snapshot of https://github.com/zulip/zulip.git @ 48c69911c7dd4e03b20552eb3bd77ad8151c1357 (2026-09-15)

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+How can a scrappy startup help mitigate the most immediately destructive aspects
+of climate change? [WindBorne](https://windbornesystems.com/) 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
+
+<figure class="markdown-image-with-caption">
+  <img src="/static/images/landing-page/case-studies/WindBorne-constellation.png" alt="Atlas, the largest balloon constellation in the world">
+  <figcaption class="markdown-image-caption">WindBorne Atlas, the largest balloon constellation in the world</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+## “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](https://www.stanfordssi.org/) 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](https://chat.zulip.org/?show_try_zulip_modal), 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](https://zulip.com/help/add-a-custom-linkifier) 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
+
+<div class="text-image-in-row">
+  <p class="text-image-in-row-text">
+    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.
+    <br/><br/>
+    Nathan designed a streamlined experience for coordinating contractors, with Zulip as the hub.
+    <br/><br/>
+    “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.”
+  </p>
+  <figure>
+      <!-- Set custom width to reduce image height so that it doesn't overflow text. -->
+      <img
+          class="text-image-in-row-image windborne-alaska-image"
+          src="/static/images/landing-page/case-studies/Alaska-balloon.jpg"
+          alt="Balloon launch in Alaska"
+      >
+      <figcaption class="markdown-image-caption">Balloon launch in Alaska</figcaption>
+  </figure>
+</div>
+
+> 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](https://zulip.com/api/running-bots), 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](https://zulip.com/help/mute-a-topic) bot conversations you aren't
+interested in. WindBorne
+[allows](https://zulip.com/help/restrict-message-editing-and-deletion#configure-message-deletion-permissions)
+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