Michael Lopp

“At Slack, we took our largest customers, and we assigned non-sales DRIs, directly responsible individuals, to be in charge of each customer. So our VP of engineering, Michael Lopp, was in charge of VMware. Our CTO, Alan, was in charge of Nike, and so on. And a…”

“My utopia is that engineers have a good chunk of time To do what everyone promises us during week of code or these other like one week of things. Hey, I want to build something and demo the CEO. These are great things, but that's an always thing. That's all a …”

“That's my utopia, is that there is that thing that's 71%, that's a real business and real stuff that's really clear, and we're debating it, and we're making it better, but there's also this free time to be kind of a free electron or a wolf or something like th…”

“There is no accounting. Because it's, the moment we do that, then the project managers show up and they say, cool, have you done your wolf time? Great. Check. Let's do that. Thanks so much. Great. Good job, everyone. Now we're operationally sound. It's the sho…”

“I tried to operationalize this at Palantir and it was a huge disaster for most of the reason I kind of disimplied. I gave it a title. I said, this is how you achieve this and this is how we will measure this. And it suddenly became this gameable thing where ev…”

“Every leader that you just referred to, every single one, when I'm right, and they're wrong, and I can convince them of that in whatever scenario, they understand that. They go, yeah, well, yeah, shut up. You're right. Stop. I got it. I got it.”

“That is part of the culture of these companies that you're talking about is that there is that, that debate culture that the CEO, she or he has created because they have a vision. They want to do the thing, but they also want their brightest and their talented…”

“People try to write it down and they say, Hey, here are values and sort of thing, but that's not what it is. It's like, it's the early ways that their founders and the company treated each other.”

“I think a lot of people want to be told what to do. Oh, I just threw up in my mouth. And I don't, I bet these people don't even think that, but I think it gets you started. Right? It's not, you're actually not going to do it. I'm gonna say, hey, go do this thi…”

“And here's a controversial one. There's times we spent a year. I'm like, you don't need to be here anymore. You have learned everything that you're going to learn here at Slack. It's time to go somewhere else. And I wouldn't say it like that, but there's truly…”

“It's not enough time and you don't, you got to see someone with bullets shooting over their heads to see who they truly are. It's fine. Interviews are great. You learn quite a bit, but like I've been trying for this forever. It's kind of like root out and I'm …”

“I think you can learn from background. Checks, but there are people that are, they're picking the people that they're telling to you. You gotta do like unsolicited ones are actually the ones that are actually interesting because someone who hates them tells yo…”

“I'm deeply afraid of becoming irrelevant and it just, it can happen in two years. You can be at that place. That's so totally not relevant anymore.”

“You're not, you get a new role. You're not good at it for three years.”

“30% of the people always going to hate you. It doesn't matter what you say. You're always going to be pissing off like minimum of 30%, like all the time.”