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 21 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
Knoop: Zapier operates with zero internal email across the entire company
“We don't send any internal email.”
Knoop: Remote employees cannot rely on their workplace for primary social connection
“Your work can't be your family at Zapier or any distributed remote company. Like you, in the past, it's very easy to lean on your work as that, like, social connection.”
Knoop: Remote companies are forced to adopt better management practices much earlier
“The types of things you have to do in order to be a successful remote company make you just a generally better company. They are not unique to remote. However, they, you do have to figure them out earlier.”
Knoop: High quality work requires four-hour deep work blocks, not constant collaboration
“A secondary benefit that I think isn't as obvious is that when you're actually doing your job, like, the best work gets done not when you're, like, sitting next to someone and, like, collaborating all day. There's Like, you have to get into deep work. Even for…”
Knoop: No single SaaS company is incentivized to build thousands of integrations
“Just because of the dynamics of the explosion and how many tools there are, there's no one player in that marketplace that's going to be incentivized to go build thousands of integrations with everyone else.”
Knoop: Platforms are viable when 1% of revenue could be a business
“I think I'd always, I'd heard the heuristic of like once you get big enough where you could carve off one percent of your revenue and that could be its own standalone business, like you've kind of reached a critical mass that you could actually build a platfor…”
Knoop: Zapier bootstrapped early integrations by offering partners retention, not distribution
“The value we gave to partners was around retention. If they built, they integrated with Zapier, they got access to 50, 60 at the time integrations that were maintained and scaled and were adding more to it, and they got it left for free. So it allows them to g…”
Knoop: Zapier had reached $50M in annual recurring revenue by 2019
“And it's like, well, yeah, we have, you know, a hundred, we have like fifty million in ARR, like, yeah, we're a real company.”
Knoop: Switch to video when Slack says 'several people are typing'
“If you, like, one of the things I tell a lot of our teammates, if you see that, that's probably a really good signal that you should be, like, jumping on a video call at that point. Instead of wasting, or not wasting, but instead of spending, you know, 10 man …”
Knoop: Zapier requires employees to acknowledge direct Slack tags within 24 hours
“In Slack, if you tag somebody in a message, like, at tag them specifically, it's kind of the social norm to be, to acknowledge that within 24 hours. So we have some expectations like that, and the reason we have said 24 hours is because we have folks all acros…”
Knoop: Workers who wait for direction when blocked fail in remote environments
“If you're the type of person who like, as soon as I get blocked, I'm just going to sit here until I'm told what to do next. You're not going to be successful at Zapier or I argue most remote companies.”
Knoop: Standardize boundaries and interfaces between autonomous teams, not internal processes
“I like to think about there's like the things that are important to be consistent across teams are the interfaces. Like, you need to make sure that the interface between teams is consistent so that both teams know how are you.”
Knoop: Goal setting should be split 50/50 between top-down and bottom-up
“And there's kind of a meet in the middle approach where you kind of want the work that's happening, 50% of it to be kind of top down driven, and I think 50% of it being bottom up. Because in reality, the exec team leadership is never going to have perfect insi…”
Knoop: Zapier disables Slack notices and actively encourages employees to leave channels
“And very early on, we set the expectation that Slack is not a tool you're expected to keep up with in Zapier. You are free to leave channels. In fact, we encourage it. Kevin Hale: That is fascinating. Mike Knoop: There's a feature in Slack where you can turn o…”
Knoop: In-person retreats build interpersonal empathy necessary for text-heavy remote teams
“Even though we're a hundred percent remote, there is still a lot of value for getting in person.
and we don't like discount that.
you get to build a lot of empathy.
You get to build relationship with folks and it allows you to kind of be, assume best intent …”
Knoop: Transitioning to remote work requires a cultural transformation, not just tools
“I think it is one of the reasons why it is so hard to add remote onto an existing company is because remote while When you see folks talk about it and ask questions about, it's always very process and tools based. I think the honest answer is that it's more of…”
Knoop: Zapier built an app directory and landing pages before the product
“We, so we built our app directory before we built the product. Before we launched in TechCrunch, that whole story was, ah, pre, that, we had been working on Zapier for about five months, I think, at that point. The very first thing we did when we sat down was …”
Knoop: Zapier was rejected by Y Combinator on its first application
“We applied actually twice to YC. We got the email rejection the first time. We applied basically with the prototype from Startup Weekend. So we had no customers, no traction, basically just three dudes from Missouri.”
Knoop: Zapier charged 10 users $100 and 100 users $5 pre-YC
“And then the second time we applied, you know, by that point we had had hundreds of conversations and chat logs and messages from actually a lot of folks in, like, the YC network were even using the product. It was invite only at that point, and we were having…”
Knoop: Written decision artifacts significantly reduce organizational conflict during internal debates
“Like, this is one of the things that's great about writing down our process documentation in Zappi, writing down our decision-making processes, is when it's written down, you have something to debate about. I can go to you and say, hey, can we debate whether t…”