Slite

Founder and CEO 🛰

Freelance

Freelance developer & designer

Cabine

Developed the whole product of a fashion delivery service we created in Paris.
Extremely ambitious and tricky business, we managed to launch and deliver ~200 orders before the logistical and sourcing challenges combined made us close it down.

Co-founder

Staffit

Launched in college, Staffit let recruiters without technical skills assessing their candidates.
We were offering proper tests based on projects, rated with peer assessments (candidates reviewing each others in a controlled manner).

This was R&D, and ended up not working at scale. We still got to develop and use in real conditions a prototype in 20 pilots, got incubated in a local Paris incubator, it was a terrific experience for a young engineer.

CEO at Slite 🛰 | YC alum | Building the first knowledge base on autopilot | Posts about future of work and knowledge management | Remote since 2016!

Building Slite in remote since 2016, a knowledge base for modern teams powered by AI.  

I constantly think, write about the next frontiers of work, share and discuss these thoughts here and on slite.com/blog.

I'm lucky enough to have built a brilliant team of 30 incredible human beings, spread in 12 countries 🇲🇦🇱🇹🇦🇷🇬🇧🇳🇱🇫🇷🇳🇴🇺🇸🇪🇸🇩🇪🇨🇦🇵🇹, to have attended YC in 2018, raised more than 15M$ with incredible investors such as Spark capital and Index ventures, and to serve dozens of thousands teams every month!

twitter.com/Christophepas

I got a new job 🚨

I'm  back to 0→1, building a whole new product, and I'm PUMPED!

It all started 15 months ago. It's Christmas, everybody is off, and the (virtual) office is quiet, except for 1 room where crazy things happen.

In this room, Florian and I, getting just crazy about all the things we can do with new LLMs, putting a list of all the experiments we want to run on the wall.

At the end of the first week, we ticked every box. Can you ask your Knowledge base? 

You need to give knowledge to AI, it's super hard, but it's also the most valuable piece. So we push, push, and get something that works, 25% of the time. Then 40%. 
By the end of the week, preparing for our team's return, it works 50% of the time, enough to know we can bring it to a 90% success rate with enough time and UX work.

That was the spark 🔥 In the following weeks, we onboarded pilots on what was the first knowledge base in the world allowing you to ask in natural language, and it was obviously going to change our category forever.

Fast forward 1 year, we turned Slite into the first Knowledge base on autopilot, rethinking dozens of its core jobs:

✅ Answering your question
✅ Detecting outdated docs
✅ Improving an entire document in 1 click
✅ Co-writing with AI
✅ Translating entire documents
✅ Generating directories of your docs
✅ Summarizing docs
✅ Asking on a specific doc
✅ Detecting icons with AI
✅ Answering questions automatically in Slack

We'll keep working on these, and of course, I remain CEO of Slite, of course, our core product remains!

But we came to realize we were building a ton of things no one else was doing right with Ask, and our expertise in knowledge management meant we could build something special for teams needing accurate Q&A on their data, no matter where their data lived. Yep, even Notion or Confluence 🙄

That's why 8 weeks ago we started one of our most ambitious projects ever, building a universal chat application with your data and tools.
We answer from all tools, and in many places (Slack, API, an app and an embed) and put a very heavy focus on accurate answers, with an experience to let you detect and fill the gaps in your knowledge.

We call it AskX (yet it's temporary, borrowing the way Hexa calls their product cc Thibaud Quentin Amaury 😘), I literally just onboarded the first pilots and I'll be heavily sharing on the progress in here + X!

If you need AskX, COMMENT with the tools you need to plug and use case you need this for 💬

Thanks already for all your help in the early design Sébastien Gendreau, Andre Foeken,Jordane Giuly, Will Sewell, Thomas Preston, Chase Warrington, Raphael Allstadt, Thomas Verschoren and for your incredible work already Florian Charley Antoine Guillaume and Danny! 

Christophe Pasquier

3 years ago I met Fadeelah, as she joined Slite as our first PM.

Today, she takes the role of COO 🔥🔥🔥

This new role is a change for me too. As we scaled Slite , I went from a 0 to 1 builder to the leader of a 30 people team.

We built an incredible business in a very hard market, experiences nobody in the world had done before (Ask AI, Wiki generator, AI document formatters being the last), and ended up serving dozens of thousands users every week.

But it got clear last year we needed more focus. We were not in the 0 to 1 phase anymore and my work was not reflecting that.

The trigger: my baby twins 🐣🐣

As I was getting ready for them, I felt more strongly than ever the need for me and for Slite to have another pillar to rely on, bringing structure and follow through when I would bring the chaos and ideas.

Fadz was the perfect person. She brings the highly structured background of a PM, the little spark of the ex-entrepreneur, and these 2 traits of characters combined will help us bring Slite to the moon!

Thanks so much again for taking on this new challenge Fadz, like you took the Head of product challenge before that! You will nail it equally.

PS - and stay tuned for more, this change also let me explore some veeeery exciting new things for Slite 🤫

One of the best habits you can have building a product: host Office Hours 🎙️

OH are so damn simple yet so effective.

Every month, 
- Prepare an overview of the high level updates
- Let people join a video call (through Livestorm 🥰)
- and just keep it super casual! Run a demo, ask some questions, even have user come on stage to share their tips! 

We usually have about 50 people at a time, leads or customers, it creates direct connection with your users, leads, it make them perceive you as real humans and as a result it 10x the chance they promote your tool or share deep feedback. 

We've been doing this for a bit more than a year, ran by Anouk van Tuinen and Elisa Reggiardo, and it's to this day one of the absolute best habit we took to get closer to our users. 

Want to see how it's done? Join our next session next week 😉 link in comment!

I created a GPT in OpenAI's ChatGPT, with custom action access to Slite (our knowledge base and meeting notes), Discourse (we use this for decision tracking), and Productboard (project planning) for Nedap Healthcare.

This allows us to have verbal conversations with all the information we have available. It's amazing how it is able to weave together different information sources and make connections.

A glimpse of the future (even more amazing to access it in the car using the Mobile Voice mode)

Pro tip to see problems in your product and documentation:
1/ Let users ask your help center with AI,
2/ See what fails.

Being able to collect open ended questions and to see where you fall short will change drastically how we approach documenting for others, you don't need to guess what needs to be written and spend 100h writing a "Bible" anymore.

Gentle reminder: It's time for you to unplug. You've had a long week.

Scammers got superpowers with AI

We need to fight back with AI!


Yesterday, my mother in law got scammed putting her credit card in a website looking absolutely legit, with https certificate and all. It seems they got the full card numbers unencrypted 😬

I checked the website and it was good. too good. The days of scamming and phishing only touching unaware 80+ yo elders is over.

It's so easy to generate great content, to put together perfect websites, and even to generate text, audio and deepfakes on the fly for advanced schemes that no one is safe anymore.

But it's always the same story, when they get bigger weapons, we need better countermeasures. We can fight back.

Which leads us to an example in the image below: how we fight scammers with GPT at Slite.

When you offer public sharing of content - which we are very proud to do and do well - you are immediately exposed to a very wide bunch of scammers:
Promotion of illegal products
People looking for good domain ranking SEO backlinks (don't try, it obviously doesn't work)
Content going against your policies
etc.

Charley in our team had the idea to add on top of a basic automation detecting potential issues a GPT layer to moderate the content and it saves us hours every week!

I don't know how we'll avoid getting scammed when we'll receive deepfakes from our relative (already happened). But it probably will be leveraging the same weapons.

💡 If you're a founder looking for a problem to crack, that would be a reeeeally good one! 

Changing teams dynamic is leaders' hardest job.

The best 2 ways to do so: crisis, and feedback loops.

Crisis is obvious. When you go through pivotal times, everything is on the table and you can leverage these moments to challenge aspects of your teams that felt engrained in the DNA. 

But you don't want to wait for a crisis to improve, and for softer changes, the best next thing are feedback systems. 

That was the theme of my latest internal update: "Be the change you want to see at Slite". 

Typically 
- Public praise and shout out can become addictive, in the good sense, creating emulation and an high sense of mutual respect in the team. If your team needs this, it's a great self replicating system you can create. 
- Negative feedback is the same, learnt right it becomes an habit incredibly hard to skip
- If you need for people to hyper focus on an objective, simply reminding it in dozens of touchpoints everyweek will create this, and lead them to re-use this with their teams.

The same applies in reverse
→ When we fail at sharing negative feedback, we let downward spirals happen.
→ When we ship something off, we reduce the average quality of the whole, make it harder to detect subpar items, and make it easier for this to happen again.


If you're a founder or leader, have you thought about it this way? Have you intentionally built such systems to orient your team in a certain direction?

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