About
Four people, one product, no roadmap slide
Cadence is made by a company of four in a rented room above a bakery. We have one product and no plan to have a second one.
Why it exists
It started as a Thursday evening chore
Two of us ran delivery teams at a company where every Friday someone spent an hour reading chat backwards to write an update nobody was sure anyone read. We built the first version to get that hour back, for one team, on one laptop. It was three hundred lines long and it only read one chat channel. The part that surprised us was not the writing. It was that once the summary existed, arguments about what had happened stopped, because there was a page with links on it. That is the whole product: a shared record of the week that somebody is accountable for.
The four of us
How it got here
Year one
A script for one team, run by hand on a Thursday. Two chat channels, no editor, no archive.
Year two
Six teams at three companies paid for it. We added the Thursday draft and the sign-off, because the unedited version was wrong often enough to be dangerous.
Year three
Links to sources on every line. This is the change people mention most, and it is the one we resisted longest.
Now
Around two hundred teams. Four of us, no outside money, and the price has gone up once.
Who you are writing to
Support is not a department here
When you send a message through the contact page, one of these four answers it.
Mara Oduya
Writes the code that reads your sources
Spent eight years on data pipelines and is unreasonably strict about what counts as a source.
Tomas Reijer
Decides what the summary says
Former delivery lead. Argues for fewer headings roughly once a quarter and loses.
Ines Carbo
Design and the editor screen
Responsible for the rule that a draft must be readable in under two minutes.
Devan Holt
Billing, contracts and the security questionnaires
Answers the procurement forms so the rest of us do not have to, and answers support email first.
What we have decided not to do
Four promises that cost us money
No scores for people
Cadence will never rank a person by how much they appeared in the week. We have been asked for this and we have said no each time.
No reading between the lines
The summary reports what was written. It does not infer mood, risk or sentiment from how somebody typed.
No lock-in
Everything exports as plain Markdown, one file per week, with the source links intact.
No acquisition-shaped features
We are not building a suite. If a request would make Cadence into a second product, the answer is no.
That is the whole company
If you want to know how a particular thing works before you pay for it, ask. You will get an answer from one of the four.