Slack

“And when you look at, like, the recent IPO this week of Etsy you know, they're a ten-year-old company, and Slack, You know, is a, you know, two-year-old company, and they, Slack is valued at a two-point-eight billion dollar valuation, where Etsy is, you know, …”

“So I think stockpiling the way a company like Slack is doing it at the moment seems counterintuitive from my point of view.”

“Slack is going to be bigger than HipChat or its entire competitive landscape in six months.”

“Slack just hit a twenty-four million run rate, basically one year after monetizing.”

“Slack and Voxer, for example, probably the two most used pieces of technology inside of Foundry after email.”

“I think something like Slack could have never been born, not just because the technology wasn't there, but because it was a sort of groundswell of support for this one communication method that just sort of blew up out of nowhere because the product itself was…”

“There are a lot of companies that have raised a lot of money at very high valuation, and I don't think that's going to work, and that's very clear in SaaS. Not all, not every company has the growth rate of slack. But many companies have the valuations that are…”

“You know, I think there will be a couple of, I think there will be an ecosystem built on top of Slack. And then I think there will be a handful of companies that that take that UI metaphor and become really successful outside of Slack.”

“My hypothesis is that at least at the beginning for sure, and I think going forward, they will live everywhere. One bot, I should think of a bot like I think of a contact person. It should be in my contact list. It should be in my Facebook messenger. Maybe it'…”

“We actually power that button. We power the gift button inside of Twitter. We power the gift button in Facebook. We power gifts in Slack.”

“Slack is one of the fastest growing companies, I think, that's been around, and it's poised to transform how people work and communicate, and build a true operating system and platform for productivity going forward.”

“Just because two people sit side by side in an open area office and have Slack and have email and have each other's cell phone numbers doesn't mean that they're communicating about the right things at the right time.”

“Slack, which is spreading virally at a, you know, velocity that's, I don't think I've seen before in the enterprise environment.”

“I think there's merits to all of them, but I would now lean more toward go to that medium-sized growth company. You know, if you can get in today at a company like Stripe or Slack, for example, I think you get incredible growth opportunities, and if you know, …”

“Slack, I think, is a really good example of, like, you just, you move on to that, and it's so much better than anything else out there. Like, I would really pay a lot more than they're charging to keep this product right now.”

“So whether it's Dropbox, or Slack, or the Microsoft, the three, six, five efforts, or what Adobe is magnificently doing, a lot of the enterprise is actually moving towards the consumer metaphor to sell software.”

“I just want to think back to Slack and Carter, two companies that we've worked with, you know, in the last couple of years, you know, both of them didn't really start investing in this Full bore, you know, well into about the series C, if I remember correctly.…”

“When you think about some of the very large public or non-public companies like, you know, ride sharing and office space sharing, these are tech-enabled companies for which technology is somewhat important, but that structurally have very low gross margins bec…”

“The other thing is about comments, and you know, we have like a Slack channel in Gusto, it's open to everyone, where literally every single NPS comment has been read by many, many people in our Gusto team, and especially The product and design teams.”

“If Slack was the flow of information, Notion was the stock, or if Slack was kind of synchronous communication, then Notion was the place for asynchronous communication.”

“I hope that venture funding becomes less of a closed circle, and actually that these networks become less important, and that access to this life-changing financial tool is democratized for many more people who didn't have the incredible luck That Jana and I h…”

“There I became the head of product and I started and ran the growth team in the effort to drive our daily active users from 500,000 to over six million in about three years.”

“Companies like Slack and superhuman are not only really active on Twitter and things like that, but have highly engaged high quality customer service too. And that is a really unsung competitive advantage.”

“Also worked with a lot of startups really early on, Shopify, Tumblr, Coinbase, Pinterest. We designed Slack.”

“On top of that, the ability for directors to get D&O insurance via direct listing is next to impossible, and I went through this at Slack, so I can tell you firsthand.”

“Even at Excel, our first investment in Slack was a seed. Our investment in Sentry started as a seed. Our investment in Cloudera was an EIR.”

“For the scale that we're at now, it's a little over 2500 employees and a billion dollar run rate for billing, so it's, you know, it's a pretty big company”

“Because I think you can, to a certain extent, deductively reason yourself to the right answer when it comes to product or marketing, or other functional areas of the business, I guess, finance and sales. You can't do it for leadership.”

“For me, listing all the challenges or the problems or things that aren't going well is Is an expression of optimism, because I believe that we can do something about them, and for certain personality types, I think it's, it feels like the opposite.”

“Prior to their direct listing in June, 2019, Stewart raised over 1.3 billion dollars from the likes of Excel, Thrive, SoftBank, Kleiner, IVP, T-Road, GV, and Andreessen, to name a few incredible investors.”

“Most of that original Flickr team got back together to start another company called TinySpec to build a web-based massively multiplayer game that didn't work, and then we ended up with Slack.”

“So the Slack from five years from now, I think we'll Continue to iterate and improve on the core user experience and the way that we deliver the service and the excellence in support and all that, but I think it will function much more like the lightweight fab…”

“We started three years or so before, maybe four years before we went public, for what we called public company readiness. In fact, PCR was like an acronym inside the company to refer to that”

“Certainly less than two years to get to a hundred million dollars in ARR.”

“The million dollar plus customers, a hundred percent of them use custom integrations, and the average is in the hundreds that they use.”

“The cleaner and more powerful of an answer we have for that or those questions, the faster it'll get adopted.”

“We didn't have Chamath Palihapitiya on the board for that long, but he was always great in that there would be just one or two things that he thought were more important than anything else, and we should be focusing our time on then, and everything else we wer…”

“There's 700,000 custom integrations that are actively used on Slack today. So 700,000 integrations that customers have set up.”

“We had five or six million dollars left when we decided to shut it down and work on Slack”

“Anyone who has been successful with any kind of software project, either in, like, the software industry, meaning enterprise, or consumer apps, or any kind of technology, knows that at some point, more than half of the effort just goes into paying off old tech…”

“The answer is almost never going to be it's too expensive or is lacking some feature I want. The answer is almost always going to be I have no idea what that does, and so the problem is almost always comprehension, but we treat it as if the problem is friction…”

“And founders like me, who remain the CEO, I think have a huge advantage. We don't have to be as good as leaders as like a professional CEO would be because we're the founder, because there's like something of the soul of the company that's tied up with us. So …”

“The biggest waste of time in product organizations is the preparation of slide decks, of static mock-ups of user interfaces, and then people go to the meeting and they all look at the slides and they give their opinion about whether it'll work or not. And to m…”

“Hopin operates in a way for recruitment. We operate it with, like, almost like a set of APIs that pin off when someone joins. It's like, okay, the line manager. It becomes super clear who it is because they get connected via Slack, and we do a few other things…”

“This was around 2017 when we really started building all of the developer community engagement programs that AWS still has today, including our developer Slack, our Reddit engagement, our Stack Overflow engagement, open sourcing product roadmaps on GitHub.”

“I learned from Fareed, who was director of growth at Slack, that premortems are far more effective than postmortems.”

“To be honest, there was a bit of cynicism around sales in the beginning at Slack, and I totally got that.”

“I wanted to help build slack, so I pitched a role that didn't exist, and I eliminated all the competition from my interview process. And got the role.”

“Danny is a partner at Sequoia Capital, and prior to entering the world of venture, Danny spent four years at Slack, As their head of enterprise sales at Slack, Danny built and scaled the self-serve, mid-market, and enterprise sales orgs across the Americas, as…”

“I've tried so many other types of community platforms, and none of them compare to how well thought through Slack is.”

“We're really heavy dog food and culture. Once a feature is ready, We just spin up a slack dog fooding channel, and the whole company goes at it, and everyone sends the feedback, and the engineers stack rank it, and figure out what they want to fix, and what th…”

“Now, I think Salesforce is probably going to be quiet for a little bit as they digest Slack.”

“Every iconic PLG company, whether it's Slack or Dropbox or Asana or Zoom, you know, at some point they have to add on that sort of direct selling motion to complement the PLG business.”

“Is they have their, essentially their self-serve or their lower end product cannibalize what could be their future enterprise product. We ran into that at Slack. We run into it at Webflow all the time where there has to be a huge product differentiation outsid…”

“So I gave the authority to approve a 200,000 dollar credit to a customer at Slack that my team was selling into.”

“As I mentioned, when I came into Slack, there had been absolutely no reach outs ever to anything proactive. Everything that we were doing, our single biggest goal, our single biggest charter was talk to the customers, was understand what is it That the custome…”

“I actually helped to build out our very first ever outbound motion at Slack, was the very first person to ever do it and ever do our first, which we called Proactive outreach. Cause outbound was, you know, of course a dirty word back then, but it is so importa…”

“At Slack is we didn't even start building an SDR team until 2017. So we had been around for almost three years at that point before we've really ever started dialing up this outbound motion.”

“If your product has a social collaboration, network effect, that kind of thing, think about Slack, LinkedIn, right, or anything like, or Airtable, Figma, hiring for growth early on, a little bit earlier, will allow you to engineering those growth loops into th…”

“The team right now is looking for alternatives. Not because you know, we love Slack. But you can see that over time, the search works a little bit, you know, worse. The buttons are moving to the wrong places. I care a lot about product and design. And I think …”

“I can very confidently say my career would not be where it is today if I hadn't gone for this job, and if I hadn't gotten that job”

“So something that we had at Slack that I then brought over to Webflow and created was a pregnancy support channel.”

“The vast majority of people who have worked at Slack on the product and design side had never worked in enterprise software before.”

“We wind up solving this like most people do at the end of the day, you use spreadsheets. So we have a Monday meeting, PD Monday meeting, as we call it, where like literally we just review in a spreadsheet, super manual process, but the top priorities for the q…”

“If you read the initial pitch deck, which they shared when they pivoted the company, It said, Slack is a product for teams of five to 50 people. The initial conception of Slack was, after 50 people, this thing probably won't scale.”

“Slack has probably around 1200 people across product design and engineering.”

“Over 85% of our enterprise customers, so, you know, customers of over a thousand users, started in self-service. So they didn't call up our sales team didn't call them. They started by signing up on slack.com, like, just like an SMB, sharing it with some co-wo…”

“And so we want to building a really robust in product trial program, many ways to flow into it, a guided experience. How can you make sure you're getting the value out of it? And that was probably, I mean, honestly, the single biggest thing we did on top of th…”

“I think we're good at talent integration. I think we struggle at product and technical integration.”

“The majority of things you're building as a private organization fall into two way door kind of decisions, especially things you can experiment with and then on release.”

“When they were trying to actually buy a product, I think you're right. I think often the thing we've learned is that it doesn't actually decrease time to market. You might bring in expertise and that's a good reason to do it, but that's at least what we've lea…”

“Our answer is that if we have to choose who we're serving above all else, it's actually the end user who's using the product and living in it for 10 hours a week. Because if we can make something that they love, that they feel like actually makes their working…”

“Most of the new capabilities that we launch can't be experiments at a user level because there are social features, right? You can't sit in a huddle by yourself. You have to be able to use it with the rest of your organization.”

“I mean, I think where internet was most true was 2018 to 2020. And I think I would, I think we would fess up to it entirely because back then, you know, this is again, I don't know if we could have done it differently. You're a small company. You can't do ever…”

“And I think frankly, especially given the competitive backdrop there, I think if we had not rushed it, but expedited into market back before there were more products that, you know, people were starting to use or get for free as defaults. And back when I think…”

“I think you can, but I think it's extremely difficult. I think Slack was able to do it. I think they nailed PLG first, and then enterprise, but they always had an eye towards enterprise. The reason why I say it's extremely difficult is to capture the end user'…”

“They had, in some cases, tens of thousands of users within single companies that said, Hey, look, we need to come to the table and operate.”

“At Salesforce, we gave them a fictitious company and a business set of business problems that they would solve using the Salesforce set of solutions. At Slack, we were comfortable with them positioning their own service, and so I think both have their advantag…”

“So Slack from day one had an appetite to work with large teams and large customers yet they had an incredibly engaging platform. So that ability to marry end user love with the enterprise posture right out of the gates, focus on large teams and all the securit…”

“And then when I was at Dropbox, I was responsible internally for kind of trying to build a Slack like product, basically a product that would allow communication on top of like the documents that are in, in, in Dropbox. And we just, we really, really didn't fi…”

“So for example, with my current team, we do a lot of real listening of calls. Like we just, and we publicly in a Slack channel, mark them when they're perfect. And we say, this is a perfect call. And we want to highlight why this is perfect.”

“I'm a big fan of like eliminating tools versus introducing more and more tools. Cause then what happens is things become fragmented that no one knows what should I slack versus what should I email, but what should I present via video?”

“Stuart Butterfield, when it didn't make it, his second gaming company, he offered to give all the money back. He offered to give what was left.”

“Some horizontal products are actually, you know, a vertical of their own, right? When I think about, you know, a Slack or a Dropbox, I think they actually fall into a very well-defined category in my mind. Like, You know what you're going to use Slack for. You…”

“And so how that actually plays out is probably a third of the company from my surveying has paid seats inside of Figma, and they pay about three times as much as they would for something like Slack.”

“Everyone is in Discord, by the way, now. I mean, it's so crazy, like, nobody is on Slack that I know in this environment.”

“In, in many cases, I think against Slack, we had a better product.”

“And so in the end, like, you know, deciding to shut down that product, we had a couple hundred people working on it. It was hard because a lot of people had poured their light, you know, heart and soul into it. We sold it to Slack”

“Twitter was a podcasting startup. Slack was a game. YouTube was a dating website.”

“I mean, I, we have, I'll tell you, we have Slack channels with every single negative feedback we get from customers. Every time we lose a deal, there's a Slack, like, why did we lose a deal? Who did we lose it to?”

“One of my favorites is actually a company called Office Vibe. It sends out polls through Slack, which we use Slack, and I measure Literally every day, I'm tracking and measuring our culture, and I can try, I can slice the data based on gender, based on tenure …”

“Like, you know, I think as a stat, 32% of European corporates do not know what Slack is.”

“Slack was worth twenty seven billion when Salesforce bought it and probably worth two billion today.”

“There's another thing I would say about prioritizing, Harry, is I think too many people run their life through Slack and through their email, and that's everyone else's priority list imposed on you, and so you're really just spending your whole time working on…”

“When you go to the leaders in Slack and LinkedIn at those times, they will tell you they will not, they were not implementing growth loops. They didn't know what a growth loop was. They were trying to find creative ways to get other users and other people to c…”

“So what we did was we conceded collaboration. So today our same fresh connect code that we built is integrating with Slack and teams. So we conceded collaboration to teams in Slack.”

“Like we took more than two years to launch, and by that time both Slack and Teams have actually started winning so many users, when we took it to our customers the CIOs actually told us, Girish, we are already dealing with slack and teams. We have to standardi…”

“Very rarely is it that your first incarnation of your product has perfect product market fit. That's very rare. You really, you know, if you look at the largest companies today, they were all created for a different reason and they ended up getting product mar…”

“What would Slack be worth today at two billion in revenue? Maybe it would be worth twelve billion, right? At twice the revenue.”

“Somebody who I really admire is Mamoon at Kleiner. I think Mamoon has an exceptional track record of investing in companies that are not at all obvious at the time. And I think about the series B in Figma, which is a round that we looked at and passed on. I th…”

“Google wave itself, like the project I work on at Google was really prescient in what it wanted to do in terms of real time communications and collaborations. But it was early for a bunch of reasons, like browsers weren't quite ready. People weren't quite read…”

“I actually once looked at my Slack history with Toby. And the most common phrase I had told him was, I disagree.”

“Because I think transparency is very, very important, we record every review, and we have a Slack chat, we use Slack, and we post every, about every review, the materials the recording the action items, the ETAs, like, everything is documented,”

“I think we drastically overestimate the technology sophistication of these companies. To be able to build with AI their own vertical solutions. Are you kidding me? They struggle to onboard Slack.”

“Probably Slack, I would say, you know, even at the 250 post that's, you know, with all the dilution over time and, If you take the twenty-seven billion or some other number that's a, obviously, a good, great multiple. Figma, you know, the initial investment wa…”

“There's one particular example that I think ended up working out pretty well. This is when Yammer got acquired by Microsoft it was a 1.2 billion dollar acquisition. At the time it felt like, man, we've got so much ahead of us. Yammer can become the next Slack,…”

“It was 500 K of ARR at the time... Two hundred fifty million post.”

“Slack created a market. In some ways, Figma created a market. There wasn't a notion of collaborative design software.”

“Understand the deep history of the individual Over a chronological period of time. I didn't realize that that was a hiring methodology until Bob Fratty taught me that at Slack, which is kind of this who hiring, the who hiring method is what we call a chronolog…”

“At Slack, anyone that was coming in as an AE had to do a writing exercise, and it wasn't a take home, like I think you just had to write something.”

“So I think one thing that I learned at Slack is like all Slack did was look at What the ARR was for the specific account, and then tied it, and they would only put a senior CSM on the, you know, whatever, the million dollar contracts.”

“It is important when you have, like, such a horizontal product like Slack that has product market fit to move upmarket faster and more aggressively.”

“I think you need to be very willing to do that. Now, the key thing that we've learned, and I, you know, learned this at Slack as well, but at Glean, You've got to have success criteria. You've got to have, okay, we're going to do, let's say for Fortune, 100 co…”

“When I joined Slack, I immediately, after we got to about ten million in revenue, Cut the team into SMB and enterprise, and I basically said enterprise is a thousand employees and above, SMB is below, and that way we just sort of put the resourcing, the more e…”

“I fundamentally believe they can be learned. You know, I think a lot of people would say it's innate, you know, you, you're born with it, it's that your personality, someone that's outgoing, but my philosophy is that pretty much humans can learn anything if th…”

“I knew the CEO at the time, John Ledger, used to hang out at the W Bar in Seattle, and so, Before an on-site, that night before, I just stayed in that W bar, like, just hanging out, and John Ledger came in, and I went up to him, and we spent time chatting. And…”

“We lost the distribution war at Slack. I think part of why we lost that war was, yes, like, monopolistic behavior by Microsoft, but Because we didn't lean into other effective fast distribution strategies other than PLG.”

“At Slack, Stuart was very involved on figuring out how to get those first customers and making them successful. Arvin, the same thing at Glean”

“In Europe, 62% of large enterprises still don't know what Slack is.”

“Majority of Enterprises, especially in Europe, do not know what Slack is, let alone what Notion is. So the fact that they're going to create their own verticalized AI tools is absolutely fucking moronic.”

“Whether if we're in person, it's an in-person meeting, we'll just huddle right after, or if it's a virtual, we'll just jump on a Slack huddle and do it, but we do it Quick. And we provide each other feedback, good, bad, and ugly. And it's two way.”

“All of their, not all of them, but the light, so many of the acquisitions, Slack, even Tableau, which I think was founded in the fifties. They're actually all growing faster than the core Salesforce. So like, we can say, oh, Slack isn't what it was, which it i…”

“My view, Stuart is a generational founder, right? Did it multiple times. Did the kind of CEO we'd all love to work for, right? But I think deep down in his heart, he didn't want to do multi-product or they would have been multi-product. Like it had an existent…”

“I don't know if you can get away forever in a horizontal app like Salesforce with a channel like Slack denying access, the denying the customer access to their own content over the medium term. I don't think it stands.”

“I just think it's a sign of a decaying empire. It's a sign that you can compete on the merits, and it's, I, it's a little bit of a dangerous sign.”

“I will say, I believe it would work if it's a very transactional product. Like, if you're like, hey, we're a conference, and we are selling conference booths, this is the price. I think, like, an AI Seller can actually probably sell that quite well, but when y…”

“And it was in the job that I realized that the account manager role was an account executive, a solutions engineer, and a customer success manager, all in one, helping our customers.”

“And so at Slack, we saw that our biggest workspaces were actually communities. They were professional networks that were using Slack to trade best practices. There were student groups that were using Slack to work on projects. And the sales team was tempted to…”

“Like for us, my theory was we didn't need PMs until call it 50 people or so. We actually do have some gaps. And so we have PM That's like former senior director at Slack that contributes about 15 hours a week, and it really helps fill the gaps on his enterpris…”

“The way you said it, honestly, people, product and market. I think the people, Define everything else. They are the upstream engine that makes everything go. They're the most important piece. Two, I think the product that the people build tell you a lot about,…”

“They were early to figuring out that there would be a huge opportunity in AI. So, you know, they famously were in NVIDIA in, in that fund you know, and they did some really good investments, like Slack, like Garnet.”

“But I have to say in my role now, I'm not sure that slack actually makes me better at what I do and makes my day better and more effective.”

“One of the ones I have that I think was a good habit in the beginning of the company is now, and now it's starting to get bad, is I zero out Slack, like, every, like, 15 minutes, and so I'm in, like, almost every single Slack channel, and I read every single t…”

“Slack never raised prices and still grew at 140% NRR.”

“I suspect as the year goes on, we're gonna see the same thing at Slack, because most folks haven't used it, we're on it. The AI version of Slack for certain use cases is so much better. I don't love that they're not just charging another four bucks a month, bu…”

“Most long Slack messages should have been a phone call.”

“We're building out an eval set that measures how effectively agents can build end-to-end SaaS applications, where twenty-twenty-five was the year of how do you get a model to make a PR and a code base, and twenty-twenty-six is the year of how do you get the mo…”

“Slack is also going to be a great, turn out to be a great acquisition, because like, that's pretty sticky. Nobody wants to replace, build their own Slack.”

“Capturing that context is really useful because it allows you, it allows an AI to automate that work. And the truth is a lot of that context exists in Slack. So if you're watching people interact on Slack, and if you watch it autonomously for weeks and months …”

“Slack was bought for twenty seven billion, which is rough and tough twice what Hugging Face apparently is going to get bought of. And we fell out of our chairs and it was the high watermark of that era, right? But it was at a billion in ARR. This one's at a hu…”

“We have two different channels, so one is Slack for work, and one is WhatsApp for private communication, so our life, and we never mix them”