Case study: WindBorne

How can a scrappy startup help mitigate the most immediately destructive aspects of climate change? WindBorne is advancing humanity's ability to predict the weather — from hurricanes to heatwaves — and thus manage its impacts.

Zulip has been WindBorne's irreplaceable hub for coordinating work that ranges from balloon launches around the globe to developing state-of-the-art AI models.

“All our digital communication flows through Zulip… We have three deep learning channels, each with twenty active topics a day. No other chat system could support that.”

— John Dean, co-founder and CEO of WindBorne

“We were addicted to Slack”

When WindBorne co-founders started the company in 2019, Slack was the obvious choice for their team chat. The team had met as Stanford undergrads, launching high-altitude balloons with the SSI engineering student group. “All the WindBorne cofounders were addicted to SSI's Slack — we loved it,” says John Dean, WindBorne's co-founder and CEO.

The delight didn't last. The company's 12-person team was trying to use chat for serious technical discussions, and Slack's user experience didn't feel so great for that purpose. “With overlapping conversations, there was no way to make it work. Slack threads are trying to solve a real problem, but solving it in a bad way,” says John.

“Over 2019 and 2020, Slack got worse and worse,” John recalls. “I was using it in Firefox on Linux, and things would just hang.” When Slack had outages, the entire team's work would be disrupted for hours.

“Oh my god, this is awesome”

When John discovered Zulip, its topic-based threading felt like the right solution to Slack's messiness. After giving the app a try in the Zulip development community, WindBorne opted to host their own Zulip instance. (Never again will they have to rely on an external vendor to manage their critical communication infrastructure.)

“After a couple of days, I thought: `Oh my god, this is awesome. How on earth would you not use Zulip?'” John says. “It was so much easier to communicate.”

“How on earth would you not use Zulip?”

— John Dean, co-founder and CEO of WindBorne

Zulip's threading model was transformative, but John also appreciated other touches. “Zulip linkifiers are amazing,” John says. In WindBorne's Zulip, “W-” followed by a balloon's ID number auto-links to that balloon's mission page, and “/live” goes to a live map of balloon locations.

WindBorne's Head of Global Launch Operations Nathan Kaplan experienced a similar revelation when he joined the company in 2023. “My previous company used Slack, and they required threads for everything. It was a complete mess,” Nathan says. “Zulip took some getting used to, but after two weeks, it was so much better than anything I'd used before.”

“I love the application, and couldn't dream of going back to anything else. Slack and Discord just pale in comparison.”

— Nathan Kaplan, Head of Global Launch Operations

Communication hub for coordinating dozens of contractors worldwide

Nathan travels around the world to manage WindBorne's balloon launch sites — he's onboarded dozens of international contractors who run WindBorne's launch operations.

Nathan designed a streamlined experience for coordinating contractors, with Zulip as the hub.

“80 to 90 percent of the work a contractor does happens within their launch support channel on Zulip,” Nathan explains. “A big “aha” moment for them is knowing what they need to launch based on messages in the “launch planning” topic from the last few days, without having to do a bunch of scrolling.”

“Zulip organizes ideas in such a clean and simple way. You get easy readability over months, not just hours like in other apps.”

— Nathan Kaplan, Head of Global Launch Operations

Zulip also serves as a rapid prototyping platform to try out and refine workflows before implementing them in WindBorne's dedicated launch management product. Last year, Nathan used Zulip to develop a workflow for uploading photos of balloon sensor bags. Only once requirements were clear did the team kick off a major engineering project to build uploads into the launch management app.

“Zulip offers us so much more than anything else really could — especially for the contractor onboarding experience, and how we manage the entire team.”

— Nathan Kaplan, Head of Global Launch Operations

The perfect platform for LLM bots

Zulip is a communal playground for WindBorne's team to try out new ideas. Using Zulip's bot API, they built bots that provide daily conversation summaries, post pull request reviews, and (more whimsically) generate images of landscapes with balloons.

Zulip has been perfect for managing context for LLM bots: “If you integrate an LLM bot into Slack, you can't manage its context window — off-topic messages can poison the context,” John explains. “With Zulip, you can always just start a new topic, and move messages around as needed.” John even uses a personal Zulip instance as a note-taking app with integrated LLMs.

The team can experiment freely together without disrupting anyone's work: it's easy to mute bot conversations you aren't interested in. WindBorne allows any employee to delete messages to clear out experiments that didn't work out. (Server administrators can review the activity log to make sure this permission is not abused.)

“Zulip allows me to build the culture I want.”

— John Dean, co-founder and CEO of WindBorne