Tailscale

Our guiding principles

Real people solving concrete problems.

Decentralization, encryption, and scalability are means to an end, not the ends in themselves. We’re here to solve tech problems for diverse teams in diverse industries, and our team is diverse and empathetic to match.

Small is beautiful.

We don’t believe in huge teams or huge clusters. We don’t believe workers are interchangeable. We believe that excellent, small teams produce excellent, beautiful, coherent outcomes that large teams, and large networks, just can’t replicate.

It has to "just work."

This should be standard, but surprisingly it’s not, because system reliability is hard. It might not be glamorous or shiny, but our job is to do the boring parts and get out of the way, so customers can get back to the work that matters to them.

Our commitment

People first

Listening to a range of voices leads to a product and a company that’s better for everyone. As a diverse team we work together to understand the challenges our users face. This allows us to build a product that makes physical and virtual communities feel successful, safe and secure.

An inclusive workplace starts with a team that is not bound by geographical location, lifestyle, or life stage, which is why we are proudly, and always have been, a fully remote company with flexible working hours. Whether a mid-afternoon kids’ soccer match, time with family on the other side of the country, or an emergency vet visit, employees are trusted and respected to manage their time and projects around their life.

Diverse teams have diverse interests and voices. Whether on the Tailscale blog, or personal Twitter accounts, Tailscale celebrates communicating freely and safely, in each person’s own voice.

Supporting open source

Open source is the present and future of software development. Writing software ought not be zero-sum. Tailscale is open source at its core. It’s also free for open-source projects.

Tailscale is built on WireGuard, specifically wireguard-go. We upstream changes that help other users of the project. We also support WireGuard with financial donations.

Many Tailscalars are active in the Go community, and contribute to the project and community. When we develop features that help everyone, we upstream them. And it’s not just Go. Our team has many passions, from NixOS to SQLite.

Protecting user privacy

Privacy is a fundamental human right, and we designed Tailscale accordingly. We don’t want your data. Your data is end-to-end encrypted and transmitted point-to-point so we don’t see your packets and don’t have to pay for them, which keeps our costs low, which means our free plan can stay free. We don’t capture any more of your data than needed to provide the service, as in our privacy policy.

Tailscale networks are private. Only connect with people you’ve explicitly invited, and only share what and when you want to share.

We augment privacy with transparency and knowledge. For example, we make sure you know before you access a shared node, that your public IP address will be visible to admins on that tailnet.