A lead came into my site this week from the director of engineering for a major technology company. Could I help his group with a writing workshop? His group had hundreds of people, so this seemed like a hell of a lead. Normally I’d say yes to that and we’d figure out how. But in…
Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world. That was a statement about economics. Now I believe that social media is swallowing our brains, which is a much broader statement about human behavior. The precipitating event for this observation is Salesforce’s announcement that it would acquire Slack for $27.7 billion. According to Salesforce…
The Verge exposed the toxic culture at direct-to-consumer luggage startup Away. The CEO Steph Korey sort of apologized, then got replaced. The whole sordid saga illustrates how not to run a company. The Verge feature article by Zoe Schiffer was well reported and devastating. Away has dispensed with internal email — everything runs on Slack….
Slack wrote an open letter to Microsoft, ostensibly welcoming it to the market for workplace collaboration systems. It’s a weird hunk of prose, direct and honest on the surface, but fundamentally insincere. The choice to publish this letter — and to fill it with platitudes — makes me question the judgment of the company. Here’s what happened….