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 20 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
Mehrotra: Coda ranks reference checks first, work exercises second, and standard interviews last
“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.”
Shackleton: Career ladders flip employee focus from company to individual
“As soon as you introduce this, then the incentives sort of like flipped from being company focused to being individual focused.”
Shackleton: Coda does not make employee levels publicly visible internally
“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.”
Shackleton: Coda uses a centralized committee rather than managers for compensation
“We have a centralized compensation committee and that's who decides compensation. And so it's not the manager that drives your compensation.”
Mehrotra: Blank-slate productivity tools cannot scale past early adopters
“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…”
Mehrotra: Prioritize strategic questions by how many other decisions they eliminate
“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…”
Coda scaled its weekly decision-making throughput from five to fifty decisions
“We used to get through something like five or six topics a week. We now get through, on average, we get through 50 decisions.”
Hide participants' written feedback until everyone submits to eliminate meeting groupthink
“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.”
Shackleton: Decision-making is shifting to interactive 'two-way write-ups'
“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.”
Shackleton: Most large tech companies have 10-15 levels, Coda has five
“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.”
Shackleton: Test candidates by having them explain topics to laypeople and experts
“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…”
Coda uses 'maker billing' to charge document creators instead of editors
“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…”
Publicly published documents drive nearly a third of Coda's user acquisition
“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.”
Mehrotra: Decision rituals work best when leaders pre-specify what each approver answers
“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…”
Use 'proactive flash tags' to map stakeholder involvement before decision deliberations begin
“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…”
Field: Coda's Shishir Mehrotra was Figma's first team user
“His team was really the first user of Figma as a team, and he goes, wait a second, I am?”
Rachitsky: Figma founders drove hours back to Coda just to fix Wi-Fi
“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…”
Coda scheduled mandatory weekly Friday customer demo sessions in its early days
“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…”
Coda was Figma's very first committed enterprise user
“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.”
Mehrotra: Coda chose doc over app, naming Coda "a doc" backwards
“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…”