Slack

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• bullish fact_claim Marc Benioff

  I now have, you know, a couple dozen agents running inside Slack on my behalf, doing renewals, you know, doing support, but also like doing my wellness benefits, doing, you know, all kinds of interactions with my employees.

• bullish fact_claim Marc Benioff

  we have a, we've never been in the ITSM market before. So we're got entering and we're building on Slack, you know, so it's a Slack first app.

• bullish prediction Marc Benioff

  if you can provide it right on your phone in Slack, that's really a next generation UI. And we're doing that with all of our products.

• bullish fact_claim Marc Benioff

  Slack is on a million companies and those million companies, they're, you know, small and medium and large and extra large because all, you know, Salesforce sells to the five major segments of business at the, all of the IT world. And Slack is one of those products that we do that with.

• bullish assessment Marc Benioff

  That is probably the most exciting, most thriving ecosystem in tech for the enterprise right now is inside Slack.

• bullish assessment Phil Libin

  the best way that we found to get somebody to pay is to make them feel like they never have to pay and give them enough time to fall in love with a product and then they just want to pay and they just do normally and so we just you know we have this long-term approach and uh it's you know so far so good it's been working fantastically

• bullish assessment Phil Libin

  we're kind of take a long-term greedy approach to business you know we're here to make money and we're making money but we're here make money in the long term uh we're not trying to do anything to kind of squeeze every last dollar out of someone right away

• bullish assessment Phil Libin

  the more you use it the longer someone uses it the more likely they are to start paying even if they don't need any of the premium features just because you know once you've got your whole life in there you you feel like it's valuable you just you kind of want to pay for it

• bullish fact_claim Phil Libin

  the number one reason people give on surveys when we ask why did you why did you pay is because I love Evernote

• bullish assessment Phil Libin

  that as a business model that that's worked fantastically well for us

• bullish assessment Phil Libin

  we kind of want the free version is the main version we expect the vast majority of people to use it for free forever and uh to never never pay and that's that's fine with us so we we really treat the free version as the central version of Evernote we're constantly improving it we want it to be good enough for the vast majority of people

• bullish assessment Stewart Butterfield

  the vision here and people see this as chat messaging something we're not allowed to say chat in any of our outward facing Market we're also to say collaboration because that's a word that has like 30 years of broken promises behind it

• bullish assessment Stewart Butterfield

  it to a certain extent it mitigates the feeling of information overload and kind of obligation to get back to people and all different kinds of stuff um in another sense it exacerbates it because there's just so much going on but the the main thing is we don't actually do standup meetings or anything like that because everyone just knows what everyone else is doing okay so everybody's super informed

• bullish fact_claim Stewart Butterfield

  in fact we have 21 people working on this now we send 2,000 messages a day so it's about 100 each there's another six to 15,000 messages coming A Day from external Services

• bullish assessment Stewart Butterfield

  one of the big things for us was should we sell to Google or to Microsoft we're not selling

• bullish assessment Stewart Butterfield

  we should just make this a product yeah so January 2013 no what year is it now 14 January 2013 yeah I I had my years wrong so when I was talking about glitch I we shut it down in November 2012 we started on this January 2013 um in August we did a kind of a preview release um and then we launched officially eight weeks ago

• bullish endorsement Stewart Butterfield

  it was a great system in the sense that with 45 people over several years the company wide email list had 50 messages on it

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  slack which if you don't know has raised another $43 million from social capit capit partnership that's chth and dreon harwitz which is obviously Morgan dreon and Ben harowitz and uh you know a bunch of other folks and Excel so they're just crushing it

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  he's a tremendous entrepreneur the product's amazing

• bullish assessment Lon Harris

  that is when you're first using AI and you finally do plug it into Slack, that is one of the real gamechange moments where it's like, oh, all of a sudden it has all this context. It understands all these things it didn't know about before.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Slack is like the just all your if we're going to really train AI, if you just gave AI all of Slack, I think you could do all of our jobs at this point.

• neutral fact_claim Rowan Trollope

  the number one requested feature on sliding to do the number one thing I'm slack right now that they're asking for is video

• bullish assessment Rowan Trollope

  a slack is so impressive it's impressive hundreds if not thousands of iterations

• neutral prediction Jason Calacanis

  obviously they're not going to sell to Cisco

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  slack is this really fast growing company

• neutral fact_claim Rowan Trollope

  it's going to be similar to the price of slack or actually with it maybe slack and hip chatter maybe half that price

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  Slack started at a slightly different era. Um they started in the era of mobile and multi-platform and they really nailed that. And so, I think, you know, there's a lot of sort of business model similarities to to Yammer, but because they nailed the mobile aspect, it actually turbocharged the growth tremendously.

• bullish prediction Jason Lemkin

  I also like slack slack is putting so many resources into building this product that in two years hip chat game over they can't keep up unless the Paradigm doesn't change

• bullish fact_claim Jason Lemkin

  during the third year you're like you know what maybe this year we're going to have to rip out everything and we're going to have to do zaps we're going have to do everything but everyone on my team wants I like I'm happy with hip chat it works it works on twist it works everywhere but I want everyone wants slack

• bullish prediction Jason Lemkin

  in 2018 when you have rebuilt your whole network on top of 40 other apps and at last thing got distracted and they didn't do those Integrations and slack has them all you might change

• bullish assessment Jason Lemkin

  it is another cool software product development tool but took advantage of where collaboration is today and where apis Integrations are today and made it just so much more valuable

• bullish assessment Jason Lemkin

  what's bitching about slack beyond the cool UI and that it's fast and that works on every device is that it integrates with everything in the world right every single product you use every single bug tracking tool CI CD tool if you want take a Zen desk you put it in there everything

• mixed assessment Jason Lemkin

  I think Slack's super interesting I'm not sure slack is actually so different than at lassan

• neutral fact_claim Wade Foster

  whether it's slack logs or github commits or you know publications on a blog or what-have-you there is there is a digital trail of did you do this thing or not

• bullish assessment Wade Foster

  that's what you see with like slack blowing up and why they've done so much to invest in integrations is because it makes slack sticky and you don't want to leave any more

• neutral prediction Wade Foster

  if Google came out with a slack competitor let's say yeah which obviously they're going to at some point

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  we can build basic BOTS right you can build it in slack yes I didn't know that

• bullish assessment Wade Foster

  so Aflac becomes the command line the operating system exactly and this can expand to any of the apps you right might use

• bullish assessment Wade Foster

  most companies don't have time to build out native integrations between every possible permutation and combination of ways that their end customers might use it but they do have time to build an API and so whether it's us or our partners building integrations on a zapier you know hooks into this big ecosystem of 600 plus apps now and then regular people who aren't you know engineers who couldn't spell it barely spell API right are able to come in and you know set up these neat little automations

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  zapier along with if this then that I would say is probably the main competitor but they're more consumer II I think happier to me seems a little bit more enterprise

• mixed prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  the time to build a $300 billion company um it took Brookshire halfway 49 years um it took uh Apple 35 Microsoft 25 uh Google 15 Facebook 12 I think if any company is going to break that it's either slack or Uber um I think specifically in Uber's case uh it's probably more likely that it gets there first

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  slack is in a very unique place because it is an exceptional business model it has huge violent growth massive massive gross margin profitability and so it can choose to spend money in ways so it is a very unique animal it's probably one of a few companies it Uber there may be a handful of others that truly control their Destiny

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  it doesn't feel like the product is discernably different to me than hipchat I think that the if you look on Twitter you can see totally different um emotion around slack than you do different emotion right it feels like a different brand they love slack it's interesting sometimes the first person to get the product out doesn't win

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think if you went and you looked at why slack is being is so successful it's not because it's because they're getting people that didn't used to do chat so it's not people that were using hipchat and now are switching to slack that certainly happens right but I think most of their growth is because now there's journalists that are using slack there's people working remotely that are using slack there's just all my dad his there's definitely a network effect that occurs when you have one slack

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  slack is essentially hipchat right the hip chat came before them it's just more polished version I think maybe most people say it's designed a little bit better some people say it's quirkier I kind of like the hip chat um interface a little bit better it feels a little more utilitarian

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  if you go to Trello right now and sign up and try to pay us it's actually really difficult and part of that is because early on we had to really sell the product to people you know we didn't want to put any friction in the way so we were not focused on putting you know like hey here's how you pay us UPF front we had to convince them that troll is going to be very useful back in the day now people are showing up and they already know troll is super useful

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  one of the stats was 75% of the Fortune 500 is using okay some of those are there's like a small team 10 people or something right that's just the vanity metric is 75% but some of those have thousands and thousands of people

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  it's all Bottoms Up like there's like 6,000 people at Adobe using this and that's all these small teams across the whole entire company a quarter of Salesforce uses Trello

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  if you look at our fans and people that use Trail if you look on Twitter like it is amazing how much people love this software which to be honest it's cultish it surprised us a little bit

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  that's a race right you can't your remote can't just be that you have a piece of software especially if you're going to be super horizontal and you know try to be a new document type right the the this is a race to get enough people that are using Trello and getting a lot of value out of it that is somebody else created a clone people wouldn't use it

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we have before slack adds us all that kind of stuff well this software software is a commodity right a developer could probably take Trello as a spec right and go and spend two months or three months and build it

• neutral assessment Michael Pryor

  when you're if you're doing search and rescue and you're out in the woods okay you got your GPS your map like where am I where am I going where have I been how am I going to get there that's Trello okay that holds your state like what's the plan right so I'm not lost I don't have any anxiety I know exactly where I am got it slack is your radio God okay you got to communicate

• neutral fact_claim Michael Pryor

  slack user Trail as I showed you before right across the whole entire company

• bullish assessment Michael Pryor

  slack has such a commanding lead that why not put it out there and get feedback from everybody

• bullish fact_claim Jason Lemkin

  Slack's NPS is off the charts okay

• bullish assessment Jason Lemkin

  Why is Stuart Butterfield doing what he does why is he making slack one of the most beloved companies in Silicon Valley it's because he know he has to do this he has a precious brand and he is doing everything he can to deliver against that promise

• bullish assessment Jason Lemkin

  the rocket ships the slacks of the world get there in 5 quarters or less

• bullish assessment Linden Tibbets

  So did you know that Slack was becoming a huge hit based upon the number of recipes and the usage? It sounds like you're an early warning. We we've seen some of that. I'm not going to out anybody. It's like, oh, this is really working.

• bullish assessment Des Traynor

  So there's this new generation of companies, of which I would submit Intercom, would be a part. Slack would be there. Stripe would be there. Atlassian are there. People who build a product, and the product is the core of the offering, and everything else follows the product.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I heard about Slack. I wasn't sure it was important. Okay. Now let's compare Skype versus Slack. Oh yeah. Maybe we should go with the hip, cool new one.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  other companies like slack or Yammer they might give it out for free and try before you buy so they do it based on usage

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  slack is just such a cornerstone of enterprise computing now andand people's identity that gosh there's an unlimited number of people who could use that asset

• neutral assessment Matilde Collin

  in slack you see the information whereas in front you get work done

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  slack has all of their third-party tools and some of the popular third-party tools and api's are to do front like behaviors and connect this glue together so it's almost like you're a vertical app that's just been pre it's been super refined like you will become some percentage when you install front at an organization some percentage of the communications on slack moves over

• bullish fact_claim Matlde Collin

  the CEO of slack is an investor in our company and social capital because our Series in the stories also the series in the story of slack so if we were super competitive I think none of these investments would have happened

• neutral assessment Matilde Collin

  slack is great for internal communication and fern is great for external communication ... slack is for synchronous communiction and front is for asynchronous communication

• neutral assessment Matilde Collin

  I think there is a great world where slack and Fran exist and really change how people work but one is focusing on real-time communication with your employees and the other one is the rest of your communication

• neutral assessment David Sacks

  this feels a lot like a structured slack and slack has a lot of these features that take a little work to setup

• neutral fact_claim Balaji Srinivasan

  all intra-company email has been pulled out with slack right

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  I think if you look at a company like slack or Yammer these were chat based software both of a chat based software Yammer than HipChat and then slack where they let people use it for free in an organization to products it's super addictive and then what would happen is if you wanted the management control in other words to be able to say take this person out I want to see the archive as searchable archives right for legal for compliance and then also just to control it put people in different gr

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  it's a fantastic company. I just came from Slack's board meeting. I love Stewart. I love that team. I think it's it has the potential to be unassailable. Um but here's here's where I think Slack is an amazing company. Not because of the theoretically the amount of money that it could make us, but it's because that is a team that is incrementally every day getting more and more smart about their business. They're getting better and better at focusing on the things that they are exceptional at.

• bullish endorsement Rachel Hepworth

  one of the smallest tiniest things we did had one of the largest impacts which is slack has a Help Center with more content on it than the website by far which is pretty classic for a company a lot of visitors to it really good SEO and it runs off of Zendesk so it's not actually part of our website so we said what if you put a create a team CTA on this Help Center which took about two minutes to do and it had the biggest impact on growth on anything we've done in a year

• mixed criticism Rachel Hepworth

  the only other thing I'll say is that it's lack in many companies we've actually gotten really tripped up on the results of the experiment so one example is we did all of these onboarding and education experiments and none of them were moving the needle and we couldn't understand it some of them seemed really obvious that it would have a positive effect it would just be nothing nothing nothing and then one of our I think it was an analyst very clever analyst said huh what if we separated out the

• neutral assessment Rachel Hepworth

  the reality is is that yes you can set up that slack team and then you have the easy task of saying hey everybody I work with get off email change the entire way you work I promise it will be super awesome that's a high high bar that's a lot of friction for anybody who doesn't feel really strongly about it and who doesn't necessarily have as much social capital as a very well-paid engineer at a start-up

• neutral assessment Rachel Hepworth

  the challenge that slack has been going through in the last year I'd say maybe your and a half is we've grown really rapidly off of originally a small base our early adopters and the people who first created teams were almost all engineering dev tech folks in Bay Area they look just like the people of slack so we really understood them but as slack expands throughout the country internationally and in order to maintain those growth rates we really kind of reach out beyond the pure engineering co

• bullish assessment Rachel Hepworth

  slack's onboarding is fairly well known we use slack bot people love it because you know it's cute it's human it's simple but what I like about slack bot is it is the framework of the actual product right so it is onboarding via chat it is a chat product we are teaching you how to use the product in a fairly fun way while you're interacting with slack

• neutral fact_claim Rachel Hepworth

  slack right now obviously word of mouth is big but Brandon content is where we're really investing slack is a new category people are not that familiar with it we have to educate them a lot we have to make them aware so we're investing a lot in the brand

• bullish assessment Rachel Hepworth

  slack grew for years and even now off the back of this word-of-mouth people liked it so much they told their friend who told her friend who told their co-worker

• bullish fact_claim Des Traynor

  communicating workplace in the workplace. That's a big problem and it happens all the damn time and that's why it's Slack, a $5 company.

• neutral fact_claim David Bennahum

  if you look at slack it's a perfect example yeah people consider slack a SAN francisco-based company when in fact I believe two-thirds of their employees are in Vancouver in Canada there you go and Stewart the CEO spends most of his time there from what I understand he's in Canada most of the time two-thirds of the time probably and when they're here but you would never think how many people knew slack was a Canadian company nobody well like 4 out of 25

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  truth be told people here in the Bay Area have gotten over the fear of investing in companies that are not based here ie slack which is basically a Vancouver company with an office here I mean most people don't realize that but slacks a 10 to 20 billion dollar company at this point who knows what it's worth at this point it's growing really fast and you know nobody cares anymore

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  this is where slack can be problematic because some people can start firing stuff off and slack yeah and then emails almost as bad text messaging is almost as bad like people take the hardest conversations they decide they're gonna do them on text messages

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  negative churn is when you have more people subscribing and unsubscribing to your product so you have slack and the number of customers is going your turn those number of seats

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  if you look at something like slack they only charge you for the customers who use that product for the month so there's a super innovation

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  we're not investors in slack unfortunately but we use the product and love it

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  with the product that people love yeah that they stick with for two years or three years superhuman that might be a lifetime exactly what is a superhuman or a slack or a canva doll earth oh my lord that might be three hundred to one yes yeah you have a great net revenue retention yeah it could be yeah is that crazy

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  so I think you have to set your sights below seed funds and venture funds and any get to set your sights on rebooting the company likely recapping the company and pretending that this is day one

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  I would study the wire cutter yes I tried to invest in that company Brian lamps company multiple times I begged him not to sell for 30 million to the New York Times but he owned most of the company had not raised any money and I was like I'll give you I'll set up you know you selling 20% of the company taking the cash and let's keep going and God the New York Times owns it now and it prints money

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  this totally legal because it's happening on the consumers browser and it's their software it's their choice how they render the page however that will not stop a big company from suing you anyway

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  if slack went away people would be you know people who are using slack then what stocks going away I have all these API integrations how do i how am I gonna ever run my business without slack like you would cause a heart attack and you can tell that when slack went down a couple times all of Silicon Valley was like oh I guess we get the day off it's a snow day it's a slack day

• bullish fact_claim Brian Halligan

  we're gonna we integrate with slack in a really slick way so you can control HubSpot through slack you can get notified through slack

• bullish assessment Brian Halligan

  slack is and is a for sand and we're building to them they've got a lot of leverage out there

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  the public markets as we've seen through burrs IPO slack's IPO they're not interested in unprofitable companies

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  a great business to be in would be enterprise software a slack for example right large market growing Bottoms Up adoption by developers and it structurally it will have good margins subscription-based a subscription to every year you start with a 20 percent of the revenue of last year

• neutral fact_claim Sarah Cannon

  the last round we did in slack was a series H before the company listed

• bullish fact_claim Sarah Cannon

  slack ... they have unbelievable traction they have a lot of users but they're in a business and in Europe

• bullish fact_claim Sarah Tavel

  they said to me later you know we were gonna shut the company down if we didn't close that syndicate with me and the fact that it over performed and we got that money it was the reason comp still here

• neutral fact_claim Sarah Tavel

  slack isn't the only one Dropbox did that

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  it starts typically without a sales because I know yes and at some point what 1050 users they get a phone call

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  but that was the first company I think that grew like a consumer company while having the revenue model of enterprise

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  that ability to see things that worked in other fields and then apply them to adjacencies or things that are very far off the same way Moneyball they took quantitative analysis and stock analysis and they applied it to baseball and it worked right that's that kind of nonlinear adjacency thinking that is making some investors able to run slack like a consumer company even though it's an enterprise company right that's like where big things happen

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  all of a sudden the CEO and the CFO who are 62 years old and we're told they have to stay home well now they're in a slack room for the first time

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  so it's going to accelerate the trend and I think what you'll see is people are gonna learn how to use the tools better and then people who didn't try the tools will be incentivized to try them

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  I think that was already moving

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  obviously that helps slack and zoom and other remote technologies

• neutral fact_claim Dylan Field

  people forget how large slack is now

• bullish endorsement Dylan Field

  slack is a gold standard they send you your monthly utilization every month

• bullish assessment Dylan Field

  so selects model is that you've got active user pricing now the question is like okay is there enough trust to know that there's an active user we've definitely look to the model for figma and it's mean that I think could be really interesting to me incentivize the right behaviors like if you get to the point where you know anyone can become an active user and then you only charge the people that are using the service actively that sounds like a good thing

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  if you try to rip slack out like you'd have like people would protest

• bullish endorsement David Sacks

  I like slacks model where they're just like this is how many people you use

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  much like the pandemic that we're currently in has driven people to try zoom for the first time or maybe had them double down on slack

• bearish criticism Dan Pupius

  That is a constant complaint about Slack. And Slack has spent a lot of time building sophisticated tools for notifications that nobody understands, nobody reads, and create massive chaos, I find.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  we're big fans of slack and notion and zoom etc obviously we're big fans of slack

• bullish assessment Bill Maris

  Slack, people argued maybe Google should have bought Slack. Obviously, they you did buy Nest. that Google should have bought Slack. I said Google should have bought Slack for sure. You did, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, Stewart's a friend of mine. The same reason I think that Google didn't buy didn't buy Shopify. It just at the the price was price was too high. But of course the price is always too high for the good things. And and I really argued that that that that was incorrect. And and the pr

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  start of day, end of day on your Slack or whatever chat you're using to manage your company, I suspect everybody's using Slack now

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  And they built a product called Slack today, which they've been slowly rolling out. And it does the promise of OpenClaw.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And now the version of Slack today is like a seven out of 10. And it's getting like 10% better every couple of weeks, I'm noticing.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I was just reading again about Stuart Butterfield, who started Slack, and he was working on a totally different business. He had three million left, he told the investors, should I give the money back? But by the way, we built a communication tool that we use on our engineering team. And they're like, No, go ahead, pivot, make that the business, and then it turned into Slack. And they sold it for $30 billion.

• bullish fact_claim Elliot Shmukler

  So our end users tend to be kind of data scientists, data analysts, folks that are deep in the data inside these companies and many, many examples, right? But usually they'll spot, for example, oftentimes companies are pulling in third-party data, right? Instacart used to pull in grocery feeds from, you know, every inventory feeds from every grocery store that we worked with. Sometimes those feeds would be wrong, right? And Anomalo can spot those issues immediately or they're pulling in reports

• bullish fact_claim Elliot Shmukler

  So our customers point Anomalo at their data warehouse where all of their data lives. And we automatically use AI and machine learning technologies to spot issues in their data and alert them about these issues, you know, before that causes things to break, before that causes the dashboards to be wrong and bad numbers to be reported, bad decisions to be made or, you know, machine learning models that are using that data to kind of go off the rail.

• bullish assessment Elliot Shmukler

  And so Anomalo is kind of the tool we wish we had back in the Instacart, Welfare and LinkedIn days to catch these data issues.

• bullish fact_claim Elliot Shmukler

  Slack is similar, right? Slack had amazing growth for many years because what you want to do in Slack is once you get on Slack, well, you want your team to be on Slack, so you invite them, right?

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I mean, like we said, people have, I think channel fatigue, but they still think slack on the whole is a good product.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  it's like had that, uh, kerfuffle just a few days ago where people are tweeting about saying, why is Slack using our company's data to train their model? And you had to email the company, Salesforce to opt out of that. They didn't give you a setting for that. People were complaining about it.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  expensive. Now you're hundreds of dollars per user per month. I think it's a non-starter for a lot of folks.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  Whereas I believe you need an enterprise Slack plan in order to get Slack GPT. So a lot of people don't even know how it works or have used it.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Slack has a generic export where you can export all of your Slack data to a file

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  it's got deep, deep roots into some companies right now, deep API calls, et cetera.

• bearish criticism Evan Owen

  in Slack, if you were to post that to say the product team and the designers needed to see it, then you're going to have to add all the designers to the product channel in order for them to get access to this one thread. Well, over time, every single employee ends up in every single channel just to get that one thread they need.

• mixed assessment Evan Owen

  There's a lot of reasons why people love Slack, as well as maybe have some annoyances.

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  chat and kind of channel-based communication really took off. I had a bunch of thoughts about that, why it wasn't really that great.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  the industry standard is kind of Slack or Teams, right? Microsoft Teams.

• bearish prediction Jason Calacanis

  Glue is a Slack killer

• bullish endorsement Joe Thomas

  Slack is used mostly for internal communication. They came out with shared channels. They're an investor of ours, which has been great. They've been amazing. ... They actually, there's three different videos that play in line. It's YouTube, Vimeo and Loom. And it's because they actually built something for Loom. So that way it recognizes a Loom link. And so, uh, we've worked really closely with them.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  Right. Are magic. An ordinary person can use free Zoom for themselves and in their company and Slack in their company and never pay, never ever. It's crazy. This is contrary to everything we've been taught about how freemium and chokes and everything

• bullish assessment Jason Lemkin

  It is Zoom and Slack. The free version of Zoom and Slack are magic.

• bullish assessment Jason Lemkin

  And we look at all these companies like Zendesk is at a billion HubSpot's at a billion. All of the, the ones we came up with are at a billion in revenue, Slack's at a billion and these brands last forever.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  like Slack struggled to do is the one thing that Stewart said maybe, and I think Saks and Chamath on the All In podcast, who were involved with the company said, you know, was the one maybe leak in their game, the one thing they could have done better self admittedly across the team in an amazing outcome. But they did say Slack was late to getting the million dollar plus clients.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  It soared, as did Slack, which was bought last week for $27 billion.

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Wilkinson

  I think he had, you know, a couple million bucks in the bank and he emailed me and he said, Hey, we've got this internal tool that we've built, which is like a IRC chat client. We're thinking about spinning it up, uh, into a product we're going to call a Slack.

• bearish prediction Andrew Wilkinson

  I said, Oh, this has already been done. Jason and David had already built, uh, um, campfire. There was hip chat. I was, I was kind of thinking this is going to have a hard path ahead of it.

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Wilkinson

  their team did an incredible job turning it into the, you know, $27 billion business that it is today.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  Slack was kind of known for a beautiful design and making IRC beautiful.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  this is where like a google or a slack could be a really interesting coach like imagine if slack started telling you hey you could be more positive or zoom started telling you you know your tone and i guess gong does that and some of those other that category of products

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  ai version of slack here's what it needs to do it needs to start me with pointing me to the discussions that are occurring so when i open up slack it's like nick and you know um matt and jack you were discussing a new series for this week in startup based on ai and they're discussing you know potential advertisers guests and formats click here to join the discussion like it would actually be summarizing their discussions in real time that would be incredibly powerful for a manager of a company w

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  if somebody built the ai first version of slack i would fund that easily if somebody wants to make an

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  recapping channels slacks ai tool can recap channels and threads starting testing this winter slack i'm reading from the verge here slack ai can do things like summarize channel discussions which zoom has been doing for a month now uh threads and search for answers in relevant messages files and channels so i think that those recaps are going to be really good so if you get to a channel and it's like here's what's been going on the past week that could be very powerful i agree with that that's l

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the concept is really powerful because you know if you're within your company everything that's happening is probably centered around slack hopefully and she should be able to pull from slack what the conversations you need to have around contributions challenges engagement and and whatnot

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Yeah. It's Franken software. It's like they bolted so many pieces on like you're saying, some corporate is like, Hey, you know, we can get Oracle to sign up for this for $8 million.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  bottom. So this is the natural entropy of software, right? It's just what happens. But you sign up for Slack today and you go like, Holy there's just so much like stuff. All I want to do is chat.

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  I started one for this week in startups as well, this very podcast, and I added all the people who had come to launch festival and all of our events. So there's like an import feature. So I just took all my emails for people came to the event. I said, Hey, we have a Slack instance and all these people came. And so thousands of people start talking during COVID and it was really inspiring until we realized they're talking so quickly that I'm hitting whatever the thousand or 10,000 messages. And t

• bullish endorsement Arvind Jain

  Yeah. I, that's the one I actually like, like a lot myself. I think it, it does tell you a lot about, about the company. Like, you know, when you sort of look at these data. Yeah.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  And then there was this really cool reporting that I got just by opening up slacks admin to add somebody. It'll show you how active each person was in the last 30 days. Yeah. It just shows you like how many messages they sent. Yeah. How many they got, and then how many days out of the last 30, they logged in. Yeah.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  huddles on Slack will give you an AI summary. All of those things are doing wonderfully, brilliantly inside the organization.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  And the recaps in Slack, I think, are underwhelming, but I'm using them.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  will Notion's AI or Slack's AI provide extra value and get you to upgrade? The answer is yes. We just upgraded both of those products to the AI versions.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Slack notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, a lot of these services really land and expand nicely.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  As opposed to SaaS, where 10 people are using Slack, Slack is going to make if you have only 10 people in your company, the most they can make is 10 people's, you know, $15 a month usage. Now, if those 10 people are using Slack 1000 times a day, and they're posting 10,000 messages a day, they don't pay extra for, you know, the 5000 or the 10,000. That's just flat rate, right? You pay per seat. So there's a cap on how much they can spend with you.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  bottom up sales is one of the great, great innovations that my friend David Sachs pioneered, which was when people use jammer, which was a precursor to slack. Anybody could start using it and they could use it for free, basically. And if they used it in their department, eventually some VP or director or even the CEO would be like, what's this slack thing? ... And that's when you start paying for it.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  slack gets people to send less emails and moves the conversation to real time.

• neutral fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  i would have put slack in there they're not they got sold

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  if you had a, if you're using Slack for $15 a month. Okay. It's a high, what is that per year? 180 bucks a year, thousand people, 180,000 a year. You're like, eh, maybe we should have our own server. Or maybe if you had 10,000 people, it's 1.8 million. When you start getting to eight figures, I'm sorry, when you get to seven figures, it does become hard for SaaS companies to justify the cost, uh, in a big enterprise. And it's kind of silly, but, um, they do hide the pricing and they make a call

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  You know, I couldn't figure it out or rather like didn't want to take the time to figure it out. A lot of times I say I couldn't figure it out and it's not cause I'm not smart. It's cause I don't have that kind of time. I'll tell you the crazy.

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  It's multi-platform, not a great interface. It's super hard to cross in between things, putting in your weird URL every time you need to log in. Like, it's just not, it is. And I should, it should be easier for me to make a calendar invite from there, do all the things that like a super human can do. And you're absolutely right. Like it just, it, they got acquired and this does happen. I think, right.

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  No. Corporate IT departments did not, they were not comfortable with the security situation with, you know, I mean, I think they, they like a thing that they know. And Slack, I think didn't necessarily have the security topsy would have thought that those would go up as being, you know, being part of Salesforce. Salesforce, but it's absolutely true. If you've got synced products that are all in the same family, it's just a lot easier.

• bearish criticism Chamath Palihapitiya

  You want me to log in a second time to something else?

• mixed assessment Jason Calacanis

  Slack grew revenue, 15% slower after becoming a part of Salesforce. Interesting. Then it did in its last year as a standalone company. Remember Salesforce. I had actually totally forgotten this, that Salesforce and Slack agreed on that acquisition back in December, 2020. Salesforce paid $27 billion for Slack. Right. That was roughly 27 times ARR at the time that deal was agreed upon. The deal was cash in stock. And that at the time, again, was a pretty fair price given the market. And it looks g

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  And Slack has got that similar DNA and then other things don't like, you know, some CRM system, Salesforce or whatever, like maybe the sales team loves it, but the CEO hates it or, you know, this group loves it, the marketers love it, but the, you know, creatives don't, you know, it is hard to get all those people correct.

• bullish fact_claim Jason Lemkin

  That's the interesting part of the case study. It wasn't like Slack that was wildfire.

• bullish prediction Jason Lemkin

  the first time we met, I think I knew why Slack was going to take off and we had a debate versus Slack versus HipChat.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  if you charge your product you get better feedback and the number one piece of feedback you get is your product worth paying for you need to know that as a founder if you put that off as a sas company you're it's a really dumb decision because now you never know if people will pay for slack but slack was never free you always had to pay uh now they may have free versions but if you wanted their top tier you had to pay that gives signal back to your team

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  i think slack is still growing but i don't think people who use microsoft office or have what is microsoft 365 are going to embrace slack yeah just going to use teams because they're already logged in and it's there and people who are in zoom because zoom is going to launch a zoom team

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  i think slack is still winning

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  microsoft teams made slack 10 times better that was like a kick in

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  i think they when they sold to salesforce it was 25 billion or 30 billion

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  slack is adding documents right they did that announcement recently so they have a document associated with each chat room

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  cut the team in half, you know, that seems highly likely, right? If Slack has been operating really as a as a separate division, and they're like, Okay, wait a second, just as a matter of pure mercenary efficiency, yeah, we can fold this thing into Salesforce's offerings, lay off most of the people who are working on it, because you know, there's duplication.

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  it's very possible that Salesforce is now pressuring Slack to integrate more with the core product to, you know, it's like prices to and to eliminate duplications. Yeah, raise prices, like all of the things that would make it not as fun for Butterfield to want to be there.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Product velocity slows down. Usually when a company is acquired by a bigger company, because there's just not the same level of urgency around keeping the product going. And I think you could argue that we saw that was slack. It sort of stagnated for a long time. And then like huddles were the big innovation, which is great. But I think we could agree, there could still be other product features, um, that could have been developed if it were independent.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  Like those kinds of features would be annoying to some OG Slack users and they might be delightful for some Salesforce users, but somebody like Stuart might be like, no way, not on my watch. Well, this watch is over.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  sometimes the founder can be a blocker, right? Um, because you want to do things like you're saying, integrate the product more deeply into other products.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  if an internal person takes something over, they might not be as precious about integrations, uh, or changes to the product, you know, the original philosophy of the project, uh, and the product and the, the founding team is gone.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  I think we can assume that Slack is headed for some greater integration.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Stuart Butterfield, Slack founder and CEO, is leaving Salesforce two years to the day after Salesforce bought his company Slack. he will be replaced not by a Slack team member or a Slack executive, but by a Salesforce executive.

• bearish fact_claim David Sacks

  when they see a new competitor come along whether it's slack or zoom or or okta is they'll basically just clone it create a worse version of that product and throw it into the bundle and so now every single enterprise is getting the slack clone or the zoom clone or whatever for free and that has a huge material impact on you know it pulls the rug out from under those startups

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  unique i think it's interesting you know that slack seems to have gotten the worst of both worlds

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  i think a weak corporate culture at slack ... this is the problem when founders check out

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  stewart butterfield responded to a question about that by admitting that he quote wasn't very successful integrating the two cultures he said the problem has been there's no incorporation of the slack culture into the salesforce culture and unless there is some element of that then it's not integration in any sense it's just the elimination

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  he would be stepping down ... which was almost certainly due to the fact that he had vested ... however sometimes you get rich and you keep your job that you love and he definitely did not

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  slack is underperforming ... it is likely not helped let's say exacerbated dramatically by the fact that microsoft started bundling what is effectively slack's core offering for free into office so that's microsoft teams ... microsoft comes along like oh we have teams we'll just make that free and all of a sudden everybody's like well i'm not paying extra for slack because our whole organization's already on microsoft and now we have that

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  give it access to your slacks or as I'm saying give it access to your home it knows you better than you know yourself because it's observing you not just taking what you say for granted

• bearish fact_claim Lon

  I got an answer for you by the way business plus we're on the business plus slack tier $522 a month you're spending on slack you know

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I'm spending currently 6,500 a month to have like the second highest tier. There's like the low tier, the medium tier of the high tier. I think I'm on the medium

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I've been trying to get Slack to play nice with OpenClaw. And I want my agent to have like root access. And I want my agent, my Ultron agent, like the ultimate one on OpenClaw to understand every person who works for me, everything they do, every conversation happening, every DM happening that nobody sees to understand full context with the exception of like HR issues or whatever, which, you know, I'm kind of figuring out how to deal with, but I run a transparent organization. Anything that's an

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the deal was done not at a very high premium to where slack traded just in the summer

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we opened the direct listing at 40 or 41 and then this was at 45.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the size growing size growing about 60 a year

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  slack was doing 800 million run rate anyway rounded up to a billion

• neutral assessment David

  i think that what slack probably saw ... was as david said just um you know a level of sophistication and scale and ability to cross sell and upsell that was needed for enterprise scale

• mixed assessment Jason Calacanis

  they only build you for people who were actively using the product now that's a beautiful awesome feature it makes you not scared to use it but on the enterprise level i mean that seemed to be like maybe one of those non-cutthroat things that maybe we're holding them back

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  it just seemed to me this company unlike zoom uh should have been able to grow quicker and if you look at their numbers they had 87 companies that had were spending over a million dollars you put a rabid sales team on that product and they go in like benioff does with his sales team

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  i think there was um something in the df dna of snap slack that actually i see really very commonly uh in the dna of of sort of producty sas companies producty sas founders which is they kind of have a reflexive dislike or distaste for sales and they resist the idea of sales

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  if you were to nitpick just one one little thing that i think they could have uh done faster it would have been embracing enterprise sales

• bullish endorsement David Sacks

  stewart and the slack team did a phenomenal job 30 billion dollar exit um seven years of just about flawless execution

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  salesforce in a record transaction for a sas company i think it's the highest ever paid for a sas company 27 billion dollars 27.7 billion dollars for slack which has only been public for just over a year

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  the single biggest thing that we were attracted to was something that we looked at and which was called um intercompany edges and even back in 2015 or 16 when we did this original investment there was this dynamic where people across companies were communicating via slack channels and i was completely stunned by this idea because that was effectively a substitution for email because the only way you communicate across companies today is by email you know david is at craftventures.com and he emai

• mixed assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  i'm not sure that the m&a strategy was the hard part i just think that it's when you're in the bowels of these companies as we all know it's super hard right so i mean i don't think you can fail stewart uh and the team but i think that somewhere along the way just the realization of how special and unique that network effect was um didn't happen because it would have given a different team a level of energy or comfort to kind of really go for the brass ring as you said and um but you know hopefu

• bullish criticism Unattributed

  appreciate network effects if you look at what jeff lawson did at twilio he started with much less i think he started with nothing started with nothing twilio jeff lawson then he buys sengrid and segment their market cap has gone 12 it was 12x market cap they went from 29 dollars a share to 365 dollars a year in three years they're at 60 billion slack should have been buying other companies with their equity and they should have built and rolled up all of the other hub spots or whatever else is

• bullish endorsement Chamath Palihapitiya

  to be honest with you i mean i left the board and i just don't know why i i wish i could have gotten the call because i would have bought it yeah i agree with you i think network effects are incredibly unique assets they're very very rare i think we've all been around them we've worked in them david has david the other david has i have jason you have it is the single most incredible moment momentum driver and you know sort of tailwind and when it exists you just never give it up and so i agree w

• bullish criticism Unattributed

  my dumbest business move with slacks board selling slack this is the stupidest thing i've ever seen i understand they felt like maybe uh it was a great deal but i would have much rather them see seen them do

• bullish prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  lock-in and value and you know the prevention of churn uh over time i think it's going to be huge

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  i think i think it's on that level actually i think it's of that order of magnitude where the importance of those assets to those companies slack will be to salesforce

• bullish endorsement David Sacks

  i had another smart business move i just wanted to point out which was salesforce buying slack i think it's brilliant for them i think they're going to look back on the 10 they paid of their capital for slack and i think slack will be more important than salesforce ultimately in business it's a huge the most important brand there what a crown jewel what a great what a great move by benioff and and brett taylor and i just think what a great asset totally be better for them than youtube is for

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  In a way, Slack is the first consumer product for the enterprise. It seems to have grown on a consumer basis. It grows like a consumer app, yet it is a SaaS product.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And I think the acquisition made a lot of sense, which is you've got Office, which is Microsoft's most important product, $20 billion a year plus product. And they acquired Yammer to help them become more social, more mobile, more cloud focused. And I think the acquisition has helped them do that. But, you know, as a result, I think the Yammer product kind of has been, it's been a little bit lost in integration for the last few years. And that's allowed a company like Slack to come along and pus

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  They took your exact device, which was use your company's domain name to sign up and you'll put everybody in a group.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  But I think Slack – and it is interesting because Slack took a lot of the Yammer concepts about spreading virally inside enterprises.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I think Slack came along, like I said, a few years later. And it was a mobile first product.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  And now it's become, whatever, a $3 or $4 billion company.

• neutral fact_claim Mamoon Hamid

  We put in $25 million in the first round of Slack. ... No, it was 10%.

• bullish fact_claim Mamoon Hamid

  Slack, on the other hand, the free to paid conversion was about close to 50% at the time. The Dow Mao was about 50%.

• bearish prediction David Sacks

  And actually, I remember emailing David, David Sachs. Yeah. At the time, he was at Microsoft now. He's like, hey, David, have you heard of this thing called Slack? He's like, no, it won't work.

• neutral fact_claim Mamoon Hamid

  The video game that had just pivoting into building Slack and they'd built Slack. At this point, they had six companies that were using it and it was used by maybe a few hundred people. I remember this was about maybe six to nine months after Yammer had been acquired. And that to me was an attempt at the social network or the messaging platform for the enterprise.

• bullish fact_claim Rahul Vohra

  This is that question put to 751 Slack users, of whom 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. 51% is greater than 40%. Therefore, Slack has product market fit.

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  slack kind of came out of nowhere and there was no one to really oppose them because you know all the promotional activity we had done around yammer just ended because again we we didn't we didn't have the incentive that was created by the sales organization just to explain um the pricing thing

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  when they see a new competitor come along whether it's slack or zoom or okta is they'll basically just clone it create a worse version of that product and throw it into the bundle and so now every single enterprise is getting the slack clone or the zoom clone or whatever for free and that has a huge material impact on you know it pulls the rug out from under those startups

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  slack i think is the best example where you know microsoft teams was fundamentally cannibalizing this business which is what drove slack into the arms of salesforce

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  I mean, it looks like from this chart, that Slack is kind of level.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  And if you look at Slack itself, it's still growing the same percentage growth it did inside of Salesforce that it did as an independent company. So it's growing at a similar pace.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  And then they basically pull the legs out from under that other company. So it can't be a vibrant competitor. And then the next year, they'll just raise the price of the bundle. Right. And they've done that with Slack. They've done that with Okta. They've done that with Zoom.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  What's interesting about it is that then, you know, when the acquisition happened to Salesforce, it sort of waters down that claim, because now Salesforce also has a set of really essential products that are useful and needed in the market, that Slack can go and attach themselves to. And in many ways, David, it forced the hand of Slack to be acquired by Salesforce. And if not Salesforce, it would have to have been somebody else. But could it have been an independent company had we not had to com

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  I feel a lot better about that because Slack got acquired, hasn't really innovated in a few years.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  it's very divisive because some people like Slack's model and some people don't.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  So Slack's model is that you've got active user pricing.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  I like Slack's model too.

• bearish criticism Chamath Palihapitiya

  Now, for example, I went through a direct listing with Slack. What we did not learn is that the best price is the day one price. So if you had investor pressure, the thing that I should have done, it was a probably a $1.2 billion, $1.24 billion mistake. I know it because I distributed too late. I should have sold every share. I didn't know that. It was very hard to know that.

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  The wake-up moment for me was we were talking to our agent about, hey, we want to get this functionality out of Slack. And it's like, yeah, Slack doesn't have that, but have you considered MatterPost? I'm like, what's MatterPost? It's like, oh, it's an open source project. I can spin it up this weekend, export your Slack instance and put it there. And I was like, oh, don't do that. We're only spending 6K a year on Slack or 10K a year. But the software is building CRM systems for us. It's buildin

1. 2028-04-09 if you can provide it right on your phone in Slack, that's really a next generation UI. And we're doing that with all of our products. · Prediction · pending
2. 2028-03-20 in 2018 when you have rebuilt your whole network on top of 40 other apps and at last thing got distracted and they didn't do those Integrations and slack has them all you might change · Prediction · confirmed
3. 2028-03-20 I also like slack slack is putting so many resources into building this product that in two years hip chat game over they can't keep up unless the Paradigm doesn't change · Prediction · confirmed
4. 2028-02-17 Glue is a Slack killer · Prediction · pending
5. 2028-02-16 I said, Oh, this has already been done. Jason and David had already built, uh, um, campfire. There was hip chat. I was, I was kind of thinking this is going to have a hard path ahead of it. · Prediction · pending
6. 2028-02-11 the first time we met, I think I knew why Slack was going to take off and we had a debate versus Slack versus HipChat. · Prediction · confirmed
7. 2028-01-26 lock-in and value and you know the prevention of churn uh over time i think it's going to be huge · Prediction · confirmed
8. 2028-01-25 And actually, I remember emailing David, David Sachs. Yeah. At the time, he was at Microsoft now. He's like, hey, David, have you heard of this thing called Slack? He's like, no, it won't work. · Prediction · pending

VentureSignalScore 35.8/100 for slack, composed from 1 of 4 components (emerging formula), discounted ×0.79 for 30% signal coverage