Coda

“But if I had to stack rank in, in interviewing, what do I look for? Reference check at the top, you know, work product and presentation next, and then all the interviews. If when they disagree, that's the order we judge it.”

“Basically everybody charges for the top two. They charge for Editors and makers. If you can make changes, then you have to pay. And that's like every document product you can think of, including ones, you know, do drawing or so on. They all kind of do the same…”

“It's my view that this category, what we call the all in one doc category, I think this is going to be critical, but I don't think that there's enough people out there that are looking for like a horizontal new blinking cursor. I mean, they exist and you can g…”

“The eigen question, the simplest definition of eigen question is the question that when answered also answers the most subsequent questions. And it's a very simple idea that when you sit down and you say, Hey, here's all these questions we gotta answer. How do…”

“And what happens for us is that then becomes a loop that means that most people's exposure and Almost a third of our users come through this loop.”

“And we decided on doc, which is like actually, and the way I cemented that decision when we made it, What I named the company down where Coda is a doc backwards. I said, well, it's all, it's a, this is going to be a, we're definitely not revisiting this one. T…”

“And the other thing that Coinbase does, which is like, sounds really subtle and small, but really in detail, it really matters is the person running the meeting pre-fills that with what they want from that person. You are an approver. You know, maybe I have th…”

“We had Coda. They were our first user and they were based in Palo Alto. Dylan and I drove down and demoed the product to them and they were the first ones. Their designer, Jeremy was like, yes, we'll take this on full time.”

“As soon as you introduce this, then the incentives sort of like flipped from being company focused to being individual focused.”

“Role stages are not visible across the whole company. Like, you know, we're not showing levels of any individual PM or designer, and that's partially because we just don't want to put a big focus on it.”

“And then kind of the thesis is that we're like in the midst of a new phase, which is essentially two-way write-ups and that's where it's more conversational and feedback and discussion is like actually part of the content itself.”

“I think most other companies, especially large companies has, have 10 to 15 levels. I think we've made a really conscious choice to have only five.”

“I sometimes do a version of making them explain it two different ways after and making the candidate explain it two different ways and saying like, okay, now you have to explain that to, you know, your grandparent. And then like now, you know, you just told me…”

“In the early days of Coda, we actually did something similar. We had a time allotted on Fridays. And it was basically like, it was on the calendar, a customer or a potential customer was coming in. And so you knew that it was going to happen. And you had to ha…”

“We have a centralized compensation committee and that's who decides compensation. And so it's not the manager that drives your compensation.”

“They ended up working very closely with Coda. I don't know if you know the story where they just wanted to make sure the Coda team, and it was called Krypton back then was very happy with Figma. And so they went to the office, they set them all up. They starte…”

“His team was really the first user of Figma as a team, and he goes, wait a second, I am?”

“So our marketing team came up with this idea, and they called proactive flash tags. It's a pretty simple idea. We built a list of decisions we're trying to make, and we added four columns that kind of map to those four flash tags. It says, I don't need to be i…”

“We used to get through something like five or six topics a week. We now get through, on average, we get through 50 decisions.”

“And we do one specific thing is we have a little toggle at the top where we hide everybody else's pulses until everybody's done writing. It's how we remove groupthink.”