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 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
O'Driscoll: Slack restricting customer data access will fail over the medium term
“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.”
Early Slack Sales Reps Received Flat Salaries Without Commissions or Quotas
“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…”
Hsu: Slack and Carta didn't build dedicated data teams until Series C
“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.…”
Shah: Late-stage SaaS companies face an inevitable valuation course correction
“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…”
Lemkin: Slack hit $24M run rate one year after monetizing
“Slack just hit a twenty-four million run rate, basically one year after monetizing.”
Hugging Face Valuation Multiple Far Exceeds Slack's $27B Acquisition
“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…”
The original SoftBank Vision Fund correctly identified the massive AI opportunity
“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.”
Egan: Slack Reached Tens of Thousands of Organic Users Per Company
“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.”
Slack Did Not Build an SDR Team Until 2017
“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.”
Liaw: Salesforce will pause major M&A while digesting Slack
“Now, I think Salesforce is probably going to be quiet for a little bit as they digest Slack.”
Butterfield: Slack Has Passed 2,500 Employees and a $1B Billing Run Rate
“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”
100% of Slack's $1M+ enterprise customers use custom integrations
“The million dollar plus customers, a hundred percent of them use custom integrations, and the average is in the hundreds that they use.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Weiss: Slack has around 1,200 employees in product, design, and engineering
“Slack has probably around 1200 people across product design and engineering.”
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.”