>> Narrator: From San Francisco,
it's theCube.
Covering GitLab Commit 2020.
(light music)
Brought to you by GitLab.
>> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman
and this is GitLab Commit 2020,
here in San Francisco.
Happy to welcome to the program.
A first time guest Ian Tien.
Who is the co founder and CEO of Mattermost.
Ian, nice to meet you.
>> Yeah, thanks Stu, thanks for having me.
>> All right, so I always love when we get the founders.
We go back to a little bit of the why
and just from our little bit of conversation,
there is a connection with GitLab.
You have a relationship with Sid who's the
Co-Founder and CEO of GitLab.
So bring us back and tell us a little bit about that.
>> Yeah, thanks, so I'm you know, I'm ex Microsoft,
so I came from collaboration for many years there.
And then you know what I did,
after Microsoft I started my own...
I started a video game company.
And it was backed by Y Combinator and we had,
we were doing HTML5 game engine.
It was very fun.
And we ran the entire company off of a messaging product.
This is a little while ago and what happens
to that messaging product got bought by a big company.
And it got kind of neglected.
It started crashing, it would lose data.
We were super unhappy.
We tried to export and they wouldn't let us export.
We had 26 gigs of all information
and when we stopped paying our subscription
they would paywall us from our own information.
So very unhappy and we're like, holy cats,
like what are we going to do?
And rather than go to another platform
we actually realized we bought 10 million hours
of people running messaging and our own video games.
Well why don't we kind of build this ourselves?
So we kind of build a little prototype.
We started using it ourselves internally.
And because Sid was, this is 2015,
and Sid was out of Y Combinator.
We were Y Combinator.
We had an event and we started talking
and I was showing him what we built
and Sid's like you should open source that.
And he had this really compelling reason.
He's like, well if you open source it and people like it,
you can always close source it again cause it's a prototype.
But if you open source it and no one cares,
you shouldn't stop doing what your do.
And he was great and kind of sent me like this little email
with like all the things you need to do
to run open source business.
And it was just wonderful
and it just started taking off.
We started getting these wonderful, amazing
enterprise customers that really saw what
Mattermost was at the very beginning,
which was, you know, some people call us open source Slack.
But what it really is,
it's a collaboration platform for real time DevOps.
And it really is for people who are regulated,
it's going to offer flexibility and on-prem deployment
and a lot of security and customization.
So that's kind of we started and GitLab is...
We kind of started following,
we started following GitLab's footsteps.
And what you'll find today with GitLab is
we're bundled with the Omnibus.
So all you have to do is, you know,
put like what URL would you like Mattermost on
when GitLab reconfigure?
And you're up running.
>> Yeah, love that.
That story.
I would love you to tease out a little bit when you hear,
open source, communications and secure
might not be things that people
would necessarily all put together.
So help us understand a little bit
the underlying architecture.
This isn't just instant messaging.
How is it different from things
that people would be familiar with?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
So how do you get more secure with open source products?
And the one thing we'll look at,
I'll just give you one example, is mobility, right?
So in mobile today,
if you're sending a push notification
to an iOS or Android device,
it has to route through like Google or Android, right?
And whatever app that you're using
to send those notifications,
they're going to see your notifications.
'Cause they have to, right?
So even if you get encryption and all that stuff
in order to send to Google and Android
you have to send it unencrypted.
And these applications are not...
They're not yours.
They're owned by another organization.
So how do you make that private?
How do you make it secure?
So with open source communication,
you get the source code,
in the extreme case like we have,
apps you can use and it's really simple and turnkey.
But in the, if you want to go in the
full privacy, most security,
you have the full source code to apps,
you have the full source code to the system
including what pushes the messages to your apps.
And you can compile them with your own certificates.
And you can set up a system where
you actually have complete privacy.
And no third party can actually get your information.
And why enterprises in many cases want
that extreme privacy is because
when you're doing incident response
and you have information about a vulnerability
or a breach that could really upset
many, many critical systems,
if that information leaked out, you really can't...
Many people don't want ever to touch a third party.
So that's one example of how open source
lets you have that privacy and security.
Because you control everything.
>> All right.
Walk me through a little bit the speeds and feeds.
How many employees do you have?
How many is your share?
How many customers you have?
Where you are with funding?
>> So where we are funding is
last year we announced a 20 million series A
and a 50 million series B.
We went from about 40 folks at the beginning of the year
to about a hundred at the end of the year.
We've got over a thousand people
that contribute to Mattermost.
And what you'll find is,
What you'll find is every sort of
GitLab Omnibus installation is going to have a Mattermost,
it's going to have the ability to sort of turn on Mattermost.
So very broad reach.
It's sort of like one step away.
There's lots of customers you can see at GitLab Commit
that are running Mattermost and GitLab together.
So customers are going to include,
hey there's the ITK in agriculture,
that's got six times faster deployments
running GitLab and Mattermost together.
You've got Worldline,
it's got 3000 people in the system.
So you've got a lot of...
So we're growing really quickly.
And there's a lot of opportunity working with GitLab
to bring GitLab into mobile and into sort of
real times DevOps scenarios.
>> Yeah, and definitely one of the themes we hear
at the show is that GitLab is really enabling
the remote workforce,
especially when you talk about the developers.
It sounds like that's very much in line
with what Mattermost is doing.
>> Absolutely, Mattermost was remote first.
I don't even actually know...
We're probably in 20 plus countries.
And it's a remote team.
So we use Mattermost to collaborate
and we use video conferencing and issue tracking,
cut across it a bunch of different systems.
And yeah, it's remote first.
It's how we work.
It's very natural.
>> Yeah, just give us a little bit of the insight.
How do you make sure as a CEO that you have the culture?
And getting everyone on the same page
when many of them, you know,
you're not seeing them regularly.
Some of them you've probably never met in person.
So.
>> Yeah that's a great question.
So how do you sort of maintain that culture?
And one of the concept of GitLab's pioneered
is the concept of boring solutions.
And it's something that we've taken on as well.
What's the most boring solution
to preserve culture and to scale?
And it's really, do what GitLab's doing, right?
So GitLab's got handbook.gitlab.com,
we've got handbook.mattermost.com.
And it's really writing down all the things that,
how we operate, what our culture is
and what our values are.
So that every person that on boards
is going to get the same experience, right?
And then what happens is people think
that if you're in a building,
you're going to have stronger culture
'cause you know, sort of like you know, absorbing things.
What actually happens is
it's this little broken telephone
and it starts echoing out.
And as opposed to going one source of truth
it's everyone's interpretation.
And when you have a handbook
and you're forced to write things down,
it's a very unnatural act.
And when you force people to write things down,
then you get that consistency
and everyone can go to a source of truth
and say like this is the way we operate.
>> Yeah.
In 2019 it was an interesting year for open source.
There were certain companies that were
changing their models as to how they do things.
You started it open source to be able to get
direct feedback but how do you position
and talk to people about the role of open source
and still being able to have a business around that?
>> So open source is...
I think there's a generation
of open source companies that...
So there's three ways you can really make money
from open source, right?
You can host software, you can provide support and services
or you can do licensing which is an open core model.
And what you see as categories of companies like...
You see categories like Elastic,
like Hashi Corporate Terraform involved with GitLab
that have chosen the open core model
and this is really becoming sort of a standard.
And what we do is we follow that standard
and we know that it supports public companies,
it supports companies with hyper-growth like GitLab.
So it's a becoming a model
that is actually quite familiar to the market.
And what we see is
this sort of generation,
this sort of movement of
okay, there was operating systems,
there's Windows Server and now there's Lint.
Now there's more servers running Linux
than Windows Server on Azure.
You've seen virtualization technology,
you've seen databases all sort of go the open source way.
And we see that as a natural progression of collaboration.
So it's really like, we believe collaboration
will go the open source way.
We believe leading the way to do that is through open core
because you can generate a sustainable, scalable business
that's going to give enterprises the confidence
to invest in the right platform.
>> All right, Ian, what's on deck for Mattermost in 2020?
>> It's really, we want,
definitely want to work with a GitLab a lot more.
We really want to go from this concept of concurrent DevOps
that GitLab's really championed to say real time DevOps.
So we've got DevOps in the world that's taking months,
and weeks of cycle times and bringing that down to minutes.
We want to take all your processes that take hours
and take it down to seconds.
So what really people,
what developers are sort of clamoring for a lot is like
well, how do I get these, if I'm regulated,
if I have a lot of customization needs,
if I'm on-premise, if I'm on a private network,
how do I get to mobile?
How do I get quicker interactions?
And we really want to support that with incident response,
with dev sub doc use cases
and with really having a complete solution
that can go from all your infrastructure
in your data center to that really important person
walking through the airport.
And that's how you speed cycle times.
You make dev sec ops available anywhere.
And you do it securely and you do it privately.
>> All right, Ian, thank you so much for meeting with us
and great to hear about Mattermost.
>> Cool, thank you Stu.
>> All right.
Be sure to check out thecube.net
for all the coverage that we will have throughout 2020.
I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCube.
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