Making everything public has made PostHog easier to copy, meant we haven’t closed every hire we wanted to, and companies we’re selling to know our every move. Long-term, we still think it’s worth it. - externally, this builds trust. we write about what we’re working on so others can take advantage of it too and know how to work with us better. - the more context that lives in public, the less time is spent asking or looking for it. just as important now, it lets agents handle more things. - write about your strategy, share real numbers, publicize post-mortems. our post-mortem of the Shai-Hulud attack was one of our most-read blogs last year. - internally, we go further. managers tell you to share feedback directly, financials and board slides are shared, and team changes happen in public. if i think a team should be split up, i’ll literally post in their channel: “i think this team should be split into team A and team B, because you’re working on too many things together.” - it’s more efficient, and builds trust too. you get more feedback, the team aligns on direction, and there’s less resentment and politics. - ask (dumb) questions, share sales updates, and have disagreements in public channels. we trust people to spend in the company’s best interest, but have an expense-defense channel to back it up. i’ve called people out for using AI to write RFCs. - practically, putting things in public is uncomfortable. do it anyways. literally just ask yourself "if i was dutch, how would i handle this". - for example, i recently closed our private exec channel, which was reasonably active. nearly all exec discussions are now public, even significant positioning changes and their criticisms.

Part of being as transparent as possible is sharing info about potentially awkward moments, like when people leave PostHog. Just had a team member share their exit feedback, so I shared it with all employees (with permission!). My main takeaways: - we need to invest more in product design - there's a missing layer of product thinking below James and me - we need to start facilitating 360 feedback from people on different teams (right now it's all from immediate teammates)