: Hello and welcome to "Starting Up," the new interview show from Business Insider. I'm your host Drake Baer, deputy editor on the Strategy vertical at BI. Every day, my team reports on how and why people make decisions in their careers and their businesses as they navigate this topsy-turvy economy of ours.
We had been a small company, up to maybe 45 or 50 people working on the game and we were distributed as well. We, the founders, were in San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, and we had employees in other countries too. And over the course of the four years of building that game, we developed a set of tools to allow us to work together better.
So that was kind of like our first internal phase. But then a few weeks after that, we realized it was time to get our kind of first alpha customers. Like it was at a point where we could have other people use it and start to get valuable feedback. At that time we started reaching out to, you know, our friends at other tech companies and startups in the Bay Area.
I think that when I look back at that, one of the big advantages that we had in the category that we're in is that we're building a product that we use every day. So to some extent we really understand the customer, because the first customer was us and we understand — it's easy to both put yourselves in the shoes of that person, but also you spend a lot of time using your product.
That role has obviously changed pretty enormously today. We're an organization with more than 2,000 employees, you know, kind of offices around the world. The day to day changes hugely. You know, it's not like I'm writing code and building new features every day as the leader of a large engineering org. But I think that it's not just a transition from one role there, to the role at the end — to the extent today is the end, obviously it's still an ongoing journey for us.
I think that part of it is painting the vision of what you want the world to be like a year from now or two years from now. And that's the part to work back from, this paint a picture of what it's going to be like in the future, and then figure out what the big milestones and the big changes that we're going to need to get to. And the thing to align people around is not the individual tasks or projects that we need to get from where we are to where we want to go.
So I think they're kind of the day-to-day running of the engineering organization and running of the production service, that went fairly smoothly. We already had kind of all of the tools and techniques we needed there.
But it's been a really big focus for the engineering organization here at Slack to make sure we're able to support those organizations. A lot of those customers who use Slack think of it like a utility — it's something that just needs to be there at working. And that's in the kind of normal run of things.
I think that, you know, while we've internally had a strong one-on-one culture of, you know, every manager talks to the directs one-on-one every week. One of the things that we've seen in this distributed time is more frequent, shorter check-ins with people just to make sure that they, you know, if they're not used to working remotely, if they're not used to working from home, that they have that connection to their colleagues.
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