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 35 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Casado: Direct sales teams maximize ACV for bottom-up software companies
“Does it still make sense to build a direct sales force? As in, will it increase the unit economics if you do? I think our experience here with Slack and with GitHub and with many companies is, It's definitely yes, right? Yeah, the answer is yes. Because that's…”
Andreessen: Telepresence and VR will end tech geographic concentration by 2038
“My hope is that we're gonna get there in the next, you know, let's say, 10 or 20 years. My hope is that we're gonna get telepresence, right, in the form of video conferencing, and telepresence robots, and VR, and AR, and all these things, collaboration softwar…”
Butterfield: Microsoft is the only competitor Slack really worries about
“To be totally frank, it's the one company that I really worry about from a competitive angle.”
Butterfield: Team messaging adoption is binary; 80 percent adoption means zero
“Yeah, and it's absolutely binary. So if we get to 80% of the team, And that's it. Then it goes to zero. It's a hundred percent or it's nothing.”
Butterfield: Slack adoption is binary and requires 100% team usage
“And what we found is that success with Slack is very binary. If we get to 80% of the of the team using Slack, it might sound like I'm about to say something good, but no, zero percent will be using it soon. It has to be a hundred percent.”
Butterfield: Knowledge teams relying on internal email will lose to competitors
“But I think if you use email as your primary means of communication internally for the kinds of knowledge worker, for lack of a better term, teams that use Slack, that's, you're foolish. I mean, and it's such a big disadvantage that you will eventually be made…”
Butterfield: Centralizing tools in one hub outweighs better standalone UX
“Yeah, and I'd even be willing to admit that in many cases using a purpose-built specific tool for each of those items might be the better experience, but the value of having them all in one place just so completely overwhelms any benefit you can get by splitti…”
Butterfield: Slack intentionally excluded mobile-only jobs, omitting 70% of US workforce
“We explicitly said at the beginning, and this has still been our experience, that Slack is not really designed for a mobile-only workforce, and not designed for jobs where people aren't going to have a computing device in their hands most of the time. So we au…”
Butterfield: Heavy email usage will continue for at least 30-40 years
“And I want to just stress, because we get this in headlines quite a bit, that we want to be an email killer. Not going away. We've got, you know, at least three or four decades left of heavy email uses because it is lowest common denominator, and I mean that i…”
Yang: Slack will remain durable as a control plane for AI agents
“I don't think, I feel like Slack has a lot of legs, because Slack can also be the place where you talk to the agents themselves.”
Staniszewski: Open Slack access causes distraction and requires restricted channel permission
“If you put a person into all the slack channels and give them transparency, they actually get frequently distracted because then they read all the messages. You can still choose not to read them, but they still do. So you kind of need to cut the access to a lo…”
Chen: Uber employees secretly used Slack despite official HipChat mandate
“One of the funny anecdotes at Uber was that for a long time we were officially on HipChat, but there were so many teams across the company that would have their little secret Slack, you know, team chat going because they just didn't want to deal with it. I fee…”
Butterfield: Slack is growing its revenue at 15 percent per month
“Our multiple has come down pretty dramatically. And it's continuing to come down because we're still growing at 15% a month.”
Butterfield: Email will survive for at least three to four decades
“Email crosses organizational boundaries very well. It's how we set up this conversation. It's how people like us will set up conversations like this 10 years from now in the future. And internet, I mean, sorry, email will probably be around You know, three, fo…”
Macaitis: Slack is the fastest-growing messaging app in history
“And here it is kind of being the fastest growing messaging app ever.”
Acharya: People open smartphone apps to satisfy specific emotional states
“I've always had this theory that people open apps on their phone because they want to feel a feeling. You know, and I think, of course, there's some like functional set of needs, which is why you open calendar or something. But I also think that, you know, Wha…”
Yoo: Bottom-up B2C2B sales model is playing out in healthcare
“It's kind of the healthcare version of a trend that we've seen play out in B to B software. So, you know, you might think about Slack or Zoom or Dropbox or these products that you as an individual user can obviously adopt, but then what these companies are the…”
Chen: Horizontal enterprise products spread faster because all employees can use them
“Things like Dropbox, Asana, Slack. These are all things that everyone in your company can use. And so naturally is going to spread much faster because At every moment, each node in the network is gonna be able to have access to all 15 to 30 people around them …”
Butterfield: Enterprise clients will yield higher margins and revenue for Slack
“And I think over time we will have higher margins from those customers and they'll represent a greater percentage of our total revenue versus the total users.”
Butterfield: US and Canada comprise 47% of Slack's daily active users
“The US and Canada put together are 47% of our daily active users, roughly 30% in Europe, 20% in Asia. Japan was our number two country, both for paid seats and daily active users, until it got dislodged by the UK and Germany.”
Butterfield: Slack would not have taken off if launched three years earlier
“If we had started Slack three years earlier, we just, it wouldn't have taken off the way it did. It might have been a moderate success, but it wouldn't have taken off the way it did.”
Butterfield: Lateral transparency across functional teams unlocks immense organizational value
“If the marketing team has perfect clarity about what's going on with sales, and can see where they're falling down, see where they need better materials, if the technical operations team can see what's going on with customer support, if the engineers can see w…”
Butterfield: Slack maintains an industry-beating monthly churn of 20 basis points
“We have industry beating churn like 20 basis points of churn a month.”
Slack's internal team receives up to 100,000 automated machine messages daily
“So on our team, the Slack team, we have 250 people. We do about 20,000 messages a day from people. And we do another 80 to a 100,000 messages a day from machines.”
Wanstrath: Slack and Twilio succeed by easing the developer collaboration paradox
“There's almost this paradox where we are working on computers all day, but it's very hard for us to work with each other, and this is why you see, I think, things like Twilio and even Slack blowing up, is like, finally, there's an easy way for me to work with …”
Weil: Conservative Enterprise Clients Block Slack, Remote Access, and Facebook
“And these, this big company said they could never put Slack into an organization where it stands now. They're still on Outlook, and they're not able to log in remotely. They also aren't allowed to access websites like Facebook and bring open that tab.”
Butterfield: Slack intentionally omitted structured task management features
“When we were first starting on this and we thought about the core feature set and what we wanted to get in and what we didn't want to be, do we decided we wanted to avoid anything that has too much structure or too much ideology behind it, and so Task manageme…”
Butterfield: 99% of Slack DAUs use desktop, 65% mobile
“99% of our daily active users will log into Slack at least once on that day that they're active on the desktop, but only about 65% will do the same thing on mobile.”
Jordan: Enterprise software usage curves shift when adopted organization-wide
“You know, just if you have five people in the organization using Slack, you get one use curve. If you have, you know, if the organization, it's the operating system for the organization, you have a very different curve.”
Butterfield: Slack provides new hires immediate access to historical company communications
“We would have people start, and they would have the whole history of all communication that happened before they got there available to them, and that's in contrast to an email-based organization where on your first day, you literally have an empty inbox, and …”
Butterfield: Slack costs 1/2000th of a knowledge worker's total employment cost
“We're asking them to pay about one 2000th of the total cost of employment for a knowledge worker.”
Slack relies on around 50 different SaaS vendors internally
“I look around our company, we buy software from about 50 different vendors, and this is like software as a service in five different vendors”
Macaitis: Slack's freemium tier supports 2,000 users without time limits
“We have a freemium model where it is not, the trial is not time-bound or user-bound, so you can have 2000 people on it can be free”
Dickey: Gigster has 200 active software projects running simultaneously
“Whenever we start a new project, we have 200 projects going on right now, we start a new private room in Slack so that the team can collaborate.”
Butterfield: Slack routes all company alerts, tweets, and tickets into Slack
“In our case, every time someone tweets at us at our company, that goes into our Slack instance. Every time a the customer creates a ticket through Zendesk, that goes into our Slack instance. Every time someone signs up for the service through our own internal …”