I love to invest in workplace collaboration products because solving problems at work is such a fertile space. Successful products grow like traditional consumer products but have similar retention to traditional enterprise products. A compelling brand and the associated virtuous cycle of earned media coverage are very important to topline…

The last decade has seen the rise of workplace collaboration and productivity as a valuable SaaS category. The success of companies like Slack, Zoom, and Atlassian in challenging the dominance of Microsoft and Google’s productivity suites accounts for part of this interest, but the rise of remote and distributed teams…

Announcing Lightspeed’s investment in Magic Spoon Every morning I get up, make a coffee, and eat a bowl of Magic Spoon to power my Olympic weightlifting routine. For the rest of my day I eat every few hours, follow a supplement schedule recommended by a friend who worked in human…

Personal user manuals are one of my favorite tools. At a low point in my management career, sharing personal user manuals within my team rescued my deteriorating relationship with a high performing PM. After we learned from each other how to better communicate, our relationship improved and we continued to…

Tomorrow, Slack will become a public company. In a move that’s very “Slack”, the company is doing it via a direct sale for employees and investors, not a banker-led IPO. …

These are the touchstone books and articles I share with founders and product managers. The more you learn about product design, how people think and make decisions, what feelings are, how to run efficient teams and how groups operate, the more it all blends together. Only a few of these…

I’m experimenting with some slightly more personal essays. This is the first. In part it’s about my experience changing social classes in America. It’s also about startups. I like to help people. My dad set this example every day: if you can help, you should. When I was a kid…

I’m so happy and humbled to have joined the incredible team at Lightspeed, where I have strong mentors to learn from as well as a substantial platform. I first started making angel investments and advising companies after leaving Slack, without planning to invest professionally. I even turned down conversations with…

I recently wrote up this process document to help the founders I’ve invested in hire their first product managers. This is the process that I used at Slack to hire product managers and it’s similar to what a lot of startups use. …