2023-04-26 21:53:36 +02:00
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Founded in 2019 by a seasoned team of engineering and sales leaders, Atolio is a
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small startup with big ambitions to radically improve the way people deal with
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information at work. They have deep expertise in what it takes to [empower teams
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to collaborate effectively](/why-zulip/), and have thought hard about how to
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enable effective collaboration for their own team.
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> “The first-class threads in Zulip are absolutely critical to how we work. As
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> a fully distributed company, we needed a modern way to support the different
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> ways people work, while ensuring that everyone can find the current and
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> historical topics that are important to them. So many people on Hacker News
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> talk about using Zulip - I'm so glad we joined them!”
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>
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> — David Lanstein, co-founder and CEO of [Atolio](https://www.atolio.com/)
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## Taking the opportunity to pick the best collaboration tools
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Atolio’s founders set out to build a fully distributed company from the get-go,
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and they knew how important it would be to choose the right set of collaboration
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tools. “We had all used Slack, Jira and Confluence before, but we didn’t want to
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default to those options,” says Atolio’s co-founder and CTO Gareth Watts. “We
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wanted to take the opportunity to pick the best tools for our future team.”
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As past users of Slack’s team chat, Atolio’s founders were well aware of its
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downsides. "Slack is an extremely noisy environment. It’s very difficult to keep
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up with what your colleagues are doing, and it’s hard to separate chitchat from
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what’s important,” says Atolio’s CTO Gareth Watts. “Information in Slack’s
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threads ends up being even more hidden than other messages.”
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Thus the search was on to find a team chat tool that would truly serve Atolio’s
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needs. “We didn’t want Slack,” Gareth says. “We wanted a tool designed for
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asynchronous distributed communication, and Zulip seemed to fit the bill.”
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> "Slack is an extremely noisy environment. It’s very difficult to keep up with
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> what your colleagues are doing.”
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>
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> — Gareth Watts, co-founder and CTO of [Atolio](https://www.atolio.com/)
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## Trying out Zulip’s open-source team chat
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Beyond Zulip’s [topic-based threading model](/why-zulip/), Atolio’s team felt
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confident that they could [count on Zulip in the coming years](/values/) as they
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built out their company. “We liked that Zulip is an open-source tool with a
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[huge community](/team/) around it,” Atolio’s CTO Gareth Watts explains. “We are
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using Zulip Cloud, but if we want, we can export our data and
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[self-host](/self-hosting/) our own Zulip server. So we know Zulip will always
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be there for us.”
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Having decided to test out Zulip, Atolio’s founders realized that they should go
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all-in on a trial period. “We decided to turn off all other chat tools and try
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Zulip for a full month,” Gareth says. This way, the team could really see how
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Zulip would fit into the company’s communication patterns and workflows after an
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initial adjustment period. “After that, we could discuss if it wasn’t working
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out,” says Gareth. “But as it turned out, we never looked back.”
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> “We decided to turn off all other chat tools and try Zulip for a full month…
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> We never looked back.”
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>
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> — Gareth Watts, co-founder and CTO of [Atolio](https://www.atolio.com/)
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## “Zulip is at the core of our business”
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Since February 2020, Zulip has been the primary tool for internal communication
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at Atolio. “Zulip is at the core of our business,” Atolio’s CTO Gareth Watts
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explains. The team has always been able to rely on this crucial piece of company
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infrastructure. “The Zulip Cloud hosting has been bulletproof — we haven’t had
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any down time,” says Gareth.
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Zulip’s organized team chat has enabled Atolio to create the open communication
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culture the founders wanted. “Zulip lets us have conversations in public, not
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behind closed doors,” Gareth explains. “In Slack, two thirds of communication is
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not in public just to avoid noise. In Zulip, you can talk about what you want —
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you just give everything its own topic.”
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> “In Zulip, it’s super easy to find things 24 hours later if you weren’t online
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> when a discussion happened.”
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>
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> — Gareth Watts, co-founder and CTO of [Atolio](https://www.atolio.com/)
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Atolio’s distributed team also uses Zulip to build personal connections. With
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each conversation getting its own space in a dedicated topic, team members can
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share pictures of their cats or GIPHY memes without disrupting serious work
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discussions. And if a topic ever goes off on a tangent, it’s easy to split it in
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two and continue from there.
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When new team members join the company, the onboarding process welcomes them to
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Zulip and the company’s communication culture. An internal Wiki introduces
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2024-04-30 17:51:46 +02:00
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Zulip’s [topic-based threading](/help/channels-and-topics), [search
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2023-04-26 21:53:36 +02:00
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tools](/help/search-for-messages), and some handy [keyboard
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shortcuts](/help/keyboard-shortcuts), with pointers to [Zulip’s help
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center](/help/) for more information. Gareth hasn’t seen much difference between
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onboarding to Zulip compared to other team chat tools: “If someone hasn’t used
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Slack before, they need onboarding too.”
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> “Zulip lets us have conversations in public, not behind closed doors.”
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>
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> — Gareth Watts, co-founder and CTO of [Atolio](https://www.atolio.com/)
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## Easy to integrate
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To make Zulip a central hub for updates about what’s happening, Atolio has
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integrated Zulip with its engineering tools. In a #tickets stream, a topic is
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created automatically for each ticket, so there is a dedicated space to discuss
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the issue at hand. There are topics in other Zulip streams for automated
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deployment announcements, and for bot posts when pull requests are opened or
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merged.
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Atolio has also [connected Zulip](https://www.atolio.com/connectors/) to their
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own unified search product. “Writing against the [Zulip APIs](/api/) has not
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been hard,” Gareth says. “And since it’s open-source, we can always [read the
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source code](https://github.com/zulip/zulip#readme) if we find the docs
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confusing.”
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---
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Check out our guide on [using Zulip for business](/for/business/). You can also
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2024-02-21 22:01:33 +01:00
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learn how Zulip is being used at the InsurTech startup
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[Semsee](/case-studies/semsee/), the [iDrift AS](/case-studies/idrift/) company,
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the [End Point Dev](/case-studies/end-point/) software consultancy, and the [GUT
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contact](/case-studies/gut-contact/) support agency.
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