Clay tells staff: writing a document should take longer than reading it
The sales software company has put a rule in writing about how long internal documents should take to produce. The detail of how it is enforced has not been published.
Clay, the New York sales software company, has a written rule for internal documents: composing one should take longer than reading it.
The point is the asymmetry. A document that takes two minutes to generate and twenty minutes to read moves the work from the writer to everyone else on the thread.
Inc. reported the rule this week, and put Clay's valuation at $5bn. The company's own account of how the policy is applied, and what happens when someone breaks it, has not been published.
The rule is aimed squarely at what AI tools make easy. Anyone can now produce a long, confident memo in seconds, which is exactly why the cost of reading one has stopped being trivial.
For a founder, the transferable part is not the wording but the test. If a document took less effort to write than it takes a colleague to absorb, the thinking has not been done yet — it has been outsourced to the reader.
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