How We Communicate
Creating a culture of trust, transparency and respect in the workplace comes back to the way people share information and talk to one another. Internal communication is everyone's job.
We Optimize for Collisions
Human collaboration happens best when information flows naturally between people. In traditional societies, it flowed through shared spaces: proximity, body language, and casual encounters. As a hybrid team spread across time zones, we don't get that for free, so we have to recreate it deliberately.
Most companies chase individual efficiency. They cut meetings, minimize interruptions, and treat communication like overhead. But we believe that "overhead" is the collective intelligence that makes complex work possible.
Every time we've tried reducing meeting frequency, the company fragments: teams drift, projects misalign, and context gets lost.
A Single Ant Cannot Build an Anthill
Team alignment beats individual productivity every time. Remote work already optimizes for deep work: you have your home office, your schedule, your focus time. The hard part is staying connected to the collective effort, and that's what we aim to protect.
Not everything belongs in the same place. We run internal communication at three levels, sorted by signal-to-noise ratio, from noisy and fast to slow and permanent:
Fast Layer
- Channels: Slack (day-to-day chat and huddles)
- High noise, low friction
- Quick questions, random thoughts, immediate needs
- Like office chatter, where the connection matters more than the content
Medium Layer
- Channels: GitHub, project channels in Slack
- Higher signal-to-noise ratio
- Structured updates, decisions, technical discussions
- Searchable and persistent
Expensive Layer
- Channels: Docs & SOPs
- Highest signal-to-noise ratio
- Company decisions, processes, architecture
- Only for information that needs to last and spread
A note on Discord: Discord is where we meet the world. The Menlo and Jan servers keep us close to our community and partners, while the team's internal communication stays in Slack.
Managing the Noise
More communication creates more noise. We handle this through a few habits:
- Topic-specific channels: Keep conversations contained.
- Smart muting: You're not expected to read everything. Mute what's not relevant to your current focus.
- Clear escalation paths: Know when to move from chat to docs.
We accept the noise because the alternative is teams working in silos. Better to over-communicate than miss the one conversation that matters.