The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 141 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Wilkinson: MetaLab designed Slack and worked with Shopify, Coinbase, and Pinterest
“Also worked with a lot of startups really early on, Shopify, Tumblr, Coinbase, Pinterest. We designed Slack.”
Merci Victoria Grace grew Slack from 500K to 6M daily active users
“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.”
High-quality customer service is an unsung competitive advantage for startups
“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.”
Danny Rimer: Enterprise Software Is Adopting Consumer Selling Metaphors
“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.”
Blomfield: Slack is far superior to alternatives and underpriced
“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.”
Fine: Open offices and chat apps do not guarantee effective communication
“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.”
Giphy powers the native GIF buttons inside Twitter, Facebook, and Slack
“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.”
Kadavy: AI bots will exist everywhere across existing platforms, not standalone
“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'…”
Tunguz predicts a massive ecosystem will be built on top of Slack
“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.”
Slack succeeded through bottom-up groundswell adoption driven by product quality
“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…”
Lipman: Two-year-old Slack valued at $2.8B compared to Etsy's $3.5B IPO
“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, …”
Lemkin: Slack achieved 140% NRR without raising prices
“Slack never raised prices and still grew at 140% NRR.”
Sierra Conducts Real-Time Sales Call Postmortems With Two-Way Feedback
“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.”
Slack segmented sales into SMB and enterprise at $10M ARR
“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…”
AJ Tennant met T-Mobile's CEO at a bar to impress the CIO
“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…”
Personio records and posts materials for every product review on Slack
“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,”
Freshworks repurposed its failed collaboration product to integrate with Slack and Teams
“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.”
Freshworks lost collaboration market to Slack by taking two years to launch
“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…”
Cotopaxi Uses OfficeVibe Daily to Measure Company Culture via Slack
“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 …”
Ramp Tracks All Negative Feedback and Lost Deals in Dedicated Slack Channels
“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?”
Seibert: Twitter, Slack, and YouTube originated as completely different products
“Twitter was a podcasting startup. Slack was a game. YouTube was a dating website.”
Atlassian had 200 employees on Stride before selling to Slack
“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”
Lemkin: Stuart Butterfield offered to return remaining capital when gaming startup failed
“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.”
Jiménez: WorkRamp shares exemplar sales calls publicly in Slack
“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.”
Dropbox's Internal Slack Competitor Product Was a Big Flop
“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…”
Salesforce and Slack used different sales candidate mock scenarios
“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…”
Weiss: Slack has around 1,200 employees in product, design, and engineering
“Slack has probably around 1200 people across product design and engineering.”
Maggie Hott: Career trajectory depended on taking Slack leadership role while pregnant
“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”
Whatnot Runs Company-Wide Slack Dogfooding Before Releasing New Features
“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…”
Herzberg got hired at Slack by pitching an unadvertised role
“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.”
Hopin uses automated Slack API triggers for remote employee onboarding
“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…”
Slack prepared public company readiness 3 to 4 years before listing
“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”
Slack Has 700,000 Actively Used Custom Integrations
“There's 700,000 custom integrations that are actively used on Slack today. So 700,000 integrations that customers have set up.”
Tiny Speck had $5M–$6M remaining when pivoting to Slack
“We had five or six million dollars left when we decided to shut it down and work on Slack”
Gusto streams every customer NPS comment into an open company-wide Slack channel
“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.”
Franceschetti: Eight Sleep co-founders separate work and personal life on Slack and WhatsApp
“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”
Early Slack Account Managers handled AE, SE, and CSM duties combined
“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.”
AJ Tennant: Slack required all AE candidates to complete a writing exercise
“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.”
AJ Tennant: Stewart Butterfield and Arvind Jain personally drove early sales
“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”
Maggie Hott: Established pregnancy support employee channels at Slack and Webflow
“So something that we had at Slack that I then brought over to Webflow and created was a pregnancy support channel.”
Slack grew revenue from $100M to $1B during Herzberg's tenure
“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…”
Linda Lian: AWS launched its developer community programs around 2017
“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.”
Slack Raised Over $1.3 Billion Prior to Its Direct Listing
“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.”