What we are selling is not the software product — the set of all the features, in their specific implementation — because there are just not many buyers for this software product.
However, if we are selling "a reduction in the cost of communication" or "zero effort knowledge management" or "making better decisions, faster" or "all your team communication, instantly searchable, available wherever you go" or "75% less email" or some other valuable result of adopting Slack, we will find many more buyers.
That's why what we're selling is organizational transformation.
I have some nit-picks about the practical realization of organizational transformation that Slack claims to provide, but this is one of the few corporate memos that I've read that clearly and succinctly explains what a startup business is about and why.
To be clear: We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can't compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can't improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.
This is a rather stunning reversal from a billionaire committed to education and a thought-provoking article.
Representing Facebook before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria was Orin Snyder of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, who claimed that the plaintiffs' charges of privacy invasion were invalid because Facebook users have no expectation of privacy on Facebook. The simple act of using Facebook, Snyder claimed, negated any user's expectation of privacy:
There is no privacy interest, because by sharing with a hundred friends on a social media platform, which is an affirmative social act to publish, to disclose, to share ostensibly private information with a hundred people, you have just, under centuries of common law, under the judgment of Congress, under the SCA, negated any reasonable expectation of privacy.
I'm so glad I've never in my life used Facebook. The company cares less than nothing about its users.
Chinese intelligence agents acquired National Security Agency hacking tools and repurposed them in 2016 to attack American allies and private companies in Europe and Asia, a leading cybersecurity firm has discovered. The episode is the latest evidence that the United States has lost control of key parts of its cybersecurity arsenal.
"182 men didn't die at The Alamo just so we could give @Whataburger over to Chicago. I'm just sayin'."
Quintessentially Texas.
The legal complaint released on Wednesday read like an ice-cream vendor crime wave, complete with a map of midtown, speckled with red dots appearing like sprinkles, to indicate summons locations.
A few months ago, a routine deployment in a core service of M3, our open source metrics and monitoring platform, caused a doubling in overall latency for collecting and persisting metrics to storage [...]. Mitigating the issue was simple - we just reverted to the last known good build, but we still needed to figure out the root cause so we could fix it.
And it's a doozy. Great post on some in-depth debugging.
Keith Wardrip of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Kyle Fee and Lisa Nelson of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland have put together a map. Its most resounding and confounding recommendation: Stay out of the superstar cities. Their booming tech, health and financial industries may offer great jobs for the college educated. But if you don't have the degree, they have little for you.
It was Sept. 10, 2018, nearly 10 years to the day that the bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers sparked a global financial panic.
The short, intense crisis Mr. Aas created was a precarious moment for the financial industry. It cast doubt on the safety of institutions like Nasdaq Clearing, which were supposed to prevent another meltdown, not create one. Within the small and dispersed community of regulators and central bankers whose job it is to maintain the infrastructure of global commerce, the incident provoked a debate about contagion that continues to rage.
The closing line is spot on.
Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of ages.
— Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame