Two of Slack’s original employees, Johnny Rodgers and Ali Rayl, have started writing a delightful newsletter/blog called Building Slack. There are some great passages already.

The clarity of the initial pitch from Stewart:

“You’ll know it’s working when you don’t have to use email at work any more.”

The very high bar for great customer support:

We turned around fixes and adjustments as quickly as we learned about them. We responded to each message personally — often directly from Stewart. This pattern and the fundamental respect that it demonstrated for our customers would become essential to Slack’s early success and eventual longevity.

The impact of Stewart’s famous “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” memo:

He encouraged us to take personal responsibility not just for the tasks we were assigned, but for our shared mission in the biggest sense. This was operationalized in the early days. We would say “Somebody doesn’t work here.” As in, “Somebody should fix the typing lag in the search input” or “Somebody should follow up with the teams that churned last week.” Nope. It’s our shared responsibility, and you need to do it yourself or chase things down to ensure it’s going to get done.

It’s great. Start at the beginning.

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