fleet/handbook/company

Company

Purpose

Fleet Device Management Inc is an open-core company that sells subscriptions that offer more features and support for Fleet and osquery, the leading open-source security agent. Today, Fleet enrolls millions of laptops and servers, and it is especially popular with enterprise IT and security teams.

We are dedicated to:

• 🧑‍🚀 automating IT and security with a living, breathing API.
• 🪟 privacy, transparency, and trust through open-source software.
• 💻 a better way to manage computers.

Culture

All remote

Fleet Device Management Inc. is an all-remote company with 30+ team members spread across four continents and eight time zones. The broader team of contributors worldwide submits patches, bug reports, troubleshooting tips, improvements, and real-world insights to Fleet's open-source code base, documentation, website, and company handbook.

Open source

The majority of the code, documentation, and content we create at Fleet is public and source-available. The Fleet handbook is the central guide for how we run the company, and even it is open to the world. We strive to be open and transparent in the way we run the business, as much as confidentiality agreements (and time) allow. We perform better with an audience, and our audience performs better with us.

Why this way?

At Fleet, we write things down. Even when we might be wrong. This helps us move quickly, provides clarity, and enables asynchronous work. The "Why this way?" page in the handbook discusses some of our most important decisions about the best way to work and the reasoning for them. For example: "Why open source?", "Why do we use a wireframe-first approach?", "Why direct responsibility?, and "Why handbook-first strategy?" You can read more about these principles and suggest improvements in "📖Company/Why this way?"

Open positions

Fleet is currently hiring for the following positions:

• 🚀 Product Quality Specialist
• 🚀 Senior Software Engineer (Golang)

🛸 Join us!  Interested in joining the team at Fleet, or know someone who might be? Click one of the positions to read the job description and apply. Or copy a direct link to this page to share a short summary about the company, including our vision, values, history, and all currently open positions. Thank you for the help!

Is it any good?

Here are a few reasons to work at Fleet:

• Work from anywhere with good internet. (We're 100% remote. No office. No commute.) Everyone works remote, but you don't feel remote. There is no 'headquarters'. You are free to travel and move. Organize your workday to fit your lifestyle. Take breaks. Go to the dentist.
• Fleet can offer you a competitive salary, significant equity, and an independent, outsider-friendly culture. Work with helpful, kind, and motivated people who know what they're doing.
• At Fleet, we value focus, iteration, and meaningful results – not 60 hour work weeks. We are non-judgmental and laser-focused on growing the company.
• Work closely with experienced, well-funded founders and a great team, including the people who created osquery and Sails. We care about openness and transparency.
• Work computers can be private and safe. Help make endpoint monitoring less intrusive and more transparent.
• Protect the production servers and employee laptops of Earth's largest companies. Work on a product used by lots of people who care about what you do.
• Fleet is growing quickly, with significant revenue from Fortune 1000 customers. You will have lots of opportunities to make decisions, learn, and try new things.

Values

Fleet's values are a set of five ideals adopted by everyone on the team. They describe the shared mindset we are working together to create, inside and outside the company: 🔴 Empathy, 🟠 Ownership, 🟢 Results, 🔵 Objectivity, and 🟣 Openness.

Values play an important role in hiring, performance management, and compensation decisions. When a new team member joins the company, they adopt our values, from day one.

This way, everybody knows what to expect from the people they work with.

🔴 Empathy

Empathy leads to smarter decisions. Take an interest in what people are going through, so you can help make it better.

• Assume positive intent. Think and say positive things, and assume others are doing the same.
• Be a helper. Take care of customers first. But give hospitality and service with a smile to everyone you can.
• Roleplay. Read what you write. Again. Use your imagination to see situations from different perspectives.
• Get curious. Genuinely care. Ask questions. Listen closely to the answers. Be present.

🟠 Ownership

It takes reliable execution and a fully-activated mind to achieve ambitious goals. Think like an owner of the company.

• Be responsive. Reply quickly, consistently, whether or not you can take immediate action. Especially merge requests, Slack, and emails.
• Assume responsibility. Own up to mistakes. There's no time for finger-pointing, just fix it. Follow through on commitments quickly.
• No one is coming. Take initiative. Take care of things that need doing, or loop in the right people fast. Understand Fleet's goals yourself. Look for bottlenecks.
• Think long term. Remember the big picture beyond your department's goals.

🟢 Results

We work to get results. How we work determines what we get. Aim to deliver results daily.

• Iterate. Look for ways to make smaller changes, more often. Always be cutting scope. But finish what you bite off.
• Move quickly. Resist gold plating and bike-shedding. Between overthinking and rushing, there is a golden mean.
• Keep things simple. Focus on fewer tasks. Choose "boring solutions". Use fewer words. Avoid preemptive structure.
• Be realistic. When you can't take on more work, clarify your boundaries. Schedule time off to recharge. Practice self-care.

🔵 Objectivity

To reach our goals, we need to see reality clearly.

• Be humble. When something isn't working, stop assuming. Use the scientific method.
• Seek the truth. Change your mind in the face of new evidence. Escape the sunk cost fallacy.
• Interrogate luck. Understand why it's broken first. A lucky fix can do more harm than good.
• Think for yourself. Remember how often conventional wisdom isn't.

🟣 Openness

Take the time to make yourself and your work visible. This also takes courage.

• Write it down. Let people learn about your decisions. Remove outdated content so your writing is trustworthy, and write simply so it is outsider friendly.
• Everyone can contribute. Have short toes. Get comfortable letting others contribute to your domain.
• Be transparent. Everything we do is public by default. Redact non-public info carefully.
• Commit to candor. Give pointed and respectful feedback, even when you disagree. Interrupt and be interrupted.

History

2014: Origins of osquery

In 2014, our CTO Zach Wasserman, together with Mike Arpaia and the rest of their team at Facebook, created an open source project called osquery.

2016: Origins of Fleet v1.0

A few years later, Zach, Mike Arpaia, and Jason Meller founded Kolide and created Fleet: an open source platform that made it easier and more productive to use osquery in an enterprise setting.

2019: The growing community

When Kolide's attention shifted away from Fleet, and towards their separate, user-focused SaaS offering, the Fleet community took over maintenance of the open source project. After his time at Kolide, Zach continued as lead maintainer of Fleet. He spent 2019 consulting and working with the growing open source community to support and extend the capabilities of the Fleet platform.

2020: Fleet was incorporated

Zach partnered with our CEO, Mike McNeil, to found a new, independent company: Fleet Device Management Inc. In November 2020, we announced the transition and kicked off the logistics of moving the GitHub repository.

2022: Millions of hosts

Fleet raised its Series A funding round. The world now has at least 1.65 million computers and virtual hosts enrolled in Fleet, including enterprises, governments, startups, families, and hobbyist racks all over the world.

Still curious? Check out this visualization of the Fleet repo over the years or listen to this conversation between Zach and Mike Arpaia about the origin story of osquery.

Org chart

To provide clarity about decision-making, responsibility, and resources, everyone at Fleet has a manager, and every manager has direct reports. Fleet's organizational chart is accessible company-wide as a sub-tab in "🧑‍🚀 Fleeties" (private google doc). On the other sub-tabs, you can also check out a world map of where everyone is located, hiring stats, and fun facts about each team member.

Product groups

Above and beyond the organizational chart, Fleet organizes cross-functional groups focused on particular business goals. This helps product development teams move more quickly by eliminating roundtrips spent waiting for feedback and answers from people in other departments. Product groups include a designer, a product quality lead, developers, a product manager, and an engineering manager. For more information, check out the "Product groups" page.

Advisors

While most improvements at Fleet are driven by informal conversations with customers and open-source contributors, the company also has a few dozen advisors and investors, including Sid Sijbrandij (GitLab), Dylan Field (Figma), Jack Naglieri (Panther Labs), Mike Arpaia (osquery), and other smart people who are eager to help. If you have a question for one of them, Fleet's CEO is happy to introduce you. (Just ask.)

Strategy

You can read about the company's positioning ("👑 Crown jewels"), or review decks and recordings from recent company-wide "All hands" meetings.

Slack channels

The following Slack channels are maintained by Fleet's founders:

Slack channel	DRI
#general	N/A (announce something company-wide)
#thanks	N/A (say thank you)
#random	N/A (be random)

Stubs

The following stubs are included only to make links backward compatible.

Levels of confidentiality

Please see 📖Business Operations#levels-of-confidentiality.

Email relays

Please see 📖Business Operations#email-relays.

Tools we use

Please see 📖Business Operations#tools-we-use.

Positioning

Please see 📖Company#strategy.