9. The Future of Slack
• Continued growth
• ~250k daily active users
• 30k teams
• Acquired in 3 years
• Butterfield goes back to
making games
• More pivots?
• Game completion
10. Secret Sauce Quote
• “Butterfield’s big a ha moment, he says, was realizing that
messaging was the only business platform that could truly sit
at the center of all other software systems. This is true, he
believes, because it’s the only software that everyone in an
organization needs to use. By contrast, platforms like
Salesforce, Zendesk, and Github, for example, are highly useful
(and valuable), but are only applicable within the sales,
customer support, and development departments,
respectively. Because everyone must communicate, a platform
like Slack can be the hub that connects the entire constellation
of business services.”
Led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Ventures
Acquired Spaces
Acquired Screenhero
2002: Ludicorp Founded by Stewart Butterfield
March 2005: Flickr Sold to Yahoo for ~$25 Million
July 2008: Butterfield Leaves Yahoo
February 2014: Slack’s First Public Release
April 2014: 43M Raised in Seed Round
September 2014: Acquires Spaces (Electronic Documents)
October 2014: $120M in VC with $1.2B Valuation
End of jan 2015: Bought send grid
At its root, slack is an app for team communications, basically a glorified forum with a lot of features derived from social media.
It has both a web version and native client for mac, Android and iOS so you get a multiplatform experience.
After conversing for months with your team about a project you are gonna have a hard time looking for a specific snippet. Slack makes it easy to find what you need based on
The most interesting part of slack and how it makes its money is with integrations. Using webhooks, slack can. You can even customize your own integration using webhooks, aws or the slack API.
The secret sauce is in the way the company communicates with its customers.
