YouSaid · the spoken record

April Underwood

lines on the record: 102
first: 2018-09-05
most recent: 2018-09-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Right, exactly. So Slack becomes that bust or that common denominator. And so, you know, the ticket can be shared into the channel from Zendesk from an employee directly in Zendesk. Somebody can see, yep, that looks like a bug. They can use this new feature to be able to create a ticket in JIRA. And we actually are able to facilitate that workflow. And each of those companies did one integration. They built on top of the Slack platform. They don't have to build with the n squared or whatever number of customer service and engineering bug tracking tools. They're able to build into this platform. And so, you know, what we're doing with the platform is actually making it possible for customers to get more value out of every single dollar they're spending on software, which is a lot. And we're creating a place where not only can they get that work done, but we're building the search capabilities on top of it that it can be, you know, it can be utilized and harnessed in a way that you never could before.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We launched something a few months ago that made it so that an app on our platform like Zendesk, for example, could add an action to the gear menu inside Slack. And it seems relatively straightforward. But if you think about that, imagine a scenario where a customer support team is talking to a customer and they've at some point and they're doing their work in Zendesk. And that is where they live. They also communicate in Slack. But when they're getting work done, they're in communicating with customers. They live in Zendusk. But they need to actually share that ticket with the engineering team, within an organization, because they believe that it's likely a bug. Well, engineers don't live in Zendust. They live in JIRA. And so the ability for us to have this platform that allows information to flow and bite-sized workflows like this to actually be executed by teams across applications. Like there's just a huge gap in a world.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broader, but we have an amazing team working on that Slack's platform is just absolutely core to what we're doing, which is that”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, absolutely. And so communication Slack is organized around channels. And you're totally right that other people have sort of sort of like poked at this concept before, but in Slack, you know, channels really sit at the center. And so channels have all of these great properties to them, which are that you can join and leave them at will. You can set notifications on them so that if you need a push notification every time somebody posts in a channel that is related to what's about to go to press that you can get a push notification on any of your devices they are searchable so that you know the next person who joins a team can actually benefit from the conversation discussions that have happened in the past and you know in in it is a fundamentally different way to work i mean it's it's it's it's moving you know i mean it's fundamentally different than than inboxes were but you know slack's platform and which is what i joined to work on and um now my responsibilities are much”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was another one. We moved on to Slack from whatever it was. It was good. It was good, but you were better. Okay, but I'm saying you've got to figure out foundationally what you're providing people, which is communications. Right. And organization.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should I use this Slack thing? And I'm like, you're an idiot. Yes, you have a like for my team. And I'm like, yeah, like we run our company on. Thank you. You should write something. No, no, no, no, but I just, you do run your company on it. It's an interesting thing and it's the best so far that I've seen. Of course, would switch in a second if I had to. We were on some...”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do you want to have in order to be a platform? Is you need this really stable foundation. You need to provide some service that is so broadly useful that it's actually, it makes sense for users, for customers to be able to make use of more capabilities on top of it. And as I described earlier, communication is like the last thing before and like the operating system on your device itself. I mean, it is just so foundational to everything that people do.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so we're still in this hugely expansive phase of building the capabilities that we need so that more types of teams at work can use Slack. But the other thing is happening in parallel is we talk about the fact that we're a platform. And a lot of companies talk about being a platform.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last year, last January, when we launched Enterprise Grid, was the first time we even had a product in market that could really address the needs of a company over a couple thousand employees. And since that time, we brought tons of customers to that product. And again, like, I mean, we're what 18 months into that international, the product was only in English until a year ago. So we've just started to bring it in a meaningful way to other markets. But a lot of that is about sort of audience, like how many different teams in the world can actually use Slack. And we're still different.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I mean, if we thought we were 80% done with what we planned to do, then. Then you think about things differently, but we're just in so many ways just getting started. I mean, we've got 8 million daily active users right now, across 500,000 organizations, 3 million daily paid users. You know, we've got like capital one and then we've also got like the Jackson Hole Wildlife Refuge. Like we have this really amazing breadth of customers.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's been creeping upwards, and obviously, I had interviewed lots of Peggy Johnson before Microsoft, others had tried to buy you for years, but you guys are been going it alone, like doing this. And you're also in the sweet spot of so many companies who have tried to do this workplace productivity stuff. Microsoft has bought a number of companies to compete with you. Google's in there.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with April Underwood. She's the chief product officer at Slack. We're talking just recently about an outage they had recently, but it underscores the idea of being this utility grade and being”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's nothing you can get done at work without communicating. And one thing I remind my team sometimes is, you know, we're not personally saving lives, but there are literally people doing work on our platform who are aiming to and trying to report the news and trying to do all these things that are very real time in nature. So, you know, so with that in mind, I think that, you know, we need to be like the phone company. We need to be utility grade or carrier grade to some degree. And so we're invested very deeply there. In fact, you know, this year we have, we foregone shipping some things we're really excited about because we are shifting the majority of as many people as we can.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when Slack goes down, you can't even communicate with other people to know whether or not Slack went down. And so we are that bottom stack for like the like.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, and I suspect you'll probably mention the fact that we've recently had an outage house. I'll preview there because I listened to your discussion with Aaron Levy from Box, and I know that that was right after that had happened. So first of all, apologies, I would have brought you socks if I didn't believe you probably already had four pairs. Thank you. But I don't want to make light of that at all. I mean, it's bad enough when really important consumer communication tools go down. You know, we don't like it when our consumer, you know, you know, social networks and so forth go down because they are a lifeline in some way to connect to the people we care about and the things we do. But when we're talking about work, it's just absolutely critical. And the bar for us is incredibly high. I think it's important to realize absolutely not as an excuse, but just so you know where our mindset is, that frankly, if Office 365 or even Google Apps goes down, it's super frustrating. You're in the middle of doing something you can't do it.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Microsoft bought it, I think. Whatever. There was a lot of that idea of taking, and Facebook had even thought about doing Facebook for work. And AOL 100 years ago, you aren't going to remember this. You're much younger than I am. But AOL did AOL at work. And the day they launched it was the day they had their famous 19-hour outage. And so the guy, Mark Walsh, who ran it, was like, had sold it to all these businesses as the communications tool for a company, you know, the not email-based communications tool, and it was over in seconds. But it still was a great idea.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Important I So it made it really straightforward. Right. And then you just went, you thought this is the way it goes. And it was really fascinating that to me that no one had ever thought of this works. It was a version of, there were versions of it. I forget all the names of the thing. I saw so many versions of Slack, and I'm blanking on all their names, but I remember one guy had a good tan, and I forget the guy who ran that company.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so attention to detail. Important. So with that in mind, I took some time off. I launched hashtag Angels with five of my colleagues from Twitter, which is an angel investing group that maybe we'll talk about later. Yeah. And I just forced myself to take some time off. And during that time, I met Stuart. And long story short, he was looking for a head of platform. I've worked on platforms pretty much my entire career. We hit it off. I was what he needed. The role was really enticing and exciting and the company was an interesting phase. And they were working on a problem I actually cared about. So it made it really straightforward.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's, yeah, talk about quality control. I mean, I think a lot about quality control now with Slack. We care a lot about what we launch. But my first quality control job was making sure that the chicken fried steak would extend over three sides of the plate because otherwise it was not.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Until like 30 minutes after you wake up, because you're just trying to figure out is there anything in here that's important, which is also a problem that, you know, of course, Slack helped solve with notifications and the ability for you to configure your view of Slack to focus in on the things that are most important. So, you know, so I was thinking about these problems. I left Twitter. I took the first break in my entire life since I was, you know, 15 and a half or whatever the legal age was to start being a hostess at the black-eyed pee in Texas. And during that time.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was this culture of transparency, but the tools were just completely wrong for it because in an email world, you don't decide, you know, ultimately you don't really decide what comes into your view. Other people decide that for you when every single time you want to share something with somebody, you have to decide who the right people are to receive it. You have to give it a subject. You have to, like, it's all this pomp and circumstance to be able to communicate anything. And so it's very high friction. And so near the end of Twitter, I was actually thinking about these ideas of like, why did Twitter work? And Twitter worked because you could tune into the things you cared about and there was no cost to unsubscribe. But we didn't have that for person to person communication and work tools. And so, you know, as I was leaving, I was thinking about these concepts a bit from my own experience of having just been in an email culture that's just crushing. We're like, you wake up every morning and you have so many emails that you don't get out of bed.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what attracted me to Slack actually kind of started back in 2007 when I joined Google. So I joined Google out of business school. At that point, one of the big hiring pitches was transparency. So, you know, this idea that every Friday afternoon you're going to come to TGIF and you're going to hear directly from Larry and Sergei, which was amazing. And then also this idea that you can sort of know anything that's going on within the company. It was already a sizable company. And so, you know, you would join and you would start, you know, hearing about different projects and you could just join the mailing lists for almost anything that was going on within the company. And this whole idea of transparency then, you know, during those years, a lot of companies in the world were like, hey, what's Silicon Valley doing? Like, how can we be more like them? How can we shift a more transparency? It seems like it's driving a lot of innovation. Ideas are coming from anywhere within the organization. But ultimately, the tools were not the right ones for them. So, you know, in my years between two and a half years of Google and then five years at Twitter.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember dealing with someone and he was, I think it was Terry Simmel when he was running Yahoo and he was like, you know, the Yahoo search team tells me we're better than Google. I'm like, you're no. I have to say, you know, they don't understand everything. So if you know sort of how the sausage was made, you sort of do understand when people are taking shortcuts or they're not telling you the right thing or they don't, you know what to look for, I think, is critical. So how did you get to, you were at Twitter? During crazy period And slack, what happens? Yes. I had met Stuart when he did the photo thing at Yahoo. Sure. And then he did that disastrous game thing that turned into Slack. And, you know, that's the story of what happened here. And so I'd gone up to Canada to Vancouver to visit him when he was doing the game thing.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting to build teams from scratch or getting to learn new skill sets like I did during my five years at Twitter, it's so important to me and what I do now because as CPO, I'm not just responsible for the actual organizations that roll up to me. I need to have a really broad purview. And the fact that I've done a bit of marketing, the fact that I've done deals, it makes me a better partner to make the other executive people.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. You know, I am actually somebody who is pretty, I hold on pretty loosely to the idea of like which function I do. And I think that served me well. So, you know, there have been times in my career where I've been where people didn't believe I was a product manager. So when I was at Google, I wasn't a product manager because I don't have a computer science degree and I was there during an era where there was a pretty narrow view as to what it meant to be, like what was required. And the most important thing was to gain credibility with engineers. Right. And so you had to have that like stamp of approval. I'd been literally an engineer, but because I hadn't, it was a real blocker for me. And, you know, what I've found is that rather than exiting the industry, instead finding those adjacent opportunities and also frankly.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Asset responsible for them So, the reason I want you to talk about this is because I want people to understand that switching is really like shifting and shifting. And especially when you're a woman, like you can do that to try to grab for what you want kind of things. Yeah.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Asset and that institutional knowledge is so important that you actually get the opportunity to try out different roles. So I started doing product, but we had relationships with Google and Microsoft and Yahoo, the search deals. And we didn't have anybody really responsible for them. Yeah, I knew, yeah, and I also had, you know, had been at Google. So I ended up building out a good portion of the business development team. And then getting back to my sort of my major, which was product on the ads and data side over my last three years there and built the ads API and program around it and so forth. So through my course there I led product teams, I led business development teams. I also led product marketing for ads for a while too just out of the need.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I joined when we were about 150 people, and by the time I left, we were 4,000 over the roughly five years. So I joined to be a PM on platform, worked on things like the tweet button, the follow button, all of these tools to make it easier, ultimately for publishers to be able to get their content shared easily by users into the network. And so worked on that for a while, but I also wore a lot of different hats there When you're at a company through that kind of growth stage, sometimes the fact that you've been there a while becomes such a unique.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because they were OD. I remember when they were ODO before that, which was really interesting. And then they kept switching CEOs. Then you could see the problems. I have to tell you, we'll go into that later. But so you, because I want to talk about tech responsibility and things like that, you guys are less pulled into the debates going on right now, but still have to be thinking about them. And so then you were there, and through the period of its mega growth, really, right? Yeah, yeah.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, he was over there, and then I got the call from a friend, and I belabored the decision a little bit because I was working for a great startup, but I followed my heart ultimately because I didn't go there because I thought, oh, this is going to be this company that's going to go public and all that sort of stuff. I truly went there because I love the product.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The product. You know. Twitter for me, I started using it in 2007, but really in 2008. And I was living in Noe Valley at the time. And I started getting connected with people who lived in my neighborhood because of Twitter. Twitter was small then. But this idea that, I mean, this is still when mobile and mobile apps were new, but this idea that this website or this mobile app could actually help me connect with the people that actually were in like local proximity to me in a place that I'm not from and where I didn't know my neighbors and that sort of stuff, like that, that was just absolutely amazing to me. And so I really loved, I loved the medium, I loved the fact that people were smart and witty and interesting on there. I love the pace at which it moved. And so I just love the product. And so, you know, when I got the call from a friend who joined, and I had gotten to know Dick Costalo when he was at Google during his feed burner.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I was there for a few months and then I had the opportunity to join Twitter and I made the leap and joined. So what compelled you to do?”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I did. But I also left Google a few years later thinking that Google had sort of done what it was going to do. I looked at all of the things they were working on. I was like, this is done. And I was obviously completely wrong. But for me, that opened up the opportunity to then I made the leap to a small startup”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Showing up to, well, I showed up in 2007 and it fell late. It felt like showing up at a party like after like the crush of people has left. Maybe they're like running low on certain supplies. The ros ⁇ is, you know, you know the bill.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I only knew about because my sister was in junior high or high school or whatever. And so I was using it. So I went to Google after business school. I interviewed with them. I was in a role where I was focused on all of the work that we needed to do to ingest the content that couldn't be encrawled on the web. So content was a really critical thing because of Google's mission to organize the world's information. And so the data that powered local search on maps, the data that powered books search, et cetera, for all of these different properties. So this really interesting but in some ways very narrowly scoped role and what was what I realized only afterwards is that I got to work with like all of the initial teams that built all of those Google properties and so many amazing people that are you know that I'm lucky to know and be friends with and get to work with today were there during that era so I showed up to the Google party a little late I can just”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, but sometimes people around age 25 questions about what they want to do. But what was interesting is when I went to business school, then YouTube came out and got acquired by Google. The iPhone came out literally while I was in school. So I was in school from 2005 to 2007 when basically the whole new era emerged. And so then I would like fell in love with it again. Facebook and Facebook. Exactly. It came out in my second year of business.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is UC Berkeley's business school. And I was a little disenchanted with tech at that point. You know, this was 2005.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so I work at Travel Austin for a few years, and at that point, actually, I made the transition into product management, but before I did, I was told I needed an MBA to be a product manager. Okay. So I thought, okay, well, that sounds straightforward. So I applied to business school. And then I got into product anyway, but I also got into business school. So I went to business school at Haas.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. And it's also a role that has changed a lot. I think it roughly changes every five years. So product managers are ultimately responsible for picking the right things to build and then bringing definition to them. And in doing that, what I mean by that is understanding the customers, understanding the market, and then taking a principled but also rational point of view as to, well, we should do this first. And then once we do this, then we can do this and it's going to unlock these business opportunities. And so you really do have to be able to have the technical aptitude to have some sense for what's feasible. You need to have the business orientation as to what matters.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Yahoo! For these bookings and so forth. And in doing so, you know, kind of found my path towards product management. So that kind of brought me to quite understand what.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't take a lot of vacations when I was a kid, but we'd come to the Bay Area once, and I just was obsessed with it. And so I wanted to come out here and I had an interview with Intel in Santa Clara. And it was the same day as my graduation. So I decided not to do the interview. And I said, well, just send me to the next closest place. And I assumed Oregon was just the next exit off of the freeway from San Francisco. And so I ended up in Oregon working for Intel, assuming I would spend a lot of time here. And then once I actually looked at a map, discovered that that was a little impractical. So I worked there for a while. I transitioned to travel ostey back in Texas to spend more time with my family. And I was an engineer and became a product manager ultimately because I started asking a lot of questions. I was being asked to code things specifically Travelocity Power, the travel tab for Yahoo Travel at that point. And I started asking business questions about why we would pay so much Rev share.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I graduated in December of 2001. So, you know, on the morning of 9 11, for example, we actually had a speaker in one of my classes from Southwest Airlines. And just none of us even knew what to say. We had no idea what had just happened. And so the economy was really, really falling out. And I had the opportunity to interview with Intel. And I'd always, always wanted to live in the Bay Area.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Complicated technical thing, and then they would have to hang up the phone, and it's sort of like good luck, you know, because mostly had one phone line. So, you know, I think that was the first point at which I started to think more about software. I taught myself to code so I could get off the phone and start creating the training modules for the other employees. And I started just realizing the extent to which, you know, these products were really powerful, but also were really, really hard to use for a lot of people. They did it anyway because they were so useful. People wanted to be online. But the experience was needed a lot of work. So that was the point at which I decided to go into software. McCame engineer. I worked at Intel. I worked at Travelosty. I transitioned into product management.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So people. This is why I was in college my second semester freshman year. And so I started working on the side. And I was helping people reinstall their modem drivers so that they could get on the internet. The trick was they had to, I had to teach them how to do this.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't that interesting to me? So, you know, I went to University of Texas at Austin in part because I had a good number of scholarships there. And financially, that was really important for me to be able to. Do college. And I gave them all up because I realized that it wasn't the right thing for me. And so I got to work doing what I've pretty much always done my whole life, which is I went and got a job. And I went and went in the Texas paper and the campus paper, there was a job that paid $10 an hour, which sounded pretty better than the waitressing and barista jobs it had before. And it was doing tech support for internet service providers.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would have been an honor. So I went to UT and because I'd done well in chemistry in high school, I thought, well, then I should be a chemical engineer. And the first time we were going to visit a company to learn a little bit about the roles, we had to get a hard hat and steel-toed boots. And that was the first sign I had that I actually knew nothing about chemical engineering and learned that it was a lot of oil and gas.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Easily find out whether or not I had whatever that Texas Rangers baseball card was or so have you. So in a different environment maybe now, I would have been pretty clear that actually I was really. Unnaturally interested in technology and computers, but I didn't pick up on it. I don't think anybody really did. And so, you know, I went off to college at University of Texas in Austin. And I chose chemical engineering. Yeah, that's right. Hook them horns.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“where I'm from. So for our listeners who have driven across the country in I-40, there you go. So I grew up in Amarillo. I was lucky to go to Montessori school and, you know, my parents were very focused on education. But, you know, growing up in that place, you know, the helium plant was one of the biggest employers there. There was not, you know, there was not a lot of technology. And so I really didn't grow up knowing that this technology industry existed. But I did have a real interest in computers. I don't think I realized it. I think to some degree I just was a little bored, but we got a computer when I was a kid and I would play games. But I'd also do kind of weird things like I had a baseball card collection. And so I typed all the metadata from my baseball cards into a spreadsheet so that I could sort it so that I could.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up in Amarillo, Texas, which is in the panhandle. If you'd ever driven down I40 and seen the big signs for the restaurant that offers a 72 ounce steak for free if you eat it in an hour.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got here, yeah. I mean, you wouldn't have necessarily been able to predict that I'd end up here, I would say. I'm from Texas.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT