Cancel the meeting, start a thread.

Today we’re launching the Threads beta — a platform designed to make work more inclusive by empowering teams to discuss and make decisions at scale.

So, what’s the problem?

As a team grows, you start to see it happen. People get left off meeting invites, group chats happen in private with fewer people than before, and even email becomes siloed.

You start to hear about critical decisions through the grapevine, things at work feel like they’re coming out of left field, and even if you have a strong opinion, it’s often too late since the ball is already rolling.

Here’s the thing — we work with great people but only ever hear from a few. This isn’t good for anyone. People feel unheard and undervalued, teams are making worse decisions, and ultimately, the business moves more slowly.

It’s easy. Just tell people to stop excluding others!

The truth is, it’s not easy. This isn’t happening intentionally, it’s happening because most communication tools struggle to keep up when teams scale. No one wants to “reply-all” to an email because they’re afraid of annoying others. It feels impossible to catch-up on a channel with 100+ messages. Also, if you’re lucky enough to get invited to a meeting, you need to be senior enough to take part in the conversation or be louder than the rest.

Tools today make us choose between inclusion and efficiency. Due to this, the quality of work suffers. What if we didn’t need to make the choice? What if we built a way for growing teams to stay on the same page, have broad discussions, and make the right decisions? What if we made it possible for work to be more inclusive?

If this problem and opportunity resonates, we’d love for you to meet Threads.

How does Threads work?

1. Create an organization for your company.

2. For any team, project, or topic, create a space and invite who’s relevant.

3. Whenever you want to share or discuss something relevant to the team, project, or topic — start a thread.

4. People will start to read and comment on your thread, and when it reaches a resolution — mark the relevant comment as the decision.

A thread is designed to make it easy for many people to catch up and contribute to a discussion whenever they have time. It accomplishes this in a few ways:

1. You can’t be “late.” Even if you come to the thread after several other members have contributed, you won’t be at a disadvantage. You’ll be caught up by simply reading from top to bottom and will have the ability to reply to comments, creating a nested sub-discussion.
2. You won’t annoy people. A thread separates having access to information and being notified about it. If you comment on a thread, it’ll only notify the people who have commented. Everyone in the space can see the thread, but we make sure not to over-notify.
3. You can’t be interrupted. The product allows you to provide your two cents without anyone interjecting or throwing off the flow of the conversation.
4. You won’t lose track of what was decided. Decisions are highlighted and documented for posterity.

On that note, does Threads work?

Our customers think so! If your team wants to spend less time in meetings and more time making decisions, we think you might like Threads.

• “Threads has been a game-changer for how our team makes decisions together. It filled a need that Slack and Email couldn’t and has become our hub for facilitating feedback, updating the organization on changes and making sure everyone is on the same page.” — Joe (Bitwise, Designer)
• “In a growing company, one of the first things to fall apart is effective communication. I can’t imagine scaling discussion and decision-making across multiple offices and teams without Threads.” — Spang (Nylas, CTO)
• “With Threads, we were able to 6x our company seamlessly with few growing pains. All new team members could learn context around decision making and culture in a way that wasn’t possible with email or Slack.” — Anthony (Perfect Keto, CEO)

See more, here.

Remind me again. What are the benefits I get from using Threads?

• You’ll have fewer useless meetings.
• Your team will be heard and included.
• You’ll stop having a bunch of one-off docs that get lost.
• Messaging will have a much better signal-to-noise ratio.
• Most importantly, your company will make better decisions and move faster.

How do I try it?

threads.com — check it out for yourself! We’d love to have you.

— Rousseau (Threads, CEO)