July 16th, 2024

HuggingFace: Scaling open source community 300%/yr with No OKRs and No Meetings

HuggingFace, under Chief Llama Officer Omar Sanseviero, grew its open-source ML community from 780k to 2.3m repos in a year. They prioritize community collaboration, metrics, and engagement over revenue, with a decentralized structure and no OKRs.

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HuggingFace: Scaling open source community 300%/yr with No OKRs and No Meetings

Decentralizing DevRelDX Tips: The DevTools MagazineFollowDX Tips: The DevTools MagazineFollowDecentralizing DevRelDX @ HuggingFace: Scaling open source ML community 300% a year with No OKRs & No Meetingsswyx·Jul 16, 2024·14 min readTable of contentsIntroduction to Omar and HuggingFaceDevRel at HuggingFace - Metrics and VelocityManaging Open Source CommunityCalls to Action: Accessibility, Hiring

HuggingFace, led by Chief Llama Officer Omar Sanseviero, is known for its open-source ML community stewardship, growing from 780k to 2.3m repos on the HF Hub in a year. They prioritize community collaboration, provide grants, and maintain open-source libraries. DevRel at HuggingFace focuses on metrics like repository growth and platform usage, emphasizing community engagement over revenue. The team's decentralized structure encourages all members to engage in DevRel activities, fostering genuine relationships and collaborations. They avoid OKRs, prioritize usage-based metrics, and balance agility with structured goal-setting. With a small team, HuggingFace maintains numerous open-source projects through an async culture and flexible organizational boundaries. They experiment to gauge impact and community interest before scaling successful initiatives. The company's community-centric approach and collaborative ethos contribute to its success in the rapidly evolving ML ecosystem.

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Link Icon 16 comments
By @osanseviero - 7 months
Hi all! I'm Omar from Hugging Face. Happy to answer any questions you might have about Hugging Face in general, llamas, and open ML!
By @edude03 - 7 months
It feels hard to ask this without sounding snarky, but how do you separate growth from making good decision and having a good product from growth (in this case) because AI is hot and HF offers a lot of utility for free?
By @parhamn - 7 months
Interesting. Independent of the specific strategies, I always think of HuggingFace as squandering potential. They could/should/can be the singular place where you explore _and_ productionize these open/social models. But their offerings are nowhere near as good as Replicate and the others. At least last I checked.
By @Animats - 7 months
DevRel is just a transient phase during ramp-up. Once you get market dominance, you squeeze the independent developers by controlling their platform access and pricing, and keep all the high-revenue products for yourself. See Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.
By @lolpanda - 7 months
I'm curious here how do they make money? i heard that they have ai consulting service. is that sufficient to run the company? i don't think any researchers i know pay for hugging face.
By @throwadobe - 7 months
I mean, it's also the fact that they were the first to create a hub for the most massive secular technology trend since the advent of the internet. It's almost like anything short of utter incompetence would have worked here. So as interesting as it is to hear how they did it, it's not necessarily actionable advice or the most efficient, effective, productive approach
By @abidlabs - 7 months
Lucky to be part of this company and seen this strategy work close up. One thing I'll add is this "decentralized" approach applies to all Hugging Face teams, not just the developer advocacy team. Just to give an example, there's no central comms team at Hugging Face, every team (usually the engineers who work on the product or features) does their own comms across the channels they think work best. That means there's lots of experimentation and most of our hires tend to be generalists who are comfortable wearing many hats.
By @0x1ch - 7 months
I know a pretty affluent tech grifter who attended this. I'll pass on this nonsense.
By @dinobones - 7 months
In every company I've worked for, the biggest fans/lovers of meetings/let's "touch base" have always been: The most useless members of our team.

And I truly mean that, whether PM/TPM/or even SDM/SDE. The common denominator is they were always absolutely useless, adding no value or no true technical contribution, and their only value add was siloing information and claiming to be in "meetings" to lead some effort forward.

Their entire job function could've probably been replaced by a wiki or Google Doc. They intentionally made themselves the only points of contact and did not introduce people cross team because people would probably immediately realize how useless they are.

I've seen this multiple times, multiple roles, L5+, earning 100s of thousands of dollars a year at big tech companies.

Yes, I will waste 45 minutes of my time explaining word for word to you, exactly what is written in this design document, and none of it will be documented, no AIs will come from it, so you can look "busy" for today and tell your manager you did something. Woohoo collaboration!

By @tiffanyh - 7 months
> "growing from 780k to 2.3m repos on the HF Hub in the past year"

Is this what caused the title to be "300%"?

a. that's actually ~200%

b. isn't growth, as defined by number of repos (which might be free) the wrong metric. It's super is to scale adoption when you're giving something away for free

By @ibejoeb - 7 months
What is an OKR?

update: dead serious. I searched. It says "objectives and key results." But what does one look like? Is it a document?

By @mvkel - 7 months
Why is it that whenever a company happens to be successful, and does meetings/goals differently than most (also successful) companies, the success is attributed to the lack of meetings/goals, and not, y'know, the business?
By @ZiiS - 7 months
Step 1: Be at exactly the optimum point during a massive opportunity.

Step 2: Do almost anything you will still grow.

By @unixhero - 7 months
Nowhere in the article it is stated what devrel stands for. What is it?