The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 22 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Yassin: Asian tech focuses on ecosystems rather than single-product IPOs
“I found out that the American way of building companies is very different than the Asian way of building companies. The American way of building companies tells you, build one product, make that product really big, go on IPO, and just like continue working on …”
Yassin: The Asian conglomerate startup model beats the US single-product focus
“The American way of building companies tells you, build one product, make that product really big, go on IPO, and just like continue working on that product for the next 1020 years. Like Slack. Slack is a one product company until it got acquired. Perfect. Rig…”
Butterfield: Slack and Many Companies Will Retain Significant Remote Workforces
“One of the big topics is, do you expect to have a significant portion of your workforce remote when this resumes? And universal, yes. So I definitely expect that for us. I expect that for many companies.”
Email fundamentally cuts new employees off from historical company knowledge
“In email, if you join a company that has been around for 30 years and has been using email since its inception, You get an empty inbox. You're completely cut off from the whole history of what's happened before you got there. And almost all of the email, like,…”
Butterfield: Slack's first two remote weeks were its most productive ever.
“The first and second week after work from home order were probably the two most productive weeks in the history of the company.”
Slack's biggest challenge is creating a brand-new software category
“I think we still face that as a major challenge for Slack, because it's like a brand new category of software that doesn't really replace anything specific that you were using before.”
Only 8 of 45 Glitch employees stayed to build Slack
“So there's 45 people at the company, and eight of them were going to stay on to work on Slack. So for the other 37 people, we did kind of career coaching. We wrote reference letters. We set up interviews for them. We ended up getting everyone a job”
Organizational alignment dictates success more than an individual leader's strategic decisions
“What I found is what matters is performance at the level of the organization. Cause to the degree that everyone's pushing in the same direction, you're able to achieve something. If people are pushing in opposite directions, then, you know, you can put as much…”
Unlike most enterprise software, Slack requires unanimous team buy-in to work
“Unlike most software, you can't unilaterally decide to use Slack with your colleagues. Everyone has to buy in.”
Investors treated the Slack pivot like buying another lottery ticket
“None of them wanted their money back, and not for altruistic reasons, but we had already spent two-thirds of it, so their options were, like, we can get back a third of what we gave you, or they can buy one more lottery ticket and say, keep the money we'll kee…”
Slack sold $1M in software within three weeks of its official launch
“Within maybe two weeks or three weeks of launching that officially, we had sold a million bucks worth of slack.”
Carter Was an Early Investor in Spotify, Uber, Dropbox, and Slack
“Spotify, Warby, Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, Slack really great companies that we're proud of.”
Troy Carter Was an Early Investor in Spotify, Uber, and Slack
“Yeah, yeah, Spotify, Warby, Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, Slack really great companies that we're proud of.”
Butterfield: Slack saw massive surges across every metric during COVID onset
“In the early stages of this, yes, we saw a huge increase in the number of new teams being created, which is kind of people signing up for Slack in the first place, converting to paid status, the customers who are already paid, adding more users the people who …”
Glossier hosts 1,000 top customers in a Slack channel exchanging 10k weekly messages
“We've put a thousand of our top customers in a Slack channel who exchange over 10,000 messages a week.”
Pivoting from failed game Glitch to building Slack took under a week
“My memory is, is it took us months to decide this, and there's a lot of debate. In fact, it took us, like, less than a week. The core was there, like, almost instantly.”
Butterfield pitched early Slack investors on a $1B valuation target
“We went in there and told them our plan and, you know our grand ambition, which was, hey, we believe that there's, you know, we could one day get to a hundred million dollars in revenue with this business and thereby be a billion dollar business.”
Slack grew between 5% and 10% every single week in 2014
“And, you know, at that same period, we're still growing, like, somewhere between five and 10% a week.”
Pre-launch Slack users almost never stopped using the product
“The leaky bucket problem that I talked about in the context of the game was completely eliminated. Like, we found that once people started using it, as hard as it was to get people to start, once they started, they almost never stop.”
Butterfield: Leaders must constantly reinforce plans because humans hate uncertainty
“People need to be reminded what's important more often. People need to be reassured. People need to be clear that they understand the plan because human beings hate Uncertainty. I mean, just historically, it's almost like it's an evolutionary instinct, and you…”
Slack.com was registered in 1993 by an engineer hosting cat pictures
“Slack, speaking of .com registrations, was registered by this guy in 1993. He lives in somewhere in the Midwest, I think Wisconsin, who is an electrical engineer, and there's no more iconic internet thing than this. He had it as a website with pictures of his …”
Butterfield asked early candidates: 3x17, three African countries, French Revolution century
“By the way, in the early days when Stuart was interviewing job candidates for the company, he would always ask three questions. The first one, what's three times 17? The second one, name three countries in Africa? And the third question, in which century was t…”