There's a lot of automation that can happen that isn't a replacement of humans but of mind-numbing behavior.
I love cities. New York, Montreal, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, L.A... but, I do choose to live in Vancouver. It's home.
You can take a team of absolute all-stars in terms of their native abilities, but if they are not working together, they are much less effective than a team where there is less native ability but a higher degree of teamwork and cohesion.
It's very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy.
One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that there has got to be a reason for what you're doing. You actually have to care about what you're doing. The business has to be about something. Whatever the point of it is does not have to be inconsistent with making money, but usually if that's the sole reason, it is not very successful.
I see all kinds of people work hard all over the world, and some of them are barely making it. I don't just mean subsistence farmers. I mean people in the developed world who work multiple jobs, and because the cost of health care and child care eats up almost all of the living they make.
In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience.
From the outside, Yahoo was extremely successful. It was making money; it was still bigger than Google. But when I got there, I learned what a disaster of a company looks like from the inside. There were a lot of vice presidents, and it was basically a turf battle between them.
Anything we can do that lets people find information more quickly is something we're interested in.
We created materials to explain Slack to individuals - what it was for, how it worked, what you're supposed to do - but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team.
Sometimes you will get feedback that is contrary to your vision. You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first.
There's a lot that's wrong with the way we work - bad habits that develop around control of information, people hoarding information as a means of preserving their own power. When you're using Slack, everyone can see what's going on because the default mode is public.
Internally, we sometimes say Slack is like a nervous system, connective tissue, or the internal network.
Email is the lowest common denominator. It's the way you get communications from one person to another. There isn't really an alternative. Sometimes people will have Facebook messenger turned on, but 99 percent of the time, if you're sending a message to a human you don't know well, you're using email.
The most productive employees, from my experience, are those who go home at 5:30 P.M. but are hyperfocused at work. People can only think really hard for six to eight hours a day.
We sent our user research team out to sit with customers for periods of time and get some insight into how Slack is working. We also get tens of thousands of points of contact via Twitter and our customer support ticketing system every month and can synthesize those results.
There are a lot of things that Slack gives you that email doesn't when you think about internal use. Switching to Slack from email for internal communication gives you a lot more transparency.
Slack is gratifying to work on in the same way that Flickr was. The mission is to make people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive.
The social use of Slack does drive awareness - it's a good thing for us.
I have a couple of things I do to clear my head when I need it. The first is exercise, the kind of exercise that makes me lie on the floor afterward gasping for breath and wonder if I'm actually going to be able to breathe enough to not die. The other one is playing music.
