know first fourth and fifth amendments in a way that is clearly illegal both under the constitution and under is it title 18 whatever 242 you know there's a specific federal law that says there it's a felon it's a felony for a government official to use the power of being in government to deny citizens of constitutional rights there's actually by the way another law there's 241 that actually applies that same principle to private citizens including private companies and so I think it's possible that there has there I think it's possible that there's actually been criminal activity both on the government side and on the company side um and yeah and it's just like yeah that's been happening and you know the twitter every new drop of the twitter files shows that that's what's what's been happening you know in a in a in a non-political world where we all just like read the constitution um you know this would be a constitutional crisis you know this would be the biggest story in the in the country there would be hearings you know there would be you know among other you know immediate impeachment proceedings like you know this this would be a five alarm fire very because obviously the government can't be allowed to do this um you know in our in our in the real world of course that's not what's happening um and you know and we're back to either either denial or or or embrace under the theory that this is good and proper right um are there sectors that are less subject to that dynamic that you just described in which the startup quickly become the incumbent semester of the state I mean look so I think it's so my my theory basically is the question is always the same question like is there actual competition right like so so so actually I think there's like a deeper my my deeper idea here is basically the process of evolution like so the idea of capitalism is basically an economic form of the idea of evolution right a natural selection and the you know survival of the fittest and the idea that basically it's a superior product ought to win in the market um and that markets ought to ought to be open to competition and a better you know a new company can come along with a better widget and take out the incumbents because it's widget is superior and customers like it better and so like for for evolution to proper to to function properly you need survival of the fittest which means you need things to die when they're not the best thing for capitalism to work properly you need the same thing to happen you need companies to die when they are inferior to other companies that are doing things better right that you know that's that that's sort of inherent to the to the thing and so the the the question always is like is there actual competition happening or not right is is and you know in part it's like do consumers actually have the ability to freely select among the existing alternatives and then the other question is like can can new can new products actually come to market right you know can you can you actually bring a new widget to market or do you get blocked out because the regulatory wall that's been established is you know basically makes that prohibitive I mean look the the great example of this is is is banking right where you know the the big thing in 2008 was we need to bail out these banks because they're quote-unquote too big to fail and so then there were screams of the need to reform the too big to fail banks that led to Dodd Frank the result of Dodd Frank I call it the big bank protection act of 2011 uh right the the result of that is that the too big to fail banks are now much larger than before and the number of new banks being created in the US has dropped to zero right because it's it's now effectively impossible to launch a new bank in the US because you know JP Morgan Chase has 10,000 lawyers right working on their regulatory issues and you have one like it's it's not possible like you can't start new banks anymore and so anyway sorry so I'm I'm repeating the I'm repeating the case against so but the question is like where is that not happening like you know where where in the where in the market is that actually not happening um you know where is there free and open competition you know look the the the cynical answer is this it's not that doesn't happen in the spaces that don't matter right like so toys like anybody can bring a new toy to market like it's fine sure great right anybody can you know I don't know like anybody can open a restaurant right it's I mean I would say don't matter being like you know these are fine and good like you know consumer categories that people really enjoy and so forth but as contrasted to the healthcare system or the education system right or the housing system right or your business better if you want freedom your business better be frivolous I mean that would be the that would be the cynical way of looking at it like if it if it doesn't matter from a societal structure right in terms of like determining the power structure of society and basically the power of the government and society um then yeah go crazy do whatever you want but like if it actually matters to like major issues of policy right where the government is intertwined with them then of course it doesn't happen there and again it doesn't happen there not just because the government it doesn't happen there because of an intertwining of the incumbents in the government you know look I I think this stuff is getting look this is one of these things where I almost have trouble debating it I'm not debating it with you but like debating it with people who argue with me on this because I think it's so self-evident it's like well why aren't there you know it's like why are all these universities like identical like why are all of the major universities implementing the exact same like crazy like why do they all have like identical ideologies right why isn't there like a why isn't there a marketplace of ideas at the university level right and it's like well that becomes a question of like why aren't there more universities okay well why and I can tell you why there aren't more universities there aren't more universities because to be a new university you have to get accredited the accreditation bureau is is run by the existing universities like it it's sitting there in plain sight I'll give you the other another example why do health care prices do what they do right why why do health care prices work the way that they work a major reason for that is because they because basically they're paid for by insurance there's private insurance and public insurance the private insurance price is just key off the public prices because medicare basically drives the whole thing because medicare is the big buyer so however medicare price is set they're set by a unit inside hhs called cms and and cms runs literal soviet style price fixing boards for medical goods and services and so once a year there are doctors who get together in a conference room at like a high at chicago somewhere and they sit down and they establish they fix they do the exact same thing that what was the unit of the the communist party in the in Russia that used to do this in the soviet union there's a term for it there was the central price fixing bureau right so the soviets had a central price fixing bureau it didn't work we don't have that for the entire economy but we have that for the entire health care system right and it doesn't work for the same reason that the soviet system didn't work right and so we've exactly replicated the soviet system we're expecting better results it operates in plain sight you can go on the medic cms cms as a website they'll explain this all to you it's operating in plain sight everybody thinks it's a great idea and then you know lots of people are calling for you know increased government you know centralized you know control and purchasing of health care which would make that system stronger and so it's like we we know that this is not going to work we know that it's going to only result in restrictions of supply and and rising prices we know precisely what the outcome is going to be we seem perfectly happy with it and then we complain about it so