#135 CMO & CSO GitLab, Ashley Kramer: The Three Ps

Guest: Ashley Kramer, CMO & CSO of GitLab

One day, when Ashley Kramer was an SVP at Alteryx, one of her direct reports hit her with a dose of reality: “She said, ‘I think you are trying to put me on a path to be you, and to have your job. I don’t want any of that.’” Now the CMO and CSO of GitLab, Kramer — who has been a perfectionist since childhood — used to hold her team to the same high bar. But as she’s learned over time, “Not everybody’s gonna have your same ambition. Not everybody’s gonna work as hard as you. It doesn’t mean they’re not good at their job. It just means different things are important to them.”

In this episode, Ashley and Joubin discuss what companies get wrong in CEO interviews, “the three P’s” of company values, loosely held disasters, thinking about the future, “everybody does not want to be like me”, how GitLab does meetings, pre-speech nervousness, context switching, skip-level meetings, credibility with the customer, setting the bar too high, and Naval Ravikant.

In this episode, we cover:

• People, Passion, and Product (04:36)
• Joining companies right after they IPO (07:16)
• Scaling questions (10:28)
• Job-hoppers and ambition (12:06)
• Parents and dinner-table conversations (16:35)
• Coping with perfectionism (19:17)
• Coaching and demotivators (21:36)
• Confident public speaking (26:21)
• How Ashley got out of engineering (32:08)
• Being CPO and CMO of Sisense at the same time (35:49)
• Representing “two constituencies” (38:54)
• Why Ashley has two titles again (44:59)
• The radical transparency of GitLab (47:20)
• Growing pains and becoming interim CTO (51:28)
• Working with founder-CEOs (56:08)
• Tough feedback (58:20)
• Personal and professional OKRs (01:01:15)
• Work-life balance (01:03:33)
• How to network (01:06:10)
• Who GitLab is hiring and the meaning of “Grit” (01:08:58)

Links:

• Connect with Ashley
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm