Slack

“In a separate example, when Slack was going public, I was on the board, and I was on TV with CNBC. And we were talking about Tesla and SpaceX. And I made a couple of comments about Slack positive, but not saying anything that was crazy. It was just about the n…”

“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”

“And now instead of like pinging the team in Slack, I can basically tag an agent in Slack with that comment or drop it into our internal harness. And instead of bugging the team and asking them to do something, I just send them a PR for review and it's already …”

“The first task I gave it was go through my Slack, go through my email and suggest like five things that you can take off of my plate and what it would take for you to do that. And I suggested five and like two of them were actually really helpful. And I just i…”

“Because I have been on the developer side, I exactly know developer doesn't want to go out of Slack. Developer doesn't want to go out of Jira, right? And they hate the tools that security people tell.”

“But Meta is moving to it because it thinks it's better than Google for agents.”

“Like Slack is the worst agent collaboration platform. One simple thing to understand, you put two agents in the same channel on Slack, they cannot communicate without a bunch of weird software in the background.”

“And for those who don't know, it was a video game company for one or two or three years and it sucked. And he was gonna give his money back to Andreessen Horowitz and they're like, dude, I don't care about this money, figure it out, just do something.”

“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…”

“I think proactivity is a big untapped kind of part of the experience that we're really excited to think about. You know, we're starting to see this with ChatGPD work now where it actually has pretty good suggestions based on, you know, your calendar or your Sl…”

“The leaning into the weirdness of what it looks like to have not just an AI workforce, but to have a multiplayer AI workforce that other humans can chime in on and have it be proactive, right? That is absolutely the second thing. And giving it that flexibility…”

“And actually in this case, Quad also decided to live blog it. So what it did is it created a Slack channel internally, and it started just posting screenshots every few minutes of its progress.”

“We actually have Cloud maintaining itself now. And the way we do this is we have a Slack channel where we just had Cloud start a bunch of different routines to maintain its own code base. And we actually do this for the CLI, for the iOS app, for the Android ap…”

“Slack had a network effect in that One team would use it, and then someone was working with that team, so they would use Slack, and then their team would use it, and then they, so it would kind of spread organically. There were very, very few pieces of enterpr…”

“So we literally gave everyone corporate cards and said, hey, if you see a home whose power is not on, if you type in the address into Slack, you will get back the phone number you're supposed to call, the account number you're supposed to say, and the credit c…”

“I have now gotten to the point where I have built an actual agentic AI CFO. That literally is in my email every single day. If I get anything from my finance team, it reads it. It opens up the Excel files. It is got probably 10 pages of instructions on how to …”

“Once a week, an agent goes into that Slack channel, finds everything our customers have said over the last week, sends that to another application where it's turned into a podcast. When I wake up Wednesday morning by five AM when I'm at the gym, I'm listening …”

“This is like the great fallacy of enterprise software that you can just sell to the users, and it's like it only ever worked for Slack and one other company. Maybe Notion, but even Notion has capped out.”

“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 …”

“Within OpenAI, we basically have the same level of penetration now and usage of slack. Right. It's like everyone in opening eyes like an entirely slack based company. We do not use email for the most part. It's like really like if you're not on slack, you're n…”

“I have access to every Slack channel across my companies. It's a mandate.”

“So I think S tier would be Slack. And then Discord, Teams, and then goes like Telegram, and then WhatsApp. They're very, very limited in what you can do, and it's hard, like, you have to have your own phone number if you want, like, a decent experience.”

“Within OpenAI, we basically have the same level of penetration now and usage of Slack. Right. It's like everyone in opening eyes, like an entirely slack based company. We do not use email for the most part.”

“Our attrition is extremely low, but the leaning into the async culture has helped because everything's written, everything's recorded, everything's captured in Slack or Notion, or one of our sales meetings is ingested into our warehouses, and this kind of solv…”

“The only tech was, we had a customer app that worked around 30% of the time, and that's being a little generous. And we would receive a Slack message which had some, like, basic information about the customer, their address, what time they had booked, and that…”

“The other shift that I've recently done is I actually have a quad code remote session that I enlist in all of our repos. And so this way I have full visibility into the work that everybody's doing. And this instance, he also has access to all our Slack channel…”

“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.”

“Nobody, nobody gets any Slack messages from me anymore, right? It's quiet because I can get, you know, I can get all the answers to my questions now that I couldn't get before.”

“So early on, like a mobility manager would post a message. I would basically take that message, think about, Hey, which other mobility manager can actually help them answer that question. And I would like forward them the message and be like, Hey, can you do m…”

“Slack was a great example because I think Slack might've just been proven and better and no new. And that's even better.”

“Because I think what people really want is in my opinion, is really a way of saying, okay, this is actually a virtual employee almost that has, you know, it's on Slack. It has an email. I can actually invite it to me. You can join a meeting, take notes. And yo…”

“We had an instance with a SAS product with 20 seats. Nobody was logging in and using it, but the data was there. So we created like three accounts, got rid of 17, connected it to Slack, connected it to Claude. And now everybody can interface it through a natur…”

“Yeah, we're using Slack as, like, just a database. They should market that more. Like, you can have your agents message each other in Slack.”

“What we've actually ended up doing is We've built like a set of you know, skills internally. We have like, we each have our set of skills and we've just been distributing even to the non-technical folks, the CLI. And then effectively we're just giving it acces…”

“So we use teams for video communication, like, but we don't use it for chat. We get home for a long, long history, right? We always talk about chat ops and like, everything is built into slack, like every command, every flow, even though you have been acquired…”

“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…”

“We have built from scratch our own AI-powered operating system. We have these 16 partners in different locations that need to look at information asynchronously. Everything that we do at Ethos feeds into our data lake and is run through our knowledge graph in …”

“I think there's this little thing in people's heads where they really like to keep their personal and work agents separate. And I think there's a whole territory. Our COO Brandon Gell calls this computer errands. There's like this whole territory of using pers…”

“I think Slack, I think, and incidentally, I think Discord's awful too.”

“So we made Slack the front door. Slack comes in, tick it out. Claude does the triaging. So Claude actually co-work now does a lot of this. And that's changed for us probably in the last week since I made these slides, but co-work can check your emails and can …”

“And you know, that open AI and Anthropik and every AI company is standardized on Slack.”

“We're even working on technology inside Slack, To make it easier for everybody to code. So I think it's going to be really breaking news there. You're going to see some cool stuff with slack and code.”

“In the case of large customers that have scaled with us, even though it has started small, one thing that we have done is we've kept close. Like we would create a Slack channel between The customer and the folks on the customer side, the users on the customer …”

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

“You've got big foundation model companies are out there buying the slack instances of failed startups to get more data.”

“One of our biggest use cases is bug triaging. So if someone posts something in Slack and you just have a custom agent that lives there that has its own routing constitution of what team this belongs to. Creates a task in your task database and then posts in th…”

“There are a lot of things where we choose not to use MCP because we want to add more high touch to quality. I think search and agentic find is like the largest instance of that, where we have slack and linear and JIRA search and notion that is not using necess…”

“When we get a page because we're missing a timeout, for example, I can just add codecs in Slack on that page and say, I'm going to fix this by adding a timeout. Please update our reliability documentation to require that all network calls have timeouts. So I h…”

“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…”

“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.”

“Everyone has these notebook channels where you kind of have like your own like Twitter feed in a way where you're just, Talking about your thoughts about things, and so you can go and, like, join the Slack channel, the notebook channels of people on research a…”

“So what they did is they built their own simulation of Slack and Jira and Okta and all of this software they were integrating with. And the way they did that is they basically took the API documentation for the public APIs for Slack and the client libraries, t…”

“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…”

“Computer exists as a Slack bot right now. That you can add to your Slack workspace on the enterprise plan.”

“And our entire company works like that. People are talking more to computer on Slack than other people.”

“I can count on one hand when I was chief of staff, how many people asked me for advice before going into a product review with our CPO or other executive team to say, what do you think is most important to them right now?”

“We implemented something at Slack with Stuart because we realized we were coming to him with, like, done designs, and he was like, what the fuck is this? This is completely different than how I had this in my mind. So Allie Rail, early Slack employee, implemen…”

“We used to have this rule After a design review with Stuart, we'd go through the design review and he'd say, no, do it exactly like this. I want, you know, the button here and the interaction to be this. And frankly, he always had better ideas than we did, but…”

“And so we implemented something called the customer love sprint. We said, okay, engineering, stop what you're doing as an entire team. We're going to spend two weeks. Just painting the inside of the cabinets. The only rule was engineers got to pick what they w…”

“As soon as we got the Notion index working, it was obvious that, oh, okay, we should index everything else as well. And so we indexed, like, Slack and Google Drive, and we, we're launching new ones on a regular cadence.”