
Get in the KNOW
on LA Startups & Tech
XWhat are the Secrets to Running a Remote Startup? GitLab has Been Doing it for 5 Years
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.

As employees and employers have scrambled in recent months to adapt to remote work, nothing has changed for GitLab, except that its founders feel vindicated after years of doubts about whether not having an office would harm productivity and scare off investors. The company, which provides software for developers, is valued at $2.75 billion and employs 1,200 people in 67 countries, all of whom are remote.
GitLab has been fully distributed since it was founded out of Y Combinator in 2015 and far from slowing it down, Darren Murph, the company's head of remote, says eschewing the office — or the co-located model as he calls it — has been a major driver of success.
"In 2019, the company tripled in size," said Murph. "That would have been literally impossible in a co-located space because we would have had moved offices at least three times — and just the time it takes to actually move would have prevented us from hiring that amount of people. We havebeen able to scale and grow at an amazing rate because of the efficiencies when you don't have to worry about an office building. You can run circles around companies that continue to do the co-located model."
What are the Secrets to Running a Remote Startup? GitLab has Been Doing it for 5 Years
about.gitlab.com
Murph, who has been working at home for 15 years in various communications roles, was hired by GitLab last year into a position he thinks more companies should have. That's because, he says, for all its advantages, being a remote office is not easy. It requires intentionality, especially for employees who've spent their whole careers in offices.
"This isn't just something where people flip a switch and say 'oh great, we're remote' and everything can work as it always has'," said Murph.
Aside from being an evangelist for remote offices, Murph helps new employees onboard and wrote GitLab's Remote Playbook, which anyone can view. He recently spoke to dot.LA from his home in North Carolina about what other companies can learn from his experience and how many others will ultimately follow GitLab's path.
GitLab has been fully remote since it was founded out of Y Combinator in 2015 and far from slowing it down, Darren Murph, the company's head of remote, says the distributed model has been a major driver of success.
Why did GitLab decide to go fully remote when it started?
The first three employees at GitLab were based in three different countries, and so we were very much remote by default. The company did come to California through the Y Combinator startup accelerator — and as all companies do, they did what they were told and they got an offer in San Francisco. That lasted about three days before people just stopped showing up. The work continued to get done and it just dawned on the founding team really early on that spending money on real estate was not useful in any way, so they let the office fade and thus the all-remote company was born.
Did you ever feel before the past few months that there was a stigma put on you guys because of that decision to be fully remote?
Early on there were actually some investors that told the founding team, "Look, we love your business and we love your business model, but here's the deal: We have various companies that we can invest in and we've never seen a company do this long term. And so that means there's more risk associated with this. And we're not in a position where we have to take that risk and so we're not going to."
And what's crazy about it is over the years, many of those have made a complete 180 and are actively seeking remote first and all remote companies because it simply makes sense. When you look at a VC, if they're going to cut you a million dollar seed check and 40% of that goes to an office that you're leasing and you have no equity in, compared to a startup where 100% of that goes to people and technology, which do you think has the longer runway for success? It is amazing to see the turn of mindset from nine or 10 years ago. Last year we partnered with General Catalyst to host a half-day panel specifically on making remote work because General Catalyst wants to be known as a VC firm that is actively looking to invest in companies like that. That would have been unthinkable 10 or 15 years ago.
So these remote trends were underway before coronavirus?
Yes, well before COVID, because the technology is not the issue anymore. Fifteen years ago, Slack and Zoom did not exist. The only thing you have to get your head around is the management culture side, and (employers) have seen that startups tend to skew younger and they have never known a life without the internet. They've always been comfortable communicating digitally. It just makes sense. They don't view it as remote work. They just view it as work. And I think what has happened has simply accelerated what was already happening.
But VCs have always liked going in and walking around — to, in some sense, see where their money is going.
But that doesn't mean it's intelligent. Laying your eyes on people and on chairs that you don't own has never been a good way to measure productivity or success. And that is the great awakening that's happening right now, which is the question of, 'how do I know if someone's working remotely?' Well, how did you know they were working in the office?
This great migration is starting to force people to take a look at how much they were biased and how much they really should have been focused on results. But listen, I don't think you'll ever get away from some B.S. that they want their start ups in an office, because they they want to command and control. And look, it may work better for some companies than others. If you're dealing with physical hardware, it's still going to be really hard to do it remotely. But if you're dealing with a truly digital products, (working remotely is) really amenable to do that.
It seems like there's already been a whole backlash to the all-remote movement. Ultimately when there's a successful vaccine, how much of a shift will there really be?
There's definitely no putting this genie back in the bottle. I think the long term effects of this are going to be way more positive. That will outweigh any negative. I think one of the major things to come from this is it has finally democratized the conversation on workplace flexibility.
Working moms, caregivers, military spouses, people with disabilities and people that simply want to live somewhere outside of a major urban center have been (reluctant) to bring up the conflict in conversation and interviews. What COVID has done is every company is going to have to have an answer to question: 'What is your stance on workplace flexibility?'
To me, that is massively empowering and massively liberating. I don't think all companies are going to shut their offices down overnight. The point is to provide more flexibility and support for people no matter where they are. Companies need to realize that their offices are simply another place to go to work in. And if you look at it through that lens, you design your company to have a thriving culture no matter where someone is.
- GitLab's Head of Remote on How to Run a Remote Startup - dot.LA ›
- gitlab - dot.LA ›
- The Future of Real Estate: Bigger Offices and Smaller Chains - dot.LA ›
- Nearly Half of Employees Want to Continue to Work From Home ... ›
- GitLab's Secrets for Running a Remote Startup - dot.LA ›
- GitLab's Secrets for Running a Remote Startup - dot.LA ›
- The LA Startups That Applied for Paycheck Protection - dot.LA ›
- The LA Startups That Applied for Paycheck Protection - dot.LA ›
- All Voices Allows Employees To Share Feedback Anonymously - dot.LA ›
- All Voices Allows Employees To Share Feedback Anonymously - dot.LA ›
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.
Venture Firm Backstage Capital Laid Off Nine Employees, Reducing Its Staff to Just Three
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Venture firm Backstage Capital laid off nine employees, reducing its staff to just three.
Managing partner and founder Arlan Hamilton announced the layoffs Sunday on her “Your First Million” podcast. General partners Christie Pitts and Brittany Davis, along with Hamilton, are the only remaining employees, TechCrunch reported. The move comes only three months after the Los Angeles-based firm said it would only fund existing portfolio companies.
“It’s not that I feel like there’s any sort of failure on the fund side, on the firm’s side, on Backstage’s side, it’s that this could have been avoided if…the system we work within were different,” Hamilton said during the podcast.
Hamilton founded Backstage in 2015 to highlight underrepresented founders and launched a crowdfunding campaign last year to draw in everyday investors. The company announced its plan to raise $30 million for a new fund, bringing in $1 million from Comcast. Having invested in 200 companies, Backstage announced in March that it would not be making new investments.
Hamilton said Backstage’s situation is a “purgatory kind of position,” with companies saying the fund was either too developed or not developed enough to invest in. However, in an email sent to stakeholders, she said she is “optimistic about the next 18 months.”
The firm still intends to grow its assets under management to over $100 million as Hamilton looks for backing from to the 26 funds she has invested in for backing. Hamilton said the company does not “have dry powder right now,” which points to the firm’s struggle to grow.
The news comes during a wave of layoffs across Los Angeles, with companies like Voyage SMS, Albert and Bird letting go of employees.
- Going Public Show Was Built for the Retail Investor Uprising - dot.LA ›
- Backstage Capital Opens Fund to Everyday Investors - dot.LA ›
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
A New Tide of LA Startups Is Tackling the National Childcare Crisis
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
The pandemic exacerbated a problem that has been long bubbling in the U.S.: the childcare crisis.
According to a survey of people in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers conducted by the city’s WiSTEM Los Angeles program and shared exclusively with dot.LA, the pandemic exposed a slew of challenges across STEM fields. The survey—which consisted of 181 respondents from L.A.County and was conducted between March 2021 and 2022— involved respondents across medical fields, technical professions and science industries who shared the pandemic’s effects on their professional or education careers.
The survey found 60% of the respondents, primarily women, were balancing increased caretaking roles with work or school responsibilities. And while caretaking responsibilities grew, 49% of respondents said their workload also increased during the pandemic.
“The pandemic threw a wrench into lots of folks' experiences both professionally and academically,” said Kathryne Cooper, a health tech investor who sits on the advisory board of WiSTEM. “So we need to acknowledge that.”
In the L.A. area, an increasing number of childcare startups are aiming to address this massive challenge that is a growing national crisis. The U.S. has long dealt with a crippling childcare infrastructure plagued by low wages and a labor shortage in preschools and daycares, but the COVID-19 crisis made it worse. During the pandemic, women left the workforce due to the lack of childcare and caretaking resources. By 2021, women made up the lowest percentage of the workforce since 1988, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Despite the pandemic forcing everyone indoors, caretaking duties fell disproportionately on women.
“I almost actually left my job because everything that I looked at was either waitlisted or the costs were so astronomical that it probably made sense for me to stay at home rather than pay someone to actually look after my child,” said Jessica Chang, the CEO of childcare startup WeeCare.
Brella's Playa Vista-based childcare center lobby.Photo courtesy of Brella
The Marina del Rey-based WeeCare, one of the startups that helps people open their own childcare facilities, announced it raised $12 million in April (to go along with an additional $5 million in bridge funding raised during the pandemic). The company helps people build daycare centers and works with employers to provide access to WeeCare centers and construct child care benefits programs.
Some of these startups strive to boost the number of daycare centers by helping operators with financial costs, licensing fees and scheduling. Wonderschool, a San Francisco-based child care startup, raised $25 million in January and assisted with hundreds of childcare facilities in L.A.-based Playground, which raised $3 million in seed funding last year per PitchBook. Playground acts as an in-house platform for childcare providers to communicate with staff and parents, track attendance, report student behavior and provide automatic invoicing services.
L.A.-based Brella, which launched in 2019, raised $5 million in seed funding in January to create a tech-enabled daycare scheduling platform that could meet the demand of flexible childcare as parents navigate a hybrid work environment, and recently opened a new location in Hollywood. The startup aims to address the labor shortage among childcare workers by paying its workers roughly $25 an hour and offering mental health benefits and career development opportunities for its educators.
“It's this huge disconnect in our society because these are really important people who are doing arguably one of the most important educational jobs,” said Melanie Wolff, co-founder of childcare startup Brella. “They often don't get benefits. They don't have a lot of job security.”
Venture capital funding has poured into the relatively new childcare sector. A slew of parent-tech companies aimed at finding flexible child care and monitoring children saw $1.4 billion worth of venture investments in 2021, according to PitchBook, largely to meet the demands of parents in a pandemic era who have more flexible work commutes and require more tech-enabled solutions.
“I think a lot of it has to do with what employers expect for workers,” said Darby Saxbe, an associate professor of psychology and family relationships expert at USC. “There's still a lot more stigma for men to build their work around caregiving responsibilities–there's a lot of evidence that men are often discouraged from taking paternity leave, even if it's available.”
WeeCare is one of several startups updating the childcare space with technology and flexibility.
Photo courtesy of WeeCare
Childcare benefits are also becoming a more attractive incentive as workers grapple with unorthodox work schedules in a hybrid setting.
“Employers, because of COVID, were having a hard time retaining and recruiting employees,” said Chang. “And they were actually incentivized to actually find a solution to help the employees.”
WeeCare primarily partners with employers of essential workers, like schools, hospitals and grocery stores, and the benefits programs account for the majority of WeeCare’s revenue.
Childcare works are part of a massive labor shortage in caretaker roles that also include nurses, and health aids for the eldery. These workers, which allow women to maintain careers in STEM and other high-paying industries, are vital, according to Saxbe.
“Women can advance in the workplace,” Saxbe said. “But if there's no support at home and there is no one who is helping take care of kids and elderly people, women can't just advance in a vacuum.”
- The Wana Family Childcare Network is Booming - dot.LA ›
- Childcare Providers Get a Lifeline From LA Startup WeeCare ›
- Childcare Center Brella Raises $5 Million, New LA Locations - dot.LA ›
- WeeCare Raises $17 Million As Childcare Startups Boom - dot.LA ›
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
MaC Venture Capital Raises $203M for Its Second Fund
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
While venture capital funding has taken a hit this year, that hasn’t stopped MaC Venture Capital from raising $203 million for its second fund.
The Los Angeles-based, Black-led VC firm said Monday that it had surpassed its initial $200 million goal for the fund, which dot.LA reported in January, over the span of seven months. MaC said it expects to invest the capital in up to 50 mostly seed-stage startups while remaining “sector-agnostic.”
“We love seed-stage companies because that’s where most of the value is created,” MaC managing general partner Marlon Nichols told dot.LA. While the firm has invested in local ventures like NFT gaming platform Artie, space startup Epsilon3 and autonomous sensor company Spartan Radar, Nichols said MaC—whose portfolio companies span from Seattle to Nairobi—would continue to eye ventures across the rest of the country and world.
“Talent is ubiquitous; access to capital is not,” Nichols noted. “What they’re building needs to matter; we’ve got to believe that this group of founders is the best team building in the space, period.”
Launched in 2019, MaC is led by four founding partners: VC veteran Nichols, former Washington, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, and former William Morris Endeavor talent agents Charles D. King and Michael Palank. Nichols described the team’s collective background in government, consulting, media, entertainment and talent management as its “superpower.”
In a venture capital industry where few people of color are decision-makers, MaC Venture Capital has looked to wield its influence to provide opportunities for founders of color. The firm says 69% of its portfolio companies were started by BIPOC founders and 36% are led by women, while MaC has also diversified its own ranks by adding female partners Zhenni Liu and Haley Farnsworth.
MaC’s second investment fund nearly doubled the size of the firm’s $110 million first fund, which it closed in March 2021. The new fund’s repeat institutional investors include Goldman Sachs, ICG Advisors, StepStone, the University of Michigan, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, while the likes of Illumen Capital and the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois also pitched in as new investors.
“It’s a great combination of having affirmation from people who have been with us from the beginning and new people coming in that want to be a part of it,” Fenty told dot.LA.
- Can MaC VC Help Solve Tech's Whiteness Problem? - dot.LA ›
- MaC Venture Capital's Marlon Nichols on 'Diversity Theater' - dot.LA ›
- MaC Venture Capital Eyes $200 Million For Its Second Fund - dot.LA ›
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.