Why Your Company's Knowledge Should Live in Markdown
By Wesley Black
Every few years, a new “knowledge management” tool appears. Notion. Confluence. Coda. They all promise to be the one place for all your company’s knowledge. They all have one thing in common: they store your data in a proprietary format you can’t easily take with you.
The export test
Here’s a simple test for any tool you use: can you export everything to a format that another tool can immediately use?
Try exporting your Notion workspace. You’ll get a pile of markdown files — but with Notion-specific syntax, broken links, and missing context. Try exporting from Salesforce. You’ll get CSVs that strip out relationships and history. Try exporting from Slack. You literally can’t without an enterprise plan.
Markdown is the answer
Markdown is plain text with minimal formatting. It was invented in 2004 and hasn’t changed much since. Here’s why that matters:
It’s human-readable. Open any markdown file in any text editor. You can read it immediately. No special software needed.
It’s machine-readable. AI agents can parse, search, and reason about markdown trivially. It’s the native format of LLMs.
It’s version-controllable. Git tracks every change to every file. You get full history, branching, and collaboration for free.
It’s portable. Move from one system to another by copying files. That’s it. No migration scripts. No data transformation. No vendor negotiations.
It’s permanent. Text files from 1970 are still readable today. Try opening a Lotus Notes database from 1995.
The Snowball architecture
Our knowledge engine — the Cube — stores everything as markdown files in a directory structure. Company knowledge, meeting notes, decisions, processes, client information. All in plain text, all in git, all on infrastructure you control.
AI agents read from and write to this shared knowledge base. Every interaction makes it richer. Every day compounds the value.
When a new team member joins, their AI agent immediately has access to the entire institutional memory of the company. No onboarding docs to read. No “ask Sarah, she knows how that works.” The knowledge is there, structured, searchable, and growing.
The anti-lock-in guarantee
If you decide our system isn’t for you, here’s what you take with you: a folder of markdown files containing every piece of knowledge your company has generated. Open them in VS Code, Obsidian, Notion, or cat. They work everywhere because they’re just text.
Compare that to canceling Salesforce.
The best format for your company’s knowledge isn’t the one with the most features. It’s the one that will still be readable in fifty years. That format is plain text.
Like the tech but don’t want to keep working with us? Go ahead. It’s yours. You own it. No license key. No broken contracts.