Fuck that

There are 3 companies that I absolutely love and admire: Zoom HQ, Slack and GitLab.

It’s not because of their product, or their founding story, or anything else, but because they took the world completely by surprise.

I remember very vividly having the same reaction when hearing about these companies for the first time:

“These guys are idiots, there’s already X doing that”

— Me, a bigger idiot

For Zoom, it was Hangouts, Skype, appear.in, etc. For Slack, it was even worse: they had to take over email first; and then the usual suspects: Skype, Hipchat, Hangouts, etc. Keep in mind that these products were all owned by huge companies (Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, etc).

GitLab was similar: they wanted to take on Github. At least for me at the time, in the software world, everybody loved Github. Apparently not everybody.

Why do I admire these companies? They were able to abstract themselves away from the market and our biases. EVERYBODY knew email, Skype, and Hangouts were a nightmare to manage, but not many would dare fixing it.

These folks looked at the market from a higher level and just said: fuck that, let’s build it.

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