The one thing that matters more than your new design is how you came up with it. — You’ve just finished working on a new design and you are about to pitch it to your team. You’ve been at it for days, obsessing about the tiniest details, getting stuck along the way and wanting to give up on it more often than you’d ever admit. Now that you’ve…

How startup life and the pandemic rekindled my passion for chess. — It was a gray, damp Sunday afternoon, one of the many such days in the Richmond District of San Francisco. I was working for the 7th day in a row, obsessed with fixing some obscure aspect of my startup’s website. As the afternoon wore on, though, and the caffeine kick…

You can now welcome new #channel joiners on Slack with over 50 new animated GIFs. — GreetBot has had the ability to welcome new joiners with animated GIFs for quite some time now. It was a little over a year ago when we launched Woofy and Howdy Greet Packs, finally bringing the internet’s favorite pastime to onboarding on Slack. As of this week, though, GreetBot’s collection…

The year 2020 has brought both progress and setbacks to our mission. — What a year this has been. A roller-coaster ride does not even begin to describe it. The outbreak of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, followed by months of political unrest and the most heated U.S. presidential campaign in a generation. Needless to say, these events affected the lives of every single one…

Slack’s “human-first” company culture is its secret sauce. — I wouldn’t be able to do my job without Slack. Yet it isn’t Slack’s ease of use, its versatile communication features or the vast number of integrations that made me invest in Slack Technologies, Inc., a.k.a. WORK. Yes, the polished product design combined with its funky, playful branding have undoubtedly…

See your key onboarding metrics at a glance. — GreetBot has passed a number of milestones recently. We are now serving more than 10,000 workspaces worldwide, delivering an average of 50,000 greetings per week. Somehow, in the course of the last four years GreetBot has delivered over 2.5 million welcome messages to more than 2 million individual Slack users…

What if we treated racism like an infectious disease? — Racism is not a biological disease transmitted by invisible, airborne viral particles. But it spreads in surprisingly similar ways. Like microbes, racist ideas can be passed on from person to person, carried by word of mouth. Left unchecked they can also grow exponentially: the more people they reach, the more…

The fleeting joy and the enduring heartache of visiting the Elephant Nature Park. — We were driving for nearly an hour, making our way through hills covered in thick, sub-tropical forrest. All of a sudden the trees cleared, letting blinding beams of light in. My eyes were still adjusting to the intense, Thai sunshine when the valley below us revealed itself. There, on the…

Hard work is what you will be remembered for. — The hardest thing to do is to resist easy work. To steer clear of the softball tasks like checking email, starting your washing machine or placing an order on Amazon whenever you have better things to do. Things like training, learning, thinking, creating, innovating. …