We are trying to make writing things down worth it.
Every company already knows it should write more down. Almost none of them do, and the reason is not discipline — it is that a written thought has nowhere to go.
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2023
Dara and Wren spend a fortnight watching people use their own document tool, and count the eleven minutes.
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2024
The first version ships to nine companies. It has notes and nothing else — no agents, no search, no board.
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2025
Agents arrive, and are ignored for four months until we make them show their working.
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2026
Seats are retired. Reading and writing become free for everyone in a company, on every plan.
How we got here.
Margin started as a stopwatch. In 2023 we sat with people at three companies and timed the gap between noticing something wrong in a document and filing something a colleague could act on. The median was eleven minutes, and nine times out of ten they gave up before the eleven minutes were done.
Everything since has been an attempt to get that number to zero. The note came first, then the board it lands on, then the agents that pick it up, then a price that does not punish you for inviting the person who needed to read it. We are not finished, and the stopwatch is still running.
Four things we argue about.
Written down, on a page, with notes in the margin where people disagreed.
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Write it down or it did not happen
Every decision we make lives on a page with a note beside it. New people read the argument, not just the outcome.
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Show the working
Applies to our agents and to us. A conclusion nobody can check is a conclusion nobody will act on.
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Charge for the work, not the seat
The product gets better with more people in it. Pricing that fights that is pricing we have to change.
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The fourth draft is the one
We ship slower than we could and rewrite more than is comfortable. It is the only quality lever we trust.
Twenty-nine people, one page.
We are small on purpose and write far more than a company this size normally does.
See the open roles-
Dara Okonjo
Co-founder
Wrote the first note object on a train.
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Wren Adeyemi
Co-founder
Killed seat pricing, twice.
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Priya Raman
Engineering
Built the step log before the agent.
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Sasha Merrin
Design
Owns the margin, literally.
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Ari Vance
Infrastructure
Keeps the answers under 200ms.
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Rowan Ellery
Operations
Ran the eleven-minute sync first.
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Nadia Boulos
Support
Answers before the agent does.
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Theo Lindqvist
Security
Reads every audit log for fun.
Come and write things down with us.
Or just use the thing. Both are a reasonable way to start.