Talk

Writing Your Company in Public

Tuesday, 19 May 2026 @ 09:40 - 10:00

GitLab started as a side project in October 2011. Open source from day one. By 2015, after graduating from Y Combinator with nine people on the team, we published the entire company handbook publicly. Every process, every policy, every meeting format. Not just the engineering docs. The whole company, written down and open to anyone.

That decision turned out to be an accidental AI strategy. Today I run a personal AI agent called Paul that briefs me for every meeting, drafts GitLab comments in my voice, and tracks my progress against the company objectives. Paul works not because someone built something special for GitLab. Paul works because everything he needs to know about how GitLab operates is already written down and public. The data he has access to includes the handbook, GitLab issues, epics, and meeting notes.

I head up DevRel Engineering and Contributor Success at GitLab. My team manages a community of 4,200+ contributors. The question I want to explore with your audience: in the agent era, knowledge confined to your head or within your organization has zero leverage. Writing your processes down publicly is not overhead. It is compounding interest that pays back in community scale, contributor self-service, and AI readiness.

The talk will cover:

• What DevRel Engineering is and why we treat contributor programs as engineering problems
• How the GitLab handbook went from a 9-person Y Combinator experiment to infrastructure for 4,200+ contributors
• What happens when you give an AI agent a fully public company handbook (live demo)
• A concrete challenge for OSS founders: one process, written down, made public