We didn’t set out to build another SaaS tool. We started as a customer.
Our organization ran its 1:1 process through a third-party tool — one of the many well-designed, well-intentioned products in this space. It did its job. Then, like a lot of small vendors eventually do, it announced it was shutting down.
That’s normal. Startups exit. What wasn’t normal was what it made us realize: we’d never actually asked ourselves what a vendor shutdown means for the content of a 1:1. Performance concerns someone raised in confidence. A manager’s private notes on a direct report’s career trajectory. Compensation conversations. Personal circumstances an employee disclosed expecting it to stay between two people.
None of that content is ever supposed to be visible to anyone beyond the two participants — not their skip-level manager, not HR by default, not IT, and, we realized with some discomfort, not really the vendor either, even though the vendor could, technically, always see it. A shutdown is exactly the moment when a company’s data-handling practices get tested hardest: support staff doing exports, an acquirer doing technical due diligence, a skeleton crew winding things down under deadline pressure. We had no reason to think anything bad would happen with our data specifically. But we also had no way to know that it wouldn’t — because the entire model was “trust us,” and “us” was a company actively going out of business.
That’s the gap we decided was worth closing properly, not just for our own organization, but as something anyone in the same position could actually verify for themselves rather than take on faith. If a 1:1 platform is going to hold some of the most sensitive conversations a company has, “we promise not to look” isn’t a strong enough guarantee. The only guarantee strong enough is one where looking is not possible — where the operator, the IT team, the company that self-hosts it, even a full server compromise, gets nothing but ciphertext. That’s not a policy. That’s end-to-end encryption, done properly, with the code open for anyone to check that the claim is actually true.
encrypted1on1 is what came out of that.
The highest-leverage meeting on a manager’s calendar
Regular 1:1s aren’t a nice-to-have management ritual — they’re one of the best-evidenced levers an organization has for retention, engagement, and catching problems while they’re still small.
Andy Grove, in High Output Management (1983) — the book that effectively defined modern tech management practice — argued that a manager’s one-on-ones are among the highest-leverage activities available to them, precisely because they’re where a manager gets the information needed to act before a problem becomes visible anywhere else.
Ben Horowitz, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, builds directly on Grove’s framework and makes the same point from the other direction: a 1:1 is the employee’s meeting, not the manager’s status-update slot — its entire value is in surfacing what wouldn’t otherwise get said.
Google’s Project Oxygen — the internal research project that analyzed over 10,000 observations across 100+ variables to find out what actually distinguishes great managers from average ones — found that holding regular 1:1s, and running them well (employee sets the agenda, focus on development and well-being, not just task status), was one of the strongest identified behaviors. Technical expertise, notably, ranked last of the eight behaviors identified. (Google re:Work)
Gallup’s research is the sharpest business-value case: employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged as employees whose managers don’t. And managers account for 70% of the variance in team-level engagement — meaning the quality of the 1:1 relationship isn’t a soft factor, it’s the single most controllable driver of engagement an organization has. (Gallup, Gallup Business Journal)
Julie Zhuo (The Making of a Manager) and Camille Fournier (The Manager’s Path) — two of the most-cited modern management books, both written by former engineering-org leaders (Facebook, Rent the Runway) — independently arrive at the same conclusion: the 1:1 is the primary mechanism through which a manager actually does their job, not a meeting that competes with “real work.”
The pattern across all of this research is consistent: the value isn’t in having meetings. It’s in having them regularly, structurally, and with continuity — tracking what was said last time, what commitments were made, what goals are still open. That consistency is exactly what gets lost the moment 1:1s live in scattered documents, memory, or whatever tool happened to be open that week.
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