Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The outward expression of empathy is courtesy.
The element of teamwork is perhaps underappreciated.
I'm going to make more money than I need in any outcome.
The useful part of Microsoft was that everything worked together.
The social use of Slack does drive awareness - it's a good thing for us.
When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it - immediately.
I rarely in a working day go more than 10 minutes without looking at Slack.
It's easy to hire too fast and have chaos and disorganization and insufficient management.
If you're not hiring from some groups of the population, then you're obviously missing out.
Life is too short to do mediocre work and it is definitely too short to build shitty things.
It’s hard to imagine the revenue from selling the prints will cover the cost of lost goodwill.
We're still at the beginning of a major transition in how people communicate and work together.
I'm going to end up with a lot more money than I feel like I'm entitled to, given how hard I work.
Anything we can do that lets people find information more quickly is something we're interested in.
In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience.
Internally, we sometimes say Slack is like a nervous system, connective tissue, or the internal network.
All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world.
There's a lot of automation that can happen that isn't a replacement of humans but of mind-numbing behavior.
I think email's going to be around for, like, another 10,000 years. It's a great way to cross organizational boundaries.
For most companies, the hard thing is making the product work well enough to convince a single person at a time to switch to it.
People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.
A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently.
If one engineer at a startup tries Slack and says, 'I hate it. I am not going to use this,' that's it for us. We won't get evaluated.
What motivates me is just to do a really, really good job at something. If I were a better musician, I probably would've ended up as one.
People tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change. In the short-term, it's not going to make that much of a difference.
In Slack, you create channels to discuss different topics. For a small group of people, those channels are relatively easy to manage and navigate.
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.
I almost never go to news sites - it's overwhelming how much content is out there. But I will pay attention to what my friends are picking up and sharing.
I related to the whole hippie, acid-test confluence of the early Internet. The idea that we should be open and interoperate with our data resonated with me.
Every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. If you go above and beyond on the customer service side, people are much more likely to recommend you.
Those moments of play that we do get in meta-life, like playing music, or golf, or word-play, or flirting - those are some of the best parts about being alive.
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.
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.
Inside all the computers of any large corporation is every decision that gets made. But people spend a huge amount of time trying to find the correct piece of information.
At my first job in the mid-to-late '90s, almost every product was from Microsoft. Everything was designed to work together - Windows for workgroups, shared M drives, etc., etc.
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.
I can tell people a story that they believe in and get behind. So I'm good at the leadership part. But I've always said that I'm a terrible manager. I'm not good at giving feedback.
Inside a company, you can mandate that everyone use the same technology, which means you can go a little bit, I don't know, higher fidelity than the lowest common denominator technology.
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.
Email will probably be around for many decades to come. It's hard to say what will happen 20 years from now, but email has been around for decades, and it will likely be around for decades more.
I think we are reluctant to move people out of an organization when there is not a good fit. It is typically not because someone is stupid or lazy or incompetent; it is a lot more subtle than that.
The experience of being able to search back over all your team's communications for, in our case, millions of messages, is super-valuable. But you don't know what that's like until you actually have it.
I tend to be a lot more honest and transparent with employees than most bosses are. But I've had people tell me - even those who love working with me - that I'm terrifying, which is hard for me to imagine.
I was pretty entrepreneurial as a kid. I had a lemonade stand. When I was 12, I arbitraged the price of 7-Eleven hot dogs; I'd buy the ones that are pre-wrapped with the bun and then sell them on the beach.
I think of myself more as a designer than a serial entrepreneur. As a designer, the easiest way to see that something happens is to start a company and then be the boss, and then people have to do what you say.
There are two big benefits from moving conversations from a mode where you're addressing individuals, or groups of individuals, to addressing a channel which is a topic, a project, a functional discipline, or whatever.
Slack is actually a technical term in product management that means the excess capacity the system has to absorb any failures or to take on new work. That's something that was really on our minds when we came up with it.
A lot of companies lock up for a few weeks once a year for performance reviews. But there's a way to collect feedback in real time from Slack so that by the end of the year, you've already stored up all of this information.
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.
If your job requires that you spend a lot of time communicating with people across organizational boundaries, email is perfect. Email is the lowest common denominator, and it's going to cross organizational boundaries really well.