Announcing the Zulip Foundation

Today marks a major transition for the Zulip open-source project and for Kandra Labs, the company behind it: I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership to join Anthropic, alongside three senior team members, and we’re donating the company to a newly created, independent, nonprofit Zulip Foundation. The new structure provides stability, a renewed commitment to our values, and opportunities for charitable fundraising to support our mission. This blog post explains these changes and why they set Zulip up for greater long-term success.

Zulip is a beloved organized team chat product, used by thousands of companies, open-source projects, and research communities. Zulip is known for its unique topic-based threading model, which makes it easy to have many conversations in parallel without chaos, interruptions, or stress. April’s Zulip 12.0 release included almost 5,500 commits contributed by 160 people from all around the world.

Zulip’s new ownership and governance structure

The Zulip Foundation will be the formal steward of the Zulip project, with a mission of developing the best possible team chat experience, with a particular focus on public-interest organizations and communities.

Kandra Labs, the company that has stewarded Zulip for the last decade, will now be fully and independently owned by the Zulip Foundation, with no other stockholders or debt obligations. Kandra Labs will continue hosting, supporting, and improving Zulip for use across all industries, offering an excellent experience for business customers. We’re committed to being a trustworthy, transparent vendor for our customers, and anticipate no major changes in how we conduct business.

I’m excited that this new structure — similar to governance structures for Mozilla, Signal, and Wikipedia — formalizes our longtime commitment to Zulip’s sustainability and independence.

The foundation’s initial board of directors will be:

• Tim Abbott, Zulip’s founder (me).
• Greg Price, who has helped me lead Zulip in a cofounder-like role for the last 9 years.
• Alya Abbott, Zulip’s product lead, who has also held a cofounder-like role for the last 5 years.
• Josh Triplett, a leader in the Rust programming language, experienced in open source, and a major advocate for Zulip.

We also have five incredible people signed on to share their expertise as members of an advisory board:

• Andrew Sutherland, mathematician and senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and President of the Number Theory Foundation. He is a leading advocate of Zulip for research collaborations, including the L-functions and Modular Forms Database.
• Hazel Weakly, a former Director of the Haskell Foundation Board, open source and community advocate, and a Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation.
• Jeremy Avigad, a Professor of Philosophy and Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and Director of the NSF Institute for Computer-Aided Reasoning in Mathematics. He is a founding member of the Lean Community organization, for which Zulip has hosted more than two million messages to date.
• Nick Bergson-Shilcock, the CEO and cofounder of the Recurse Center, a programming retreat based in New York whose community of 3,000+ alums has run on Zulip since 2013.
• Puneeth Chaganti, an OCaml developer working on core ecosystem tooling, and a mentor for Zulip’s Google Summer of Code program since 2018.

I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has volunteered to help launch the Zulip Foundation. We’re looking to recruit one additional director, and to fill out a larger advisory board. If you or someone you know may be a good fit, please reach out to foundation-jobs@zulip.com to let us know!

If you’d like to follow along, please sign up for occasional email updates from the Zulip Foundation.

Stability during the leadership transition

Zulip’s operations will continue without interruption, including Zulip Cloud; the Mobile Push Notifications Service and support contracts for self-hosted organizations; our Google Summer of Code mentorship program, with 11 participants this summer; and our sponsorships for the thousands of open-source projects and other public-interest organizations that Zulip Cloud hosts free of charge.

Kim Vandiver, an experienced leader and operator, has joined Kandra Labs as Interim President to help ensure a smooth transition. This is not the first time Kim has raised her hand to help a values-focused organization in a time of change: at VaccinateCA, a rapidly evolving COVID-era effort to spread information about vaccines, Kim jumped in to revamp a variety of processes — first as a volunteer, and then as the Director of Operations. I’m extremely grateful to have her here to manage operations and help run a global search for the best possible leadership for Zulip going forward.

Operationally, both Zulip Cloud and the self-hosted experience are the most stable that they have ever been. We’ve always had a relentless focus on eliminating bugs and workflow warts, and have made an especially strong push on this in the past year. I expect there will be a reduction in development velocity over the next quarter as the organization adapts to the leadership change, but it will feel like a small blip when we look back.

A formal commitment to our values, and a new avenue for sustainable funding

There are two main reasons why I’m excited about this change: it allows us to make a permanent, public commitment to the values we’ve long operated by, and it offers a new avenue for Zulip to raise funds without ceding control.

Kandra Labs has always been a mission- and values-focused company. We have a long-running sponsorship program, and have always prioritized features primarily useful for communities alongside features for business users. Kandra Labs has been public about its values for years — including our commitments to protecting customer data privacy, and to keeping our focus on the product, not on whatever’s commercially fashionable. The Zulip Foundation formalizes and makes permanent our values beyond my tenure as CEO.

It’s hard these days to feel confident that a company whose product you love won’t yield to commercial pressure and start selling your data, putting in ads, or otherwise violating your trust. It’s been a challenge to convincingly make the case that this won’t happen to Zulip, especially to folks who might not have time to investigate deeply. The Zulip Foundation, which has the goal of serving the public good, makes this so much easier to communicate clearly.

The new foundation also puts Zulip in a much stronger fundraising position. Over the years, I’ve been reluctant to accept external funding for Zulip, even from angel investors I trust, because fiduciary duties to those investors could eventually generate pressure for us to compromise our values. As a result, the company’s funding has been driven by how much I’m able to personally invest in Zulip above and beyond its subscription revenue.

With the foundation in place, we’ll be able to apply for grants we were previously ineligible for, and receive tax-deductible donations from individual donors. The foundation can also run fundraising campaigns that would not have felt appropriate for an open-source project with a privately owned company behind it.

Why I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership

I’m stepping back from Zulip to join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. Three additional members of Zulip’s longtime leadership team are also joining me at Anthropic: Alya Abbott, Greg Price, and Alex Vandiver.

My career choices have always been motivated by a sense of responsibility to use my talents for the public benefit. This motivation is what led me to found Zulip and lead it for a decade with our unusual values-focused approach. I remain committed to Zulip and its mission, and had imagined spending the rest of my career working on it. So what changed?

Over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting deeply on the myriad ways in which AI is changing the world, and how it might change the world in the future. And I came to the conclusion that it’s vitally important that we navigate this strange adolescence of technology well, and that I should contribute to this cause more directly than I ever could as the CEO of Kandra Labs.

My non-negotiable requirement for moving on from Zulip has always been ensuring that Zulip can continue its mission effectively without me. I’m deeply grateful to be in a position to do exactly that by creating the nonprofit Zulip Foundation.

Zulip’s team of professional maintainers

All Kandra Labs team members who are not joining Anthropic will continue working on Zulip. These 12 amazing people have an average of over 4 years of professional experience working on Zulip, and almost 25,000 Zulip commits between them. They have shipped major improvements end-to-end across every facet of the product, and I have full confidence in their ability to move the project forward.

Ultimately, Zulip’s strength is its culture and incredibly disciplined development process. The team has demonstrated the ability to operate and develop Zulip without me during the six months of my parental leave (spread across my three kids). I’ve never shared this so publicly before, but in 2018 I developed a chronic illness that was initially highly debilitating, and continued to impact my work until last year. Yet our wonderful team and community made steady progress even through the worst of it.

Over the coming months, the team will be hiring to fill roles opened by the departures. If you or someone you know may be interested in a leadership or infrastructure role, learn more and reach out!

I personally expect to remain involved with Zulip as a contributor, providing context, history, reviews, and advice as time permits.

Reach out!

While I’m excited for Zulip’s future, I know folks will have lots of questions about what it all means. Our team would love to answer them as transparently as we can. We invite everyone to join us for a live chat Q&A in the Zulip development community on Tuesday, May 19 at 4 PM UTC (9 AM US Pacific / 12 PM US Eastern / 9:30 PM IST).

If you have any questions or concerns as a Zulip customer, please contact support@zulip.com. As always, all are welcome to drop by the Zulip development community — the #general channel is a great place to ask about this transition.