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+Founded in 2019 by a seasoned team of engineering and sales leaders, Atolio is a
+small startup with big ambitions to radically improve the way people deal with
+information at work. They have deep expertise in what it takes to [empower teams
+to collaborate effectively](/why-zulip/), and have thought hard about how to
+enable effective collaboration for their own team.
+
+> The first-class threads in Zulip are absolutely critical to how we work.  As
+> a fully distributed company, we needed a modern way to support the different
+> ways people work, while ensuring that everyone can find the current and
+> historical topics that are important to them.  So many people on Hacker News
+> talk about using Zulip - I'm so glad we joined them!
+>
+> — David Lanstein, co-founder and CEO of [Atolio](https://www.atolio.com/)
+
+
+## Taking the opportunity to pick the best collaboration tools
+
+Atolio’s founders set out to build a fully distributed company from the get-go,
+and they knew how important it would be to choose the right set of collaboration
+tools. “We had all used Slack, Jira and Confluence before, but we didn’t want to
+default to those options,” says Atolio’s co-founder and CTO Gareth Watts. “We
+wanted to take the opportunity to pick the best tools for our future team.”
+
+As past users of Slack’s team chat, Atolio’s founders were well aware of its
+downsides. "Slack is an extremely noisy environment. It’s very difficult to keep
+up with what your colleagues are doing, and it’s hard to separate chitchat from
+what’s important,” says Atolio’s CTO Gareth Watts. “Information in Slack’s
+threads ends up being even more hidden than other messages.”
+
+Thus the search was on to find a team chat tool that would truly serve Atolio’s
+needs. “We didn’t want Slack,” Gareth says. “We wanted a tool designed for
+asynchronous distributed communication, and Zulip seemed to fit the bill.”
+
+> Slack is an extremely noisy environment. It’s very difficult to keep up with
+> what your colleagues are doing.
+>
+> — Gareth Watts, co-founder and CTO of [Atolio](https://www.atolio.com/)
+
+## Trying out Zulip’s open-source team chat
+
+Beyond Zulip’s [topic-based threading model](/why-zulip/), Atolio’s team felt
+confident that they could [count on Zulip in the coming years](/values/) as they
+built out their company. “We liked that Zulip is an open-source tool with a
+[huge community](/team/) around it,” Atolio’s CTO Gareth Watts explains. “We are
+using Zulip Cloud, but if we want, we can export our data and
+[self-host](/self-hosting/) our own Zulip server. So we know Zulip will always
+be there for us.”
+
+Having decided to test out Zulip, Atolio’s founders realized that they should go
+all-in on a trial period. “We decided to turn off all other chat tools and try
+Zulip for a full month,” Gareth says. This way, the team could really see how
+Zulip would fit into the company’s communication patterns and workflows after an
+initial adjustment period. “After that, we could discuss if it wasn’t working
+out,” says Gareth. “But as it turned out, we never looked back.”
+
+> We decided to turn off all other chat tools and try Zulip for a full month…
+> We never looked back.
+>
+> — Gareth Watts, co-founder and CTO of [Atolio](https://www.atolio.com/)
+
+## “Zulip is at the core of our business”
+
+Since February 2020, Zulip has been the primary tool for internal communication
+at Atolio. “Zulip is at the core of our business,” Atolio’s CTO Gareth Watts
+explains. The team has always been able to rely on this crucial piece of company
+infrastructure. “The Zulip Cloud hosting has been bulletproof — we haven’t had
+any down time,” says Gareth.
+
+Zulip’s organized team chat has enabled Atolio to create the open communication
+culture the founders wanted. “Zulip lets us have conversations in public, not
+behind closed doors,” Gareth explains. “In Slack, two thirds of communication is
+not in public just to avoid noise. In Zulip, you can talk about what you want —
+you just give everything its own topic.”
+
+> In Zulip, it’s super easy to find things 24 hours later if you weren’t online
+> when a discussion happened.
+>
+> — Gareth Watts, co-founder and CTO of [Atolio](https://www.atolio.com/)
+
+Atolio’s distributed team also uses Zulip to build personal connections. With
+each conversation getting its own space in a dedicated topic, team members can
+share pictures of their cats or GIPHY memes without disrupting serious work
+discussions. And if a topic ever goes off on a tangent, it’s easy to split it in
+two and continue from there.
+
+When new team members join the company, the onboarding process welcomes them to
+Zulip and the company’s communication culture. An internal Wiki introduces
+Zulip’s [topic-based threading](/help/introduction-to-topics), [search
+tools](/help/search-for-messages), and some handy [keyboard
+shortcuts](/help/keyboard-shortcuts), with pointers to [Zulip’s help
+center](/help/) for more information. Gareth hasn’t seen much difference between
+onboarding to Zulip compared to other team chat tools: “If someone hasn’t used
+Slack before, they need onboarding too.”
+
+> Zulip lets us have conversations in public, not behind closed doors.
+>
+> — Gareth Watts, co-founder and CTO of [Atolio](https://www.atolio.com/)
+
+## Easy to integrate
+
+To make Zulip a central hub for updates about what’s happening, Atolio has
+integrated Zulip with its engineering tools. In a #tickets channel, a topic is
+created automatically for each ticket, so there is a dedicated space to discuss
+the issue at hand. There are topics in other Zulip channels for automated
+deployment announcements, and for bot posts when pull requests are opened or
+merged.
+
+Atolio has also [connected Zulip](https://www.atolio.com/connectors/) to their
+own unified search product. “Writing against the [Zulip APIs](/api/) has not
+been hard,” Gareth says. “And since it’s open-source, we can always [read the
+source code](https://github.com/zulip/zulip#readme) if we find the docs
+confusing.”
+
+---
+
+Check out our guide on [using Zulip for business](/for/business/). You can also
+learn how Zulip is being used at the InsurTech startup
+[Semsee](/case-studies/semsee/), the [iDrift AS](/case-studies/idrift/) company,
+the [End Point Dev](/case-studies/end-point/) software consultancy, and the [GUT
+contact](/case-studies/gut-contact/) support agency.