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 80 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Slack won enterprise market share by forcing buyers to follow end-users
“Slack just blew away through enterprise because they built for users, not for enterprise buyers. And buyers were cornered to make that decision. As opposed to choosing Slack for the organization, not a single enterprise buyer I know has ever chosen the Slack f…”
Ugarte: GrokBot successfully identified two autonomous tasks from my email and Slack
“The first task I gave it was go through my Slack, go through my email and suggest like five things that you can take off of my plate and what it would take for you to do that. And I suggested five and like two of them were actually really helpful. And I just i…”
Anthropic uses open Slack notebook channels as public internal Twitter feeds
“Everyone has these notebook channels where you kind of have like your own like Twitter feed in a way where you're just, Talking about your thoughts about things, and so you can go and, like, join the Slack channel, the notebook channels of people on research a…”
Fain: Slack shipped 65 polish improvements in a dedicated two-week sprint
“And so we implemented something called the customer love sprint. We said, okay, engineering, stop what you're doing as an entire team. We're going to spend two weeks. Just painting the inside of the cabinets. The only rule was engineers got to pick what they w…”
Fain: Slack used a 'Stewart plus two more' rule for Butterfield reviews
“We used to have this rule After a design review with Stuart, we'd go through the design review and he'd say, no, do it exactly like this. I want, you know, the button here and the interaction to be this. And frankly, he always had better ideas than we did, but…”
Fain: Slack created unstructured feedback sessions after Stewart Butterfield rejected designs
“We implemented something at Slack with Stuart because we realized we were coming to him with, like, done designs, and he was like, what the fuck is this? This is completely different than how I had this in my mind. So Allie Rail, early Slack employee, implemen…”
OpenAI data scientists use Codex in Slack to diagnose metric changes
“Data scientists often here are using Codex a ton to just, like, answer questions, like, why do you think this metric moved?
What happened?
So questions, you know, you get the answer right back in Slack.”
Butterfield: Cal Henderson and I are discussing what to do next
“Cal Henderson, who's the CTO of Slack, and who also, we worked together on Flickr, so have worked together now for 23 years, have been talking about what we want to do next if there is something.”
Yehoshua: Slack employees use zero internal email
“No email, unless you're dealing with somebody external and now it's mostly Slack Connect anyway.”
Crusson: Atlassian aimed to win enterprise communications before Slack and Teams
“I worked on HipChat and Stride. HipChat was one known, Stride less so we were trying to win the enterprise communications market before Slack and Microsoft Teams came about.”
Lemkin: Most of Slack's revenue was enterprise sales at IPO
“Slack started all self-serve. And by the time they went public, the majority of their revenue was enterprise sales.”
Weiss: Asking candidates for their 'unfair secrets' yields practical operational insights.
“If I say unfair or secret, I usually mean, like, not something that you probably read on, like, a medium, but like, what did you learn? How did you learn it? And how does it work? And how do you apply it? You also just get amazing, interesting, like, bits of i…”
Weiss: Slack doubled paid customer growth after a 2018 self-serve pivot
“We wound up kind of doubling the rate of our new paid customer growth in the year and a couple of years after that and kind of reaccelerating the self service business.”
Weiss: Slack organizes AI development using central infrastructure and prototyping pods
“We have a kind of central machine learning and search team, but there's a lot of people have expertise in this field to build infrastructure that everybody can use. And what we've done is Because the space is evolving so quickly, like literally every month, li…”
Weiss: Slack's Original Pitch Deck Targeted Companies of 5 to 50 People
“When the original pitch deck came to the investors, they said, Slack is for companies of five to 50 people. At the time, the biggest company imagined using Slack was 50 people, because I don't know how this is going to work beyond that. You know, it'll become …”
Weiss: Slack's Early Enterprise Sales Called Domains Sorted by User Count
“And then by the time we then scaled our enterprise sales team, I mean, truly the exercise initially was just take customer domain, sort by number of active users and call them in the order of that, which is, you know, Hey, by the way, you have a couple thousan…”
Weiss: Critiquing competitor products helps unstuck teams unlock new ideas
“Whenever a team, I think either gets stuck or feels like they reached like a dead end in a direction is Doing complaint stores about the product area that they're in or using adjacent products just to get inspiration. And then I think it kind of unlocks a lot …”
Weiss: Slack develops zero-to-one features by establishing scratch incubation teams
“Structurally the way that we've approached it is that we've over time created kind of new teams from scratch that incubate in a new area before the areas mature. So we did that with a lot of these kind of native audiovisual products like huddles and clips earl…”
Singleton: Stripe Co-Created Stripe Billing With Slack and Figma
“And when we got to starting the Stripe Billing product, we realized that there were a number of our existing users. These were companies like Figma and Slack. We were already using Stripe for payments, but had these subscriptions business models. And we figure…”
Former Slack SVP Peter Vidani joined The Browser Company as an IC
“We just hired someone named Peter Vidani.
When I was 20 building consumer social software, he was like the coolest, most impressive person.
He was the first designer at Tumblr, ran the design team at Tumblr for seven years.
and the most recently was SVP of de…”
Mixpanel routes customer feedback from BigQuery to Slack via Census
“Basically all these feeds information land in our data warehouse, which is BigQuery. And from there, they're pushed out via a reverse CTL tool we use called Census to Slack and Notion.”
Figma leadership created a 'Concerning Tweets' Slack channel for Dylan Field
“So Chris, RCTL, and I kind of, like, intervened. We created this new channel, private channel called Concerning Tweets. And it's just, you know, for this small group of us that Dylan can kind of, like, drop those. And then these are tweets that aren't going vi…”
Walter: Slack revenue grew 10x from $50M during his tenure
“When I joined, revenue was around fifty million. When I left roughly four years ago, it was 10 extra.”
Walter: Early Slack mobile changes increased activation by double digits
“Within six months, I was able to ship changes in the news experience, especially on mobile, that moved the needle by a lot, like double digit percentages within just six months. And we're talking about top line metrics, like activation.”
Rachitsky: Big tech's hidden perk is access to private strategy docs
“One of the best benefits of working in large companies, they have access to real life strategy documents, vision documents, things like that.”
Lenny's paid newsletter Slack community has about 10,000 members
“Basically if you're a paid subscriber to my newsletter, you get access to the Slack and there's about 10,000 people in there, mostly PMs and founders and growth leaders.”
Mosavat: Closer marketing partnership would have increased Slack impact
“What I think is I look at What could have moved the needle more and what could have made me a more sex successful leader at that company, it would have been partnering more closely with marketing, for instance, to figure out how we could be working on things t…”
Fain: Almost no Slack PMs consulted her before executive reviews
“I can count on one hand when I was chief of staff, how many people asked me for advice before going into a product review with our CPO or other executive team to say, what do you think is most important to them right now?”
Kapoor: Figma logs sales feedback into Asana via Slack emoji
“We basically have, we store it in Asana, basically. We create, like, we have this integration which many companies might have, which is, like, a Slack integration where you can, like, react with an Asana emoji, and then, like, any piece of feedback that comes …”
Walter: Misinterpreting curious questions as disagreement impeded his early career
“For me specifically, I realized whenever people ask me questions, if I didn't know the answer, I would have like all this negative self-talk. And I'd basically would, you'd ask me a question and question could be something like, why are we doing it this way? R…”
Mosavat: Slack's Lifecycle team drove self-service from onboarding to monetization
“We were responsible for the self-service business at Slack, all the way from first sign out, first team creation, through to the first invites, activation, expansion. Monetization, and even connecting the dots with our SMB sales team to help nurture some of th…”
Forget The Funnel tags Slack messages by urgency to protect focus
“Something else that we do to protect each other's time is we like time, not timestamp, but we put like a little code in all of our messages. That's like either like, you don't have to listen to this before the end of day, or it's timely, or it's no rush so tha…”