20VC: Gitlab Founder, Sid Sijbrandji on Lessons From Scaling from 400 to 1,000 People in 1 Year, Why You Have To Have A Low Level Of Shame On The Product You Release & The Secret To Making Remote Work So Effectively At Scale

Sid Sijbrandij is the Founder & CEO @ Gitlab, a single application for the entire software development lifecycle. From project planning and source code management to CI/CD, monitoring, and security. To date, Sid has raised over $145m in funding for Gitlab from the likes of GV, August Capital, YC, Khosla and Goldman Sachs just to name a few. What is incredible, Sid has scaled the team to over 762 team members across 55 countries and is famed for his openness and transparency on how he builds both the product and company. You can find the fantastic Gitlab handbook here. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Sid made his way into the world of startups, learned Ruby in the early days and came to found Gitlab? What was that a-ha moment? 2.) In 2019 Gitlab is growing from 400 to 1,000 people, what are the biggest challenges that come with such operational growth? How does one hire at such pace and retain quality? How does Sid think about the right way to onboard new employees? How does Sid think about KPI and goal setting in the early days? 3.) Today all 750 Gitlab employees are remote, what does Sid believe is the secret to making remote teams work at scale? How does Sid think about the balance between fast shipping cadence and perfect product releases? Why does Sid believe, "you have to have a low level of shame on the product you release"? 4.) How does Sid think about operating Gitlab as a totally transparent company? What does that mean both in reality and in process? Why does Sid believe it is optimal to have a roadmap that is open for everyone to see? What are the pros? What are the cons of such transparency? How do competitors respond? 5.) If every great business is bundling or unbundling, where does Sid believe he and Sid are in the process today? How does Sid think about being too much to too many people? How does the open-source community really come into play in the development of Gitlab? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Sid’s Fave Book: High Output Management As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sid on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  You are listening to the 20 minute VC in a very special episode of Founders Friday with me, Harry Stebbings at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs on Instagram. So why is today's show so special? Well, I'm super excited to have a guest I've wanted to have on the show for a very long time. I think the way he's built both company and product is extremely unique. And I've heard nothing but exceptional things, both from his leadership team and from his board members. And so with that, I'm super excited to welcome Sid Sid Brangie, founder and CEO at GitLab to the hot seat today. Now, GitLab is a single application for the entire software development cycle from project planning and source code management to C I C D, monitoring and security. To date, Sid has raised over $145 million in funding for GitLab from the likes of G V, August Capital, Y C, Cozla and Goldman Sachs, just to name a few.

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  What's incredible though also, Sid has scaled the team to over 762 team members across 55 countries, a fully remote team. And he's also famed for his openness and transparency on how he builds both the product and the company. And you can find a fantastic GitLab handbook in the show notes. That really is a must read. And I do want to say a huge thank you to Mad at Iconic, David G V, Ilya Sukar and Vili at August for some fantastic question suggestions today. I really do so appreciate that. But before we dive into our episode today, look at the world's tech leaders and high growth startup CEOs. And do you ever wonder how in the world do they have that kind of inexhaustible energy to do what they do? The answer will surprise you. The latest trend with top tech leaders is sleep optimization. The first step, the Pod by Eight Sleep, the ultimate sleep machine.

• 1:26Harry Stebbings?

  The Pod is the first and only high tech bed designed to help you achieve peak mind and body performance. The Pod dynamically adjusts the temperature on each side of the bed so you're comfortable all night. Plus, if you're a total data nerd like me, well, the Pod tracks your biometrics while you sleep with no need for wearable technology because the better you sleep, the better you do everything. Get the Pod, the most advanced sleep system on the market at eightsleep.com/20vc. Try the Pod for 100 nights. And if you don't love it as much as I do, they'll refund your purchase and arrange a free pickup. Once again, that's eightsleep.com/20vc. And if sleep is that core personal foundation, what about the professional foundation? Well, that's where First Republic is so good. First Republic's resources, network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customize

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  A solid foundation for their business across all stages. Why First Republic Bank? Well, you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events. You get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees. And you get to access exclusive events and networking opportunities. But don't trust me on this. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, Carter and Wish, just to name a few. And you can check them out by heading over to firstrepublic.com/innovators. And last, but by no means least, smart executives and business owners know that harnessing the power of AI, embracing the cloud and prioritizing cybersecurity are the cornerstones of growth. Well, Everyday Reik helps thousands of companies worldwide do this by revolutionizing how they approach work.

• 2:51Harry Stebbings?

  Reik's secure automated cloud-based work management tool helps businesses future-proof their cultures and evolve fast. How? Well, Reik's award-winning collaborative all-company platform keeps everything in one easily accessible space. Time to embrace next-gen work management at the executive level and encourage lean thinking from the top down. With Reik, crushing your objectives and mitigating risks at scale is much, much easier. Give Reik a try for free at reik.com, that's W R I K E dot com. But that's quite enough from me. So now, without further ado, I'm very, very excited to hand over to the wonderful Sid Sidbranji, founder and CEO at GitLab.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:34Harry Stebbings?

  Sid, I have to say, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. I've heard so many great things, both from Vili and from Masid Iconic. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 3:44Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all, but I do want to kick off today with a little bit about you. So tell me, Sid, how did you make your way into the world of SaaS and come to found the rocket ship that is today, GitLab?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  I actually tried to get into the world of SaaS and I got into the world of software instead. In 2012, I saw a project called GitLab and it was collaboration software for developers. And I thought that makes so much sense. I was a software developer at the time and everything I used was open source, except the collaboration software I used. And I figured there'd be a market for that, so I checked out the project. And it already had 300 people contributing to it in the first year, so it had an amazing Community behind it, but everyone ran it self hosted. And I thought, well, SaaS is the future. So I'll start Gitlab.com. So I sent an email over to the offer of the software, Dimitri, who started the project a year earlier. And I said, look, I'm going to start Gitlab.com. I I hope you don't mind. I'm I'm doing that without you. He said, no, totally cool.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  It's open source. Go ahead. And I'm glad you're making it more popular. Then a year later, I learned that not a lot of people were interested in the SaaS at that time. But a lot of the people that were using the self hosted version had a lot of requests for new features. And because I was visible, they asked me, but I wasn't that experienced. At the same time, Dimitri tweeted out to the whole world, I want to work on Gitlab full time. So I sent him an email like, hey, let's make it happen. How much do you need? We agreed on a payment and I went to the local Western Union money office in the Netherlands to wire it to the Ukraine. And they said, do you know this person? Or is this someone you met over the internet? And kind of both were true, in my opinion. Anyway, I made the wire and we were in business. And today, we have a much better SaaS product. So a lot of people are using it like that.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  But the majority of our revenue is still coming from self hosted.

• 5:26Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I absolutely love that as a starting story. Can I ask, have you always been an inherently trusting person? Have there been moments where you've gained and really kind of matured in terms of your level of trust and belief in those people that you engage with?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  I think I try to trust, especially, look, this is, if it doesn't work out, it's not the end of the world. Like you lose a few monthly payments. I think that's fine. That's a risk you can have. I think in Gitlab, when we hire people, they do have to kind of prove themselves. So I wouldn't call myself an actually trusting person. It's just how much damage is it? And if people scam you, if you find out quickly, most of the time, if there's not a lot of at stake, that's fine. I think much more worried about having a person in a role who isn't a great fit, not executing or for some other reason, it's not working and then damaging the rest of the organization.

• 6:14Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I do get you in terms of that concern around damaging the organization. I do want to start with the organization and just set some context ahead of time because it's a very special structure you have in place. So tell me, Sid, when we think about the company structures today, for those that don't know, what does the structure of the company look like? How many? People are in it. And why did you choose that structure for GitLab?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so GitLab is now six hundred fifty people, growing this year from four hundred to thousand people. And one of the particular things about it is that it's an all remote company. So everyone works from the location they prefer. Most people work from home, but also pay for an office. But there's no shared offices where people congregate. So we work to using Zoom and Slack and Google Docs and a whole lot of GitLab to collaborate across more than fifty countries.

• 7:00Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I absolutely love that structure. And this is such a novel chance to make a deep dive on it. So I hope that's okay. But when we chatted before, you said transparency and iteration are key for working across time zones. You left me hanging there. So what did you really mean by this transparency and iteration? How does that play out so successfully?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, the hardest part from working across time zones is that it needs to be asynchronous. You have to be able to collaborate without being in the in a meeting at the same time. So iteration helps because you bite off smaller things. So iteration means reduce the scope, do a smaller thing, but do it really quickly and get it out there, get it in the market. And the smaller the thing you do, the less coordination it requires. If you're doing a six month thing, you better make sure that all the departments across the company are bought into that. If you're doing a two day thing, you can just do it, release it. If it's not exactly the right direction for the next step, you can take that step in a slightly different direction. So you'll get feedback much more easily. So iteration reduces the coordination costs and it's a core value at GitLab.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  The other thing is transparency. You want people to be able to work without shoulder tapping. If you need to ask someone for something, not only does it interrupt both the sender and the receiver of the information, but also it's just not possible if that person is not working at that time, you can't do it. So at GitLab, we write a lot of things down. We have a handbook. It's public and Creative Commons. So lots of people are copying from it and being inspired by it. But it's over three thousand pages and it contains many of the things you would normally not find documented at other companies.

• 8:33Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, you said that about breaking up certain elements of products and really running with it and not having to ask someone. In terms of, I was Think about kind of the difficult balance of how do you create ambitious individuals looking to really create, but then also ensuring that they don't have fear of accountability and it not working out. How do you create that kind of ambition without fear of it not working within the team? Is that a challenge when they have so much freedom?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  There is accountability for results at GitLab, very much so. Like, results is our number one value. And we said, GitLab, we measure your results, not your hours. So you're absolutely on the hook for producing. I think what you want to reduce is failure. And I think because we take smaller steps, there's much lower risk of failure. If you take a big leap, a big jump, the odds that you end up at exactly the right points are much smaller than if you can take little steps towards that goal. So, for example, if we make new functionality, we'll just ship it over many months and there's no big preconceived, there's maybe a preconceived plan, but we get to adjust it along the way. So if there's no customer demand for the next step, but all the customers are asking for something else, we'll ship something else.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  So we have very few kind of cancelled projects. And if something runs late, the worst thing at GitLab is if you miss a release. We have a monthly release and then instead of one month, it takes two months and that tends to happen. But we don't have things that run over for half a year or a year. So just reduce failure.

• 9:55Harry Stebbings?

  No, I love that kind of element of the failure reduction. I do want to touch on, you said about the incredible open source you have with regards to the docs themselves. You said the 3,000 page doc you have. And I heard this from your investors in terms of how you are transparent around compensation grids, product roadmaps especially. In terms of the product roadmap transparency, is there not a net negative for the business allowing competitors to see your plans? How did you think about that? And how do you advise founders as to the benefits that they should maybe embrace with it?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's a bit of a negative. Like, sometimes our competitors know that we're going to release something and they try to kind of front run us by day or so. I also like to think that they spend a big amount of time on watching our roadmap and that's a time waste they have and we don't. But all in all, it's been a very positive thing for us because the most important thing about your roadmap is not that it's a secret, but that it's correct, that you're making the stuff that customers want. We sometimes have developers starting at GitLab and they're like, who is? This person that's been giving me advice all the time about the feature I'm building, because I couldn't find him in our team directory. And we're like, well, you're sure that person works at GitLab? And they found out it's just a user that cares a lot about that feature and that sees that they're not building what they need.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  And they help and they contribute and they give different viewpoints and opinions. So I think having the roadmap out there allows our customers to not be surprised. It allows our customers to better influence the roadmap. And then we end up building what customers need at that moment the most. And that's the most important thing.

• 11:22Harry Stebbings?

  No, I do agree with you in terms of building what customers want. I do want to touch on the product itself, because when I challenged quite a few of your investors, especially Matt at Iconic, he talked about how you think about prioritizing product depth versus breadth. Tell me, what was your thought process behind product breadth over depth especially? And how do you advise founders when thinking about that?

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so GitLab is a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, which means that all the way from planning what software you're going to build to rolling it out, monitoring it and securing it, you can do that all inside one product. And that wasn't obvious to us. So GitLab started off as being inspired by GitHub. And it's now evolved into a product that has a scope that is 10 times the scope that GitHub has. In the beginning, there was just a source control. And then Dmitry never wanted to upgrade another Jenkins server. Jenkins is a testing tool, a CI tool. So he created GitLab CI. And those are very distinct things. So we had two projects for a while. And then this person came along and he contributed to the CI project, made it a lot better. And we said, okay, well, we're going to make the stuff you contributed official.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Like, that's what we're going to use from now on. By the way, do you want to join the company? And so Camille from Poland joined the company. And at a certain point, he said to Dmitry, like, I think we should integrate the version control on the CI. Dmitry said, you're obviously wrong. By the way, I just made an edit that we should never use the word obviously, because it discourages people from challenging what you just said or asking for clarification. Anyway, he was told by Dmitry, he was obviously wrong. But he didn't take no for an answer. He kept pushing. And at a certain point, it came to me and I also said, look, this doesn't make sense. Everyone in the industry does this as two. Separate things, I don't think it's gonna benefit the user as you suggest. He said, well, if you don't believe that, at least believe it's more efficient to us to ship it as a single product. Because we only have one release process.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Well, that kind of made sense and efficiency is one of our values, so we did it. Turns out, he was totally right, I was totally wrong. Users loved it. By having it in a single data store, by having a single concept of who user was and what they could do. You save so much busy work with creating projects in two applications by wiring them up together, by passing credentials around. You had the right information at the right time throughout the application. And we call that concept now concurrent DevOps. And it means that you don't have this passing the hot potato between ten or twenty different DevOps applications. But at any time, anyone can work on anything. So as soon as you've written your code, the security task can be run and the security people get visibility.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  They don't have to wait until you're totally ready to deploy things before they can start their review. There's many examples like that. So we doubled down on that and then we figured that if this is our secret, our secret in the sense that nobody believes us. Then we have to double down on this and we started biting off more and more scope. And today, if you look at our homepage, you'll see all the different stages, all the way from managing your portfolio to release management, all the way to network defense. And that's a very ambitious scope. And what we wanna do at the company is make sure that we make sure we till the land. So we make the initial fortray in each of those sections. But then we depend on the wider community contributing back to make it really good.

• 14:32Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, we always hear about the benefits of focus. You and I probably read very similar things over the years. We always hear about the benefits of focus and simplicity. Would you actually disagree with that then and say that actually there are benefits to being first mover and not having that focus, so to speak?

• 14:48Speaker 02

  I think it's more every great business is either bundling or unbundling and we're in the bundling business.

• 14:53Harry Stebbings?

  No, I do totally get that and it makes a lot of sense. In terms of taking that a level further, when we look at, you said you'd like to be the first foray into these and let the community. You got some advice once that said it's important to have a low level of shame as being intrinsic to your culture. How did you think about? That and what does that mean to you and the team today?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we till the lens. We make sure that we create the first instances of these new for trades in in new areas. Because had the people who work at GitLab full time have the best knowledge to do that. And when we do that, we do it in a in a very small iteration. So sometimes the stuff we release, we have a low level of shame about them. They're not complete and we know it. But it allows people from the community to come in and contribute to it. And by contributing to it, they make it acceptable to a bigger group of people. So there's more potential contributors and Flywheel feeds on itself. And after some time, it becomes better and better and better until it kind of becomes the best in the market. Our version control, RCI, is now the best in the market, not because we did such a great job,

• 15:56Speaker 02

  but because the community just kept contributing. Every month, we have over one hundred ninety improvements that come from the wider community.

• 16:03Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, what do you think that you did? You know, your community, as you said there, is so engaged and so unique. What do you think you did so well to build such an engaged community early on and then sustain it as you have done?

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really hard to build a community. So the community was there because Dmitry started this thing from very simple beginnings. When he started GitLab, he didn't have running water in his house and he didn't have great collaboration software. And he picked the thing that wouldn't cost any money to make because he was a developer, he could make this himself. So the community was there and I think it's very hard to build that up. But it's something you can easily lose. And so we do a couple of things. We have our stewardship promises, things that we saw going wrong with other projects and that we'll promise never to do. But also, we try to be open about how we run it and what our incentives are. So, for example, pricing is a big thing. So we have a big page about all our pricing. If you type GitLab CEO pricing, you'll find exactly all the considerations we make pricing

• 17:01Speaker 02

  and and why we charge for certain features and not others. So transparency started as a value because it was really, really important to keep in touch with the community. Later on, we realized it's also a great way to recruit people who are aligned with what you what you do.

• 17:15Harry Stebbings?

  No, absolutely. I mean, transparency is almost a strategy in and of itself. But kind of speaking of strategy, I heard you say before that your strategy should still work when everyone is aware of it. What did you mean by your strategy should still work when everyone's aware of it? And how does that lead to effective communication?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think a lot of companies are kind of hesitant to articulate and disseminate their strategy to to make it public or to even share it within the company. And there's benefits from your competitors not knowing your strategy. But I've seen a lot more companies suffer from the people at the company not knowing the strategy. So we choose, since transparency is one of our values, we choose to say, okay, we're just going to be very public about our strategy. And the advantage is that people at our company tend to know the strategy better. And people from outside the company can opt into the strategy. They'll know the strategy before joining. It's not something you get confronted with after you get hired, you opt into it.

• 18:10Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, again, I couldn't agree more with you in terms of that. Can I ask a final one before we move into the Q and A, which is my favorite, I have to say. Moving back to the unique element of the team and kind of onboarding new people. In terms of your lessons from building a remote team, is there anything that you know now that you wish you'd known at the beginning of building your remote team? And how would you advise a founder who's contemplating between building a remote team versus not?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it is much more doable to be all remote than I thought. I think being all remote is a lot easier than being hybrid, where part of your people are co-located and part are not. And that's because you've got to organize communication to a higher degree. A lot of the things that you should do anyway are more necessary to do earlier if you're remote. Good business practices like documentation and training. Also, you've got to take care of organizing the social trust building. So at GitLab, we have a lot of different mechanisms in which we allow people to learn together, know each other outside of like a transactional work setting. Examples are the coffee chats, travel stipends, we have a nine monthly get together.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  But also every day, there's a breakout call where we just chat about things outside of work. Every day, there's a group conversation where a department has an like ask me anything segment. So there's a lot of things in which you kind of have to facilitate the informal communication. And I think that's an important thing. To consider if you're becoming all remote.

• 19:32Harry Stebbings?

  No, I I I love that in terms of building non-transactional relationships outside of the core processes and workflows. So absolutely. I do want to move into a quick fire round now with you, Sid. So I say a short statement, you hit me with your immediate thoughts. Are you ready to roll?

• 19:45Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 19:46Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so your favorite book and why? What must we be reading?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  We recommend High Output Management at GitLab. I think it's a wonderful book and it's the best management book ever.

• 19:55Harry Stebbings?

  Do you pay people the same despite arbitrage locations in terms of the same financials for the same role?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  We pay people differently. We have a blog post about it, why we pay people local rates.

• 20:06Harry Stebbings?

  Got you. Advice you hear most often that you disagree with, Sid?

• 20:09Speaker 02

  You can do anything you want.

• 20:10Harry Stebbings?

  You disagree with that?

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, if I wanted to become a professional boxer now, although I saw a buttercup or butterfly or some boxer that started later and was pretty overweight and it was very inspirational, but I think you have to look at something that you're good at, that you like to do and that there's demand for. I think that's a much better advice.

• 20:29Harry Stebbings?

  No, I do agree with you there. I would very much like to be a footballer, but I think my dad body would tell me not to. Next one, I have to ask, despite being remote, what remains the hardest role to hire for?

• 20:39Speaker 02

  I'd naturally say security, but Kathy on our team is doing an amazing job there. We're vertus off with our sales hires. So for us right now, that's the hardest role to hire for.

• 20:48Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me a moment in your life, Sid, that maybe you served as an inflection point and changed the way you think.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  I think it was really counterintuitive to see how an integrated product was better than different products working together with like GitLab version control, GitLab CI. We integrated it so well and we had made custom APIs to make it the best experience ever. And it was really disheartening to see how wrong I was about that and that a single product was much better. I'm sorry for repeating the same thing, but it's it's been the biggest revelation of my career.

• 21:19Harry Stebbings?

  No, listen, it's important. Absolutely. How do you know when's the right time to monetize an open source community?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Uh, when you get a lot of usage. So for us, we had like tens and tens, probably over a hundred thousand organizations using it and they were coming back with a lot of like requests that were very enterprise specific. We have a model called Buyer-based open core. So if the people asking for features are people that can pay for them, it's probably good to start monetizing.

• 21:46Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, absolutely. What's the secret to such an aggressive shipping cadence like you have?

• 21:52Speaker 02

  We've released on the 22nd of every month and the secret is that Dimitri did the first one on the 22nd and the second one, he was like, hey, it's pretty close to the 22nd, let's do that again. And he kept doing that. And there's been many suggestions to change the date or something like that. But we always say that time is fixed and then the scope is variable. So great. If you have a hard time meeting the deadline, just cut down the scope, do less. And I think that's been very great. So just stick to your deadlines.

• 22:18Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm sure Dimitri is thrilled to keep the 20 second as the chosen date. I do want to finish though, Sid, on the final one being the next five years for you and the exciting roadmap ahead. What does that look like for GitLab?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  We have a lot of scope right now in the product, but not all the areas of the product are as good as our version control and our CI. So we really look forward to making that better ourselves. We're increasing the amount of engineers working on product from 200 to 500 this year. But it's also great to see the community contributions going up. A couple of months ago, they were 100 demand, now 190. So I'm super looking forward to building the best product on the market with an amazing team and an amazing community.

• 22:55Harry Stebbings?

  Sid, as I said, I've heard so many great things, both from Matt and from Billy. So this has been such a pleasure and I can't thank you enough for joining me today.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Thanks, boys. My pleasure. Thanks for the great questions.

• 23:07Harry Stebbings?

  What a phenomenal guest to have on the show and I couldn't be more excited about the future for GitLab and how he's building the company. And if you'd like to see more from Sid, you can find him on Twitter at S Y T S E S, that's Sitsus. Likewise, it'd be fantastic to welcome you behind the scenes here at the 20 Minute VC. You can do that on Instagram at H Stubbings 1996 with two Bs. It really would be great to see you there. But before we leave you today, look at the world's tech leaders and high-growth startup CEOs. And do you ever wonder how in the world do they have that kind of inexhaustible energy to do what they do? The answer will surprise you. The latest trend with top tech leaders is sleep optimization. The first step, the Pod by Eight Sleep, the ultimate sleep machine. The Pod is the first and only high-tech bed designed to help you achieve peak mind and body performance. The Pod diners.

• 23:50Harry Stebbings?

  dynamically adjusts the temperature on each side of the bed so you're comfortable all night. Plus, if you're a total data nerd like me, well, the Pod tracks your biometrics while you sleep with no need for wearable technology. Because the better you sleep, the better you do everything. Get the Pod, the most advanced sleep system on the market. At eightsleep.com/20vc, try the Pod for 100 nights. And if you don't love it as much as I do, they'll refund your purchase and arrange a free pickup. Once again, that's eightsleep.com/20vc. And if sleep is that core personal foundation, what about the professional foundation? Well, that's why First Republic is so good. First Republic's resources, network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customize a solid foundation for their business across all stages. Why First Republic Bank?

• 24:32Harry Stebbings?

  Well, you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events. You get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees. And you get to access exclusive events and networking opportunities. But don't trust me on this, their clients include the likes of Instacart, Carter and Wish, just to name a few. And you can check them out by heading over to firstrepublic.com/innovators. And last but by no means least, smart executives and business owners know that harnessing the power of AI, embracing the cloud and prioritizing cybersecurity are the cornerstones of growth. Well, Everyday Rike helps thousands of companies worldwide do this by revolutionizing how they approach work. Rike's secure automated cloud-based work management tool helps businesses future-proof their cultures and evolve fast. How?

• 25:15Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Rike's award-winning collaborative all-company platform keeps everything in one easily accessible space. Time to embrace next-gen work management at the executive level and encourage lean thinking from the top down. With Rike, crushing your objectives and mitigating risks at scale is much, much easier. Give Rike a try for free at rike.com, that's W R I K E dot com. As always, your support means the world to me and I can't wait to bring you another set of fantastic episodes next week.