Partnering with Silicon Valley isn’t ideal but it might be the best choice for now. — Cars have changed a great deal over the last decade. Touchscreens, wireless connectivity, electric engines, cameras, and AI continue to transform every aspect of driving. Despite all the progress, though, the way we interact with our cars still leaves a lot to be desired. Voice commands are a hit-and-miss, touchscreen…

In order to succeed in social media you need more than mathematical equations. — It should not come as a surprise that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a pioneer of space and motor industries, would think that he could run a social media company. It is not rocket science after all. Rocket science it is not, indeed. But that doesn’t mean social…

If Einstein didn’t keep a phone on his desk, maybe you don’t need to either. — In 1947 J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man best known for heading the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, accepted an offer to become the director of the prestigious Institute of Advance Study in Princeton, New Jersey. The overarching goal of his tenure there was to…

GreetBot is shutting down on August 16th, 2022. — Update August 16th, 2022 We are in talks with a potential partner to keep GreetBot online. We can’t provide a concrete timeline yet but we are hoping to know more in the coming weeks. No action is required from you at this time. You can continue using all features as…

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…