The Exchanges

Q Um, so, so you mentioned one key project is essentially search, making everything searchable, so everything that's outside of Slack, searchable from Slack?

A Yeah, so I would say it starts off with, uh, just looking at the messages that are within Slack today. Uh, I don't know how many of you actually search regularly. Uh, it's, it's a start, I would say. As Stuart might say publicly, it's, Kind of a piece of shit, but it works well enough. Uh, he's pretty self, uh, deprecating about the product. Uh, right now it really works if you know exactly the message that you're looking for. So you remember maybe that someone said, all right, clarify, uh, you know, speaking event, and there's one message that you're looking for, and maybe you use some Boolean operators to find it. Uh, obviously that is not how the next set of people who are going to use Slack are used to searching. Uh, I think their expectations are kind of set in the consumer sphere, right? It's like they're used to being able to use Google, and they can type in a bunch of words, and optionalization will work, and synonymization will work, and it'll do query expansion, and all these things that just help you actually find what you're looking for. Uh, we're thinking about how to do that with all the information that's within Slack. Uh, starting with the messages that people actually type, uh, and figuring out how to actually rank those, and rank those so that you and I probably see very different results within an organization. Uh, and then moving on to people. So, thinking a…

AI assessment note: “and then eventually, yeah, to all the third party integrations that we have.”

Q Very cool. So any, any, uh, stats on Slack and how it's taking the world, starting with this room, apparently?

A Yeah, I mean, I guess this kind of sample is a kind of nice thing to see. Uh, you know, Slack, yeah, it's a very fast-growing company. I think, ah, our public stats are that we have passed over three million daily active users, so people are using the product literally every day. Ah, those daily active users are using it for about two hours, over two hours a day, like, actually foregrounded on their phone or on their desktop. Ah, they send over 60 messages a day. We have billions of messages sent every day. Ah, so, I mean, quite frankly, that's one of the reasons why we all, ah, we're excited to kind of join to work at Slack at this point, where Uh, there's definitely enough product market fit and enough kind of intensity of usage to start really doing interesting things about understanding, uh, the work graph and how people relate to each other and how people relate to channels, uh, and also kind of understanding, uh, all this unstructured information that's passing through Slack just so people can get their job done. Can we start making sense of that? Can we start organizing it, ranking it, and feeding it back into people, uh, to make their, you know, working lives more productive? Uh, so that's, that's kind of the moment in time, uh, that, Kind of bore out this group that we're starting here in New York, which is, yeah, like you said, called the Search Learning Intelligence …

AI assessment note: “our public stats are that we have passed over three million daily active users”

Q Very cool. So any, any, uh, stats on Slack and how it's taking the world, starting with this room, apparently?

A Yeah, I mean, I guess this kind of sample is a kind of nice thing to see. Uh, you know, Slack, yeah, it's a very fast-growing company. I think, ah, our public stats are that we have passed over three million daily active users, so people are using the product literally every day. Ah, those daily active users are using it for about two hours, over two hours a day, like, actually foregrounded on their phone or on their desktop. Ah, they send over 60 messages a day. We have billions of messages sent every day. Ah, so, I mean, quite frankly, that's one of the reasons why we all, ah, we're excited to kind of join to work at Slack at this point, where Uh, there's definitely enough product market fit and enough kind of intensity of usage to start really doing interesting things about understanding, uh, the work graph and how people relate to each other and how people relate to channels, uh, and also kind of understanding, uh, all this unstructured information that's passing through Slack just so people can get their job done. Can we start making sense of that? Can we start organizing it, ranking it, and feeding it back into people, uh, to make their, you know, working lives more productive? Uh, so that's, that's kind of the moment in time, uh, that, Kind of bore out this group that we're starting here in New York, which is, yeah, like you said, called the Search Learning Intelligence …

AI assessment note: “our public stats are that we have passed over three million daily active users”

Q You know, any one or two that come to mind in terms of doing interesting things?

A Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch that we see kind of in the Slack ecosystem that we're kind of excited about, um, from things that are more technically simple, but I think are kind of delightful, like, uh, there's a company called Growbot that is building kind of an app to give kind of positive reinforcement within the workplace. Uh, there's a company in New York that we've invested in through our Slack fund, uh, just raised another round a couple weeks ago called Troops, which is kind of building Like an intelligent CRM that's a kind of conversational interface to start with. So there's a lot of interesting things. The other thing that we see a lot is at larger companies, we certainly do this at Slack, people write kind of their own custom integrations to plug into their back-end systems, so we do this for pretty much every stats system that we have is a bot that kind of emits regularly different kinds of alerts, and I think the companies that wind up loving Slack the most, they basically take all these really ugly internal tools that they have that no one ever wants to log into anyway, And they start just kind of connecting those pipes into Slack, uh, and that's something that winds up being kind of magical experience for them.

AI assessment note: “there's a company called Growbot that is building kind of an app”

Q earlier in the conversation that, um, Slack at the very beginning was a distributed company before it became distributed, and so Slack is headquartered in San Francisco, but you're based here, and you're building this team here, so is that, is that circumstantial? Is that like, no, he's this great guy, let's have him, and it'll be the team in New York, or is there something special about New York?

A Uh, it's a good question. I would say there's probably historical, corporate, and personal reasons for why we started up the team in New York. Uh, I mean, one historical is, yeah, Slack started off, there was four co-founders. Uh, one of the, the first person to be in New York actually before I joined was actually Eric Costello, who is effectively the tech lead for the front end of Slack. Uh, he's worked from New York for the 15 years since before Flickr. Uh, and two other co-founders including the CEO were in Vancouver, and one who's now the CTO, Cal Henderson, is in San Francisco. So, one, it's kind of path dependent a little bit. Slack only exists because they have this distributed team. Uh, I would say the corporate side is, you know, many of the biggest customers that, uh, already exist for Slack or will exist in the future all exist in this New York City kind of region or the Northeast region. Um, quite frankly, based on the survey in the room, you can probably tell we've reached almost saturation in San Francisco and the Bay Area in terms of companies using Slack. Uh, so most of the, I think the growth will happen in other parts of the world, and this is kind of the economic engine of the rest of the country. Uh, so we were always going to kind of come up with an enterprise office here. Uh, but I think what we saw, what I saw having worked at Google, worked at Foursquare…

AI assessment note: “historical, corporate, and personal reasons for why we started up the team in New York”

Q And as a passing thought, like, any idea why Slack is taking off now? Because the fundamental concept is not here, right? People have been trying to do something like this for a very long time, so why now?

A Yeah, I remember seeing an interview with some of the YouTube co-founders from probably a decade ago, where someone was like, this was video hosting startup number 20. Why did number 19 not take off? I mean, I think there's a lot of small things that are actually quite different about the Slack product, and like most products, it's the kind of combination of a bunch of things from a bunch of different kind of historical sources, like IRC with channels, mobile messaging on the consumer side, unfurling, like you might see on Facebook, like all these different components kind of mixed together. I think that's a big part of it. I also think, quite frankly, there was a lot of macro trends that all kind of hit at the same time, and one of the big things that we've seen is on the, Uh, enterprise side is really people's expectations of what enterprise software should be have kept increasing, and the whole world is moving from email for coordinating outside of work to something that's much more mobile and that's much more lightweight like messaging. Slack comes along at kind of that point where multiple of these messaging services were reaching billions of users, uh, and I think that plus the shift to mobile and just increasing expectations of enterprise software, that perfect storm happened and Slack kind of found the right product market fit and The rest, kind of, is history over the …

AI assessment note: “macro trends that all kind of hit at the same time”

Q You know, any one or two that come to mind in terms of doing interesting things?

A Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch that we see kind of in the Slack ecosystem that we're kind of excited about, um, from things that are more technically simple, but I think are kind of delightful, like, uh, there's a company called Growbot that is building kind of an app to give kind of positive reinforcement within the workplace. Uh, there's a company in New York that we've invested in through our Slack fund, uh, just raised another round a couple weeks ago called Troops, which is kind of building Like an intelligent CRM that's a kind of conversational interface to start with. So there's a lot of interesting things. The other thing that we see a lot is at larger companies, we certainly do this at Slack, people write kind of their own custom integrations to plug into their back-end systems, so we do this for pretty much every stats system that we have is a bot that kind of emits regularly different kinds of alerts, and I think the companies that wind up loving Slack the most, they basically take all these really ugly internal tools that they have that no one ever wants to log into anyway, And they start just kind of connecting those pipes into Slack, uh, and that's something that winds up being kind of magical experience for them.

AI assessment note: “there's a company called Growbot... a company in New York... called Troops”

Q earlier in the conversation that, um, Slack at the very beginning was a distributed company before it became distributed, and so Slack is headquartered in San Francisco, but you're based here, and you're building this team here, so is that, is that circumstantial? Is that like, no, he's this great guy, let's have him, and it'll be the team in New York, or is there something special about New York?

A Uh, it's a good question. I would say there's probably historical, corporate, and personal reasons for why we started up the team in New York. Uh, I mean, one historical is, yeah, Slack started off, there was four co-founders. Uh, one of the, the first person to be in New York actually before I joined was actually Eric Costello, who is effectively the tech lead for the front end of Slack. Uh, he's worked from New York for the 15 years since before Flickr. Uh, and two other co-founders including the CEO were in Vancouver, and one who's now the CTO, Cal Henderson, is in San Francisco. So, one, it's kind of path dependent a little bit. Slack only exists because they have this distributed team. Uh, I would say the corporate side is, you know, many of the biggest customers that, uh, already exist for Slack or will exist in the future all exist in this New York City kind of region or the Northeast region. Um, quite frankly, based on the survey in the room, you can probably tell we've reached almost saturation in San Francisco and the Bay Area in terms of companies using Slack. Uh, so most of the, I think the growth will happen in other parts of the world, and this is kind of the economic engine of the rest of the country. Uh, so we were always going to kind of come up with an enterprise office here. Uh, but I think what we saw, what I saw having worked at Google, worked at Foursquare…

AI assessment note: “there's probably historical, corporate, and personal reasons for why we started up the team”

Q And as a passing thought, like, any idea why Slack is taking off now? Because the fundamental concept is not here, right? People have been trying to do something like this for a very long time, so why now?

A Yeah, I remember seeing an interview with some of the YouTube co-founders from probably a decade ago, where someone was like, this was video hosting startup number 20. Why did number 19 not take off? I mean, I think there's a lot of small things that are actually quite different about the Slack product, and like most products, it's the kind of combination of a bunch of things from a bunch of different kind of historical sources, like IRC with channels, mobile messaging on the consumer side, unfurling, like you might see on Facebook, like all these different components kind of mixed together. I think that's a big part of it. I also think, quite frankly, there was a lot of macro trends that all kind of hit at the same time, and one of the big things that we've seen is on the, Uh, enterprise side is really people's expectations of what enterprise software should be have kept increasing, and the whole world is moving from email for coordinating outside of work to something that's much more mobile and that's much more lightweight like messaging. Slack comes along at kind of that point where multiple of these messaging services were reaching billions of users, uh, and I think that plus the shift to mobile and just increasing expectations of enterprise software, that perfect storm happened and Slack kind of found the right product market fit and The rest, kind of, is history over the …

AI assessment note: “there was a lot of macro trends that all kind of hit at the same time”

Q Um, so, so you mentioned one key project is essentially search, making everything searchable, so everything that's outside of Slack, searchable from Slack?

A Yeah, so I would say it starts off with, uh, just looking at the messages that are within Slack today. Uh, I don't know how many of you actually search regularly. Uh, it's, it's a start, I would say. As Stuart might say publicly, it's, Kind of a piece of shit, but it works well enough. Uh, he's pretty self, uh, deprecating about the product. Uh, right now it really works if you know exactly the message that you're looking for. So you remember maybe that someone said, all right, clarify, uh, you know, speaking event, and there's one message that you're looking for, and maybe you use some Boolean operators to find it. Uh, obviously that is not how the next set of people who are going to use Slack are used to searching. Uh, I think their expectations are kind of set in the consumer sphere, right? It's like they're used to being able to use Google, and they can type in a bunch of words, and optionalization will work, and synonymization will work, and it'll do query expansion, and all these things that just help you actually find what you're looking for. Uh, we're thinking about how to do that with all the information that's within Slack. Uh, starting with the messages that people actually type, uh, and figuring out how to actually rank those, and rank those so that you and I probably see very different results within an organization. Uh, and then moving on to people. So, thinking a…

AI assessment note: “and then eventually, yeah, to all the third party integrations that we have.”

Q The second, so it was a, so it was three people?

A Yeah, so there was a, there was a company called Ludicorp, uh, back in the day, or, I think, uh, and then out of that, they kind of shut that down and built Flickr, and then sold Flickr to Yahoo, and then in 2009, they tried to do it again, there was Worked on it for four years. Launched this game. The company was called TinySpec. The game was called Glitch. Uh, critically acclaimed, but kind of was aiming at the desktop when everything was going to mobile and, you know, games where you threw cows at each other and things like that. Uh, so the game never actually took off on the consumer side, but to build the game, they realized they had this distributed team. They had kind of SF, Vancouver, and New York, uh, and they were trying to figure out how do we actually work together as a team. Uh, so kind of selfishly, they started basically enhancing all these things on top of IRC, Which led to this proto version of Slack, uh, and when they were thinking about, well, this game is not successful, we probably should just give our money back, like, thank you, Andreessen, for all the support, but we don't know what to do with the money, uh, of course, they said, no, no, no, please, keep the money, take the time, figure out what to do, so, uh, lo and behold, they kind of said, well, maybe other people might want what we built as an internal prototype, and that's where Slack came from, uh…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so there was a, there was a company called Ludicorp”

Q The second, so it was a, so it was three people?

A Yeah, so there was a, there was a company called Ludicorp, uh, back in the day, or, I think, uh, and then out of that, they kind of shut that down and built Flickr, and then sold Flickr to Yahoo, and then in 2009, they tried to do it again, there was Worked on it for four years. Launched this game. The company was called TinySpec. The game was called Glitch. Uh, critically acclaimed, but kind of was aiming at the desktop when everything was going to mobile and, you know, games where you threw cows at each other and things like that. Uh, so the game never actually took off on the consumer side, but to build the game, they realized they had this distributed team. They had kind of SF, Vancouver, and New York, uh, and they were trying to figure out how do we actually work together as a team. Uh, so kind of selfishly, they started basically enhancing all these things on top of IRC, Which led to this proto version of Slack, uh, and when they were thinking about, well, this game is not successful, we probably should just give our money back, like, thank you, Andreessen, for all the support, but we don't know what to do with the money, uh, of course, they said, no, no, no, please, keep the money, take the time, figure out what to do, so, uh, lo and behold, they kind of said, well, maybe other people might want what we built as an internal prototype, and that's where Slack came from, uh…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so there was a, there was a company called Ludicorp”