Darren Murph is currently the Head of Remote at GitLab, the world’s largest all-remote company, with over 1,600 team members in 60+ countries and no company-owned offices. He has spent his career building world-class remote teams and continues to learn and share strategies powering the future of remote work.
When Murph joined in July of 2019, GitLab had approximately 700 employees and a shared vision to become the first fully remote company to go public, which it achieved in October 2021. Sid Sijbrandij (CEO) had deep conviction about the power of remote work at scale, and he wanted Murph to bring that vision to life.
Ardent recently held a session with Murph and our portfolio companies to discuss how to build, manage, and retain the best remote teams as they scale their startups. Here are some of the key takeaways:
Documentation is key
Any leader building a company with a majority of remote workers should prioritize codifying and creating a taxonomy around the most critical aspects of company culture so it is accessible anywhere. While this is easy to put off, especially for young startups, being intentional about writing everything down is crucial for a cohesive but distributed team. The Remote Playbook is a documented example at GitLab, no doubt aided by Murph’s Guinness World Record in publishing.
