Over the last two decades, Atlassian has become the leading creator of enterprise project management software. Its suite of tools include Jira, Confluence and Trello -- products that guide the workflows of many Fortune 500 companies.

Sri Viswanath has been CTO at Atlassian for more than 5 years. He’s a deep thinker who’s comfortable inside complex adaptive systems. And he’s constantly tweaking his technical team’s process to spark continued innovation.

“If you improve 1% a day, You're 37 times better at the end of the year,” says Sri. 

How does he encourage that kind of steady improvement? In this episode, Steve and Quentin talk with Sri about his appetite for complexity, his management style, and how Atlassian develops new products.

This podcast is a production of General Catalyst.

In this episode: Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake. 

Snowflake is a pioneering data warehouse platform that helps companies make sense of massive amounts of information in the public cloud. 

It currently manages 250 petabytes of data. It runs 515 million daily workloads for customers across finance, health care, government, education, manufacturing and more. It raised a billion and a half dollars from investors, including Salesforce and Berkshire Hathaway. 

Snowflake became one of the year’s biggest tech stories. In the fall of 2020, it went public -- becoming the biggest software IPO in history. The company’s share price doubled on the first day of trading.

Christian is the database expert behind Snowflake’s product evolution and growth. We’re going to talk with him about what the company is doing differently to organize, manage and retrieve massive sets of data -- and why, when he first heard about what the startup was doing, it sounded too good to be true. 

Christian was previously the director of product management at YouTube. And before that, he led the data warehouse product and business at Microsoft.

This podcast is a production of General Catalyst.

In this episode, we’re talking to Eric Johnson, the EVP of Engineering at GitLab. 

Eric oversees a distributed team of engineers at GitLab, which is one of the world’s biggest all-remote companies. And no, it’s not covid-remote -- the company is natively remote, with 1,200 people across 67 countries.

GitLab is an open-source DevOps platform that makes software development faster and easier. It has over 100,000 customers serving millions of users. We’ll hear from Eric about the technical culture inside the company that makes the platform so valuable to developers at both enterprises and startups -- and how it’s operated remotely for nearly a decade.

GitLab’s culture is based on radical transparency. Everything is meticulously documented, shared, and publicly edited. That’s a crucial piece of bringing everyone together in a remote environment. It can also be a challenge for technical executives and managers.

So why create this kind of culture in the first place? 

As Eric explains, it helps remote teams make decisions very quickly, with confidence. It’s also a core piece of the platform itself -- setting it apart from other DevOps providers.