Building 0-1

A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers: to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — and usually that means changing what one does or how one does it; it often means changing how one thinks of oneself.

Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive, our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms.

This is the overall promise of your startup. Expert level performance through appropriate use of your software to speed up a defined part of a businesses’ key workflow.

The fact that there is a newthing has come to feel like a certainty, even as we cannot fully perceive it. This will spark a search for underlying structures, analogs, and ways of being that feel natural to this newthing.

Does the newthing exist in this context or some other one?

Is it a newthing that’s meant to run all the time or is it more seasonal... See more

AI is like water.

Or more specifically, generative AI applications are like water. We've looked at hundreds of AI companies, and much like bottled water, many of them are the exact same under the hood.

This is just the reality: there will be 100 teams trying to do what you are doing, in the same way you are doing it. True tech differentiation in AI... See more

I think the mistake too many entrepreneurs make is they start companies assuming they have scale. We’ve seen no scale, we’ve seen hyperscale, and what we realized was what we have to do is we have to start with that utility and the best networks. I didn’t realize Chris wrote that post, but I should maybe in the back of my mind that’s what I was quo... See more

We are an exceptional software development team. But, we now also need be an excellent customer development team. That’s why, in the first section of this doc, I said “build a customer base” rather than “gain market share”: the nature of the task is different, and we will work together to understand, anticipate and better serve the people who trust... See more

Just because a company is B2B doesn’t mean it can’t have the taste and style of a B2C company. People who work in companies are still people, and delightful experiences should be for everyone.

A genuine interest in something is a very powerful motivator — for some people, the most powerful motivator of all. [3] Which is why it's what Jessica and I look for in founders.