This is not surprising at all. Glean has built a fantastic (and costly) tool for companies to ingest their data sitting in third-party systems and easily surface to their employees. This type of knowledge management product will become increasingly more valuable as our current state of work involves us working in dozens of purpose-built SaaS solutions. Slack conversations are a lynch pin for many in this pursuit, and extremely valuable. No doubt Salesforce will up the ante and offer this access at a premium to current plans, or better yet leverage it themselves as they build a competitive product.
Woof!
The communication app TeleMessage Signal, used by at least one top Trump administration official to archive messages, has already reportedly suffered breaches that illustrate concerning security flaws and resulted in its parent company imposing a service pause this week pending investigation. Now, according to detailed new findings from the journalist and security researcher Micah Lee, TM Signal’s archiving feature appears to fundamentally undermine Signal’s flagship security guarantees, sending messages between the app and a user’s message archive without end-to-end encryption, thus making users’ communications accessible to TeleMessage.
No doubt the complexity of winding a company down ramps up with scale, but these companies also have investors and counsel to leverage. Perhaps they’ll look to this company as The Wolf.
The thought of this company raising 15M blows my mind.
I loved this memo from Tobi Lutke, particularly this bit:
Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.
and this this bit:
AI must be part of your GSD Prototype phase. The prototype phase of any GSD project should be dominated by AI exploration. Prototypes are meant for learning and creating information. AI dramatically accelerates this process. You can learn to produce something that other team mates can look at, use, and reason about in a fraction of the time it used to take.
GSD is a reference to Shopify’s product development process, which stands for “get shit done”. How can you not love that?
Great company, great product
Interestingly, both the earliest and most experienced engineers find tremendous value in using AI in their day-to-day, while mid-career stage engineers are more pessimistic.
Fantastically helpful framing