Companies changing the way we learn + work together
I started to write about this after two recent conversations:
The first was with a friend who lives in east Capitol Hill. While we were in a line of 30 at Harris Teeter he remarked that it is nearly impossible to make friends with your grocer or cul de sac neighbor these days.
The second was with a personal-note-taking, keyboard-shortcuts guru. He has his own digital filing cabinet system to store ideas/articles/etc that he wants to remember, and he’s created a workflow for himself to make it as easy as possible to store things in that filing cabinet. (If this is interesting to you)
What these two interactions point toward is that…
Who we know
How we met who we know
What we know
How we found what we know
How we store what we know
… are all reliably different in the year 2020 (probably for a whole slew of digital and city-zoning-based reasons).
At the front of this change, software gives us new ways of keeping track of the things we know, and new ways of sharing that knowledge with the people around us. Some companies working in this space:
The way we structure information has a dramatic impact on its usability, and traditional note-taking results in deadweight loss. Roam is trying to fix this.
A notebook has only one vector of organization: time. You can’t easily re-sort your entires by theme, topic, person, or etc. This makes old thoughts mostly non-indexible—impossible to find except via memory or excruciating page-flipping—and keeps obvious connections between ideas hidden. Fundamentally, the issue here is that the complexity of the medium (the data structure of a notebook or your notes app) doesn’t match the complexity of the message (your thoughts). Roam is trying to fix this problem by allowing you to map your notes to one another like a network. You can link between notes like you’d hyperlink a webpage, and you can navigate your “notebook” like you would the internet. What’s cool is that this has the ability to elucidate and reinforce connections between ideas that previously would have been invisible or difficult to find.
Roam is currently in beta mode but you can sign up for an account to try it for yourself here. They are also hiring a Software Engineer (remote).
Figma’s mission is to make great design accessible to everyone.
Before Apple and before the smartphone, applications were “gray, bland, functional affairs imposed upon us to do the mundane tasks of the day.” Design was seen as a supplement to product development—a facet of decor rather than a matter of function. Over time, though, people began to see that good design improves user outcomes and bottom-line revenue in ways that are both explicit (ex., adding clarity to product function) and implicit (ex., creating delight). It is often a matter of accessibility, unlocking workflows and thought pathways for people who approach a situation or idea differently than the initial creator. TLDR: good design makes us happier, and the emergence of this as a business imperative is a historical development that I feel buoyantly excited about. Figma is at the forefront of this change; they want to enable this sort of outcome for as many people as possible by allowing design to be truly collaborative in real time. Their product is basically google docs for designers, a sort of photoshop but for teams and built intuitively for the web.
Figma is hiring product designers, data analysts, support managers, and more.
Do you remember when we all made fun of Wikipedia (read)? Quora is another example of knowledge-by-committee executed successfully on the internet, at scale, against all odds.
Quora is like Yahoo Answers all grown up, allowing users to post questions and receive responses from both experts and lay folk. The best way to understand and start to enjoy it is just to spend a minute on their platform. I don’t remember the last time logged in, and I am by no means a habitual user, but when I checked it out just now, their ML immediately gave me two strange, topically disparate Q&A threads…and I have to admit, I’m kind of interested in both:
and:
There are some really thoughtful people commenting on these threads!! It is a bona fide community. What I also love about Quora is that it’s a proof of concept: many years ago, English teachers everywhere thought that we were better off relying on extremely professional centralized information sources—Encyclopedia Britannica or the like—to access real, actual knowledge. But especially in an age where our news/information gatekeepers are confusing and failing us so, knowledge-by-committee becomes all the more appealing and probably imperative.
They are hiring product designers, account executives, and customer success managers.
Slack is a workplace conversation tool for the AIM generation.
Slack is not an indie start up: you’ve likely used it or heard of it. It’s a messaging app that gives an organization the ability to send direct messages and create chat rooms. The magic is that Slack is often the hub of all workflows at an organization: even if other tools are used to execute work, Slack is where you circle back around to check in with a boss, say hi to a friend, or ask a question of a collaborator. Because of this, it wields large influence over organizational culture: it’s an example of how structured technology changes knowledge sharing. Themed chat rooms (slack channels), have the potential to not only shape conversation for a minute, but the structure of conversation forever after. I think about the fact that the company I work for has a channel called #thingsthatdidntwork where everyone can post their mistakes, including the CEO.
Slack has a zillion career openings. Check out roles in account management, product management, sales, and data science.
Until next time.
Yours,
Lea Boreland