Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on competing with Microsoft, the future of work, and managing all those notifications

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield about remote working, competition with Microsoft, and the way technology changes how we communicate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Neil from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, I'm joined by Stuart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack. I'm guessing if you listen to The Vergecast, you know what Slack is, but it's the workplace communications tool that came out of nowhere a few years ago and is now dominant in enterprises of all sizes. At The Verge and Vox Media, we use Slack to do basically everything. Stuart and I talked about how Slack beat its early competitors, where it's going. We talked about some feature requests, of course. We talked about Slack's explosive growth during the pandemic. And importantly, we also talked about Slack's competition with Microsoft. Microsoft is incredibly focused on Slack with its Teams product. Slack is a startup. Microsoft is Microsoft.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Stuart has a very different view of the tech giant competition than most of the CEOs I talked to. And his perspective on it was really interesting. I encourage you to listen to that. Also, one thing I want you to pay attention to, Stuart's been in the industry for a long time. He's been building software for a long time. He has a different perspective than a lot of the folks I talk to as somebody who makes the stuff and thinks about product design as a product person versus the business CEOs that I talk to quite often. So just a really interesting, insightful conversation. I really enjoyed it. Check it out. Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  Stuart Butterfield, you're the CEO of Slack. Welcome to The Vergecast.

• 2:23Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  I've been wanting to get you on the show forever. It seems like a very opportune time to talk to you in the midst of the pandemic, amidst a bunch of people working from home. So I just want to start, sort of late March, you had a long tweet storm just about how Slack's growth exploded. As the virus started to hit, people started to stay home. The number you had here was that you went from 10 million users to 12.5 million users in basically just a couple days or a week. Is that pace still going? Is it still crazy for you guys? Has it slowed down? What's it look like?

• 2:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, definitely not on a percentage basis because we would have taken over the world. But yeah, we were talking there about simultaneously active users. So Slack is very intensively used up to a couple hours a day for paid users. And that's one of the interesting ways to measure the impact is to think about how many billions of hours, it's just a couple of billions at this point, that people spend on Slack, which is a great responsibility. Hopefully, they're doing mostly productive work and hopefully that is an investment that pays off. But yeah, this has been a particularly crazy time for us, as it has for everyone. But for us, in addition to the holy smokes, we all have to work from home. What are we going

• 3:35Speaker 05

  to do? How are we going to manage this? There's been the business results. I have a little limit in what I can say about the specifics, just because we're in the quiet period leading up to our earnings next month.

• 3:46Nilay Patel?

  Right. So there's a big spike in demand for Slack. You see the numbers go up. Did you have to make any changes on the backend in terms of meeting all that demand? Were you able to scale? What did that moment look like for you? I mean, maybe this is overstating it, but Slack is like a critical part of our workday at The Verge. It's a core piece of our infrastructure. I know lots of other people feel that way as well. How did you make sure you could survive the onslaught?

• 4:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a couple of different angles. So on the purely technical infrastructure side, we actually had made, fortunately, a number of investments over the last year and a half, but especially the last six months, which automated a lot of the scaling. So as demand increases, capacity increases largely automatically.

• 4:31Speaker 05

  So that was great, but we did have to scale a bunch of things. So one was we asked all of our salespeople to reach out to each of their customers and ask if there's any way we could help. And that was in the first 24 hours. So that created a lot of communication back and forth. And we also offered free 20 minute kind of one on one consults, either on how to use Slack or remote work tips or any of that stuff. So we had volunteers across the company to try to keep up with the demand. But in addition to the demands on the technical infrastructure, it was kind of demands on our support infrastructure, the number of customer success managers. But also, everyone is just super busy. You know, there's our

• 5:11Speaker 05

  existing customers expanded their usage. At the individual user level, people expanded their usage. And there were brand new customers and brand new people evaluating Slack. So just kind of in every respect, it was a scramble. Good news was there's a lot of adrenaline in the first couple of weeks and also a sense of purpose because it felt important that we allow you and, you know, all the other newsrooms in the country to continue to operate and the scientific research on Slack and the healthcare providers and the disaster response people. But I think everyone likes to see their work have impact. And, you know, at that time, there's a real feeling like we were made for this.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  So I'm interested in tips for remote work. And you called it what Slack offers is organizational agility, right? Not necessarily a remote working solution, but the opportunity to go work remotely if you need it. One of the first things I said, I mean, like I'm an old IRC head. So one of the first things I said to our team was, hey, it's great to do all your life in chat. You actually need to pick up the phone a bunch because you're, you can be more mean or more cutting in chat than you would ever be in person just by accident. Are those the kind of tips you were giving to large organizations? Or was it more practical? Like, here's how to name all your Slack channels?

• 6:26Speaker 05

  No, it's actually the whole thing. So you obviously had an enormous advantage having used IRC in the past. But for for a lot of people, it's a totally novel and unfamiliar way to communicate. So just the concept that there are channels and other people can see this, who can see it exactly? Like, I don't know if I want to have this conversation in front of my boss or random colleagues across the company. So it's everything from the sociology, the etiquette, or what linguists call the pragmatics of it, to like literally how to operate the system and set policies. And it's it's very different because, you know, I I volunteered for one of these consults and it was a guy in New Zealand starting a novelty business. So you remember like, you know, like fake puke?

• 7:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Like, yeah, so that's.

• 7:11Nilay Patel?

  Like New Zealand Spencer Gibbs?

• 7:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, like Chinese manufacturing. He was just starting this company up and it's just, it's him and one other person right now. So that was, you know, not typical. And meanwhile, we have our customer success managers deployed to move a customer's 14,000 person customer support team to working from home, which is obviously a huge transition.

• 7:31Nilay Patel?

  Are you just like tailoring those strategies for these different clients? Are you, because there's so much of using Slack that's like telling people to not adhere everybody in a channel. And then there's so much of using Slack that's somehow mating your corporate process to a chat app and an interface in like a channel design. Are you in the weeds as people move to remote work and deploy software like Slack?

• 7:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And and there's like, there's some things that seem like they're very trivial, but end up being important. And my favorite example is also because we used IRC, we were used to receiving notifications only when someone mentioned our name or sent us a message directly, like just just to us. And so that's how Slack works. And most people are coming from messaging systems where you get a notification for every message, because obviously the volume is much lower. So if you're on WhatsApp or Instagram DMs or whatever, you get a notification every time anyone sends a message, which would be crazy in Slack. So it turns out that mentioning people's names is really important. And everyone understands the mechanics of it because Facebook has a billion five users or whatever it is. And If you at mention someone in Facebook, they get notifications.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  But there's not necessarily a feeling that you can trust your colleagues' discipline about remembering to mention you when something requires your attention at every organization. Whereas at Slack, we just kind of grew up, Slack the company, we kind of grew up that way. And then what that means is if I get back after a bunch of meetings or something and I see a hundred unread channels in Slack, but only three of them have the red notification bubbles, I'll just check those three and then go back to what I was doing. The other 97 I can check at my leisure, or when I have a question, or when I want to catch up on something. So if you don't kind of implicitly trust that people will mention your name anytime something requires your attention, then you see all 100 of those channels as things you had better check because maybe there's something important for you.

• 9:18Speaker 05

  And suddenly, the whole thing seems overwhelming and unworkable. So the training on stuff that seems trivial and insignificant can end up being really important to the actual dynamic. But the basic thrust for everyone is create a channel for everything that's going on across the company. Every conversation, every project, every initiative, every team, business unit, office location, literally everything. And once you do that, everyone knows where to go to ask their question, everyone knows where to go to give their update, everyone knows where to go to get caught up on something. And that's really transformative. I think the bigger the company, the more significant it is.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  I have a lot of questions about how you think about managing Slack channels. But connected to this is the idea that user interfaces will drive people's behavior and then obviously be in a feedback loop with that behavior and you'll capture it. And well, during all of this, you rolled out like major redesigns of your apps. Did you think, oh, we should hit pause and not roll out these redesigns? Because everyone's coming into this interface and we're about to change it on them?

• 10:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, unfortunately, there's just never a good time. And I am also a user of software. And I think over the last 25 years of making software, I've really, I think I've gotten good at training myself to look at Slack the same way I look at the Comcast X Fi management.

• 10:34Nilay Patel?

  I hope you look at Slack with a little more affection.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, I mean, there's, there's some affection. But the point is, you know, everyone finds it easy to criticize other people's stuff. If it's like, you need to change your 401K, it's like, oh, my God, they've got, they're a bunch of idiots. Or, you know, something with Verizon or your bank or applying for a visa. It's tough to do that to your own stuff, but I think I'm pretty good at it. I can, I have many frustrations. If you work on the product team at Slack, you know all of my opinions. At the same time, even if something is definitely better than the current design, it can be tough for people to switch just because they get so used to something. And it's not about whether this is a better design in some abstract sense. It's I have muscle memory to do it this way. And now you're asking me to do it that way.

• 11:20Speaker 05

  And that's disruptive to me because I don't really care about Slack or what the UI is like for other people or, or anything. But yeah, we can't stop changing it.

• 11:28Nilay Patel?

  So did you, did you ever have the moment where you're like, we actually need to hit pause in this? Or were you full speed ahead, we gotta do this right now?

• 11:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, full speed ahead. I mean, there's a little bit of pausing because at the really high end, so you know, for, for large customers, we don't provide them support, their internal IT system. And that's the way that they want it. So they often ask us to hold back on, on changes for their company until they have more time to plan for it and stuff like that. But for the general audience, no, because we had been ready for a while at that point.

• 11:58Nilay Patel?

  And then Slack as a company, obviously you make the software, you enable people to work remotely. You know, you have an office, people work there. Are you thinking differently now about how you might organize your company in terms of where people work?

• 12:11Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely. So no conclusions. And I just, you know, my style is I would, if I have to make a decision now, I would like to make a decision quickly and clearly. If I don't have to make a decision now, I'll wait because I like the optionality. And at this point, we just have no idea. And it's not a decision that's entirely up to us, Slack, the company, because we exist in a, in a marketplace. And you can imagine if every company with whom we compete for talent decided 20 or 30 or 40% of our employees will work from home full time. And for everyone else, there's this flexibility. So maybe you come into the office a couple of times a week, or maybe you work from home for a week and then come into the office every third week or.

• 12:52Speaker 05

  And we don't do that, then first of all, they're just, they have a bigger pool of talent to choose from. And also Slack employees who over this period realized, damn, I want to actually live closer to the rest of my family back east. Or, you know, whatever it is, I want to live somewhere where I can see a lake.

• 13:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  And those people would leave and go somewhere else. So we're kind of, there's a degree to which we've got to stay in line with the market. But I'm also excited about it personally, like reimagining what that physical space is for. Cause we spend an extraordinary amount of money and it's to, you know, those offices exist principally to facilitate people sitting at desk using computers. Whereas they could exist principally to allow for more effective collaboration, which means a bigger variety of spaces and, you know, more dedicated towards meetings. A smaller number of fixed desks and the expectation that if you already know, if you already have like this giant list of work and you just got to plow through it, then stay home.

• 13:51Speaker 05

  And when it's time to do the roadmapping session and get together with the team and think about what you want to all do next, then come to the office. And then once you have your kind of work cut out for you, again, go back home.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think about that a lot, particularly as it relates to Slack, because Slack obviously disintermediates you from your physical location in a very effective way. But it also means your work can come with you all of the time, uh, which is, I think maybe the main complaint I hear about Slack, right? It's, it's chasing me around. And so we are always telling people to turn off their notifications or get rid of it or just like walk away from it. Is that part of your training as you roll it out to big organizations to be responsible and how you use it?

• 14:29Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, absolutely. And again, Slack, the company uses Slack, the product in a super specific way. And we evolved from eight people to 2100 or however big we are now, using Slack the whole way. So we, we view it as kind of as synchronous as you want it to be. So it can be completely asynchronous. I'll get back to this in 36 hours from now. Or it can be immediate back and forth. And I think there's a lot of never like explicit rules that we taught people, but just habits that developed in the culture. Things like adding the eyeball emoji to a post by someone just means like, I'm, I'll check this out. It's kind of like a someone, I don't remember who now, called faves on Twitter, the humane read receipt.

• 15:14Speaker 05

  It just means like, I took explicit action to let you know that I I looked at your response. So if you do that, then there's usually less pressure to respond. But this is something that happens over and over and over again. And I remember reading a journal story in 2000 or 2001 that was like, Blackberries, ah, they're ruining our lives. And it was illustrated with a woman pushing a shopping cart in a supermarket with like two kids tugging on her arm and her other hand is her phone and she's like answering messages. And the complaint was like, we can't get away from this stuff. It follows us on vacation. It's the evening, it's the first thing when you wake up. I think anytime there's a technological shift, it takes a while for really like almost

• 15:57Speaker 05

  low level social physics, I don't even want to say sociology, to figure out the right equilibrium point. Because if the culture is, I'll get back to you when I can, or when it makes sense, then suddenly there's there isn't that expectation and people don't feel like obliged to respond. But let me just give you a quick illustration of how complicated it truly is.

• 16:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  So we decided, because of this problem where I want to send you something, it's 11:00 PM, I'm worried I'm going to forget if I don't, because it just occurred to me again to ask you this question. So I can send it to you at 11:00 PM, but I'm the boss, you know, and you all have the same experience and people will just assume, oh, he sent it to me now, like I gotta, I gotta get back to him. So we actually created a do not disturb mode more for the sender than the recipient. So the sender could feel comfortable sending it and not having to remember this thing because they knew that the recipient had the control to turn the notifications off. But we also know that people generally don't change the defaults. So if we didn't make it default on, then most people wouldn't use do not disturb. But we also knew that people had keyed.

• 17:00Speaker 05

  Workflows off of notifications, like things like if you're on call or on rotation for monitoring a network or something like that. And also, we don't know exactly how that company works, so we want the boss to be able to override whatever the preferences are. But also, probably you should give individual users the power to override whatever the boss said. So the way we ended up doing it was, we set everyone in Slack to, I think it was 8pm to 8am, notifications would be off in your local time zone. And we didn't start it yet. And then we told all the bosses, here's the default, you can change the default for your team. And then we turned it on for everyone. And it's worked, but it's a very subtle problem. And that's just about notifications. And in addition to that, I think there could

• 17:44Speaker 05

  be a bunch of training. I will acknowledge freely, because I'm almost an eager critic of Slack, it would be much easier to treat it more asynchronously if it was easier to catch up. Because most people do what I, most heavy users do what I do, which is like, mark tons of channels unread, or maybe you use the saved items feature, or you use reminders. However, it is, you kind of develop your own way of coping with all the stuff you want to follow up on. And we don't make that very easy. We could make that trivially easy. And if it was, you know, as easy as it is in email, where you can definitely miss stuff, and you can fall behind, and you get overwhelmed. But, you know, you look at your email inbox, and it's essentially a to do list, and you can easily delete and archive things until, yeah, you can't, you can't miss it, really.

• 18:25Nilay Patel?

  You know, what's funny about this conversation is I keep looking at Slack.

• 18:28Speaker 05

  While what's going on?

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  Not because I'm distracted, but because you're talking about the features, and I'm opening, and then Slack is itself full of my team distracting me. I don't usually have this problem with other CEOs. I don't like, start playing my Sonos speaker when I talk to Patrick Spence. So you brought up this idea of asynchronous communication and email. When Slack was beginning, when that first wave of explosive growth took off, I think we wrote this headline, everyone else wrote this headline, Slack is going to kill email. That has not happened, as near as I can tell. Is that still the goal? Was that a framing that you just took because it was powerful? Did that, did something change in that relationship?

• 19:09Speaker 05

  No, I'm actually, while we're talking, I'm trying to do a complex, qualified Twitter search. Here we go. August 14th, 2013. This is a tweet from Slack. People saying we want to kill email. If we wanted email dead, it'd be cold and in the ground already. Keep it in around. Do our dirty work. So we never said that we would, we would eliminate email. I think we do, I mean, we're the extreme. We don't use email for internal communication at all, ever. Like, no one would ever email anyone else. And I think there's tens of thousands of smaller companies that have evolved that way in their use of Slack over the years. But that's not a change that's going to happen in under five years and probably more like a decade for a lot of organizations.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  You know, if it's, the people have been there 20 years and have developed workloads around email, you can't just stop. And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with email. I think the virtues of it, you know, it's an open standard, universal namespace. Anyone can run an SMTP server. So it's, you know, lowest common denominator in a really positive way. And I think you want those advantages, but none of those are advantages when it's just internal communication, where you can select a specific platform and channel-based messaging platforms like Slack, I think genuinely make life a lot easier because you join the team. You know, people started at Slack yesterday, every Monday. And there's, I don't even know, 15 million messages in the archive that are available for them to search.

• 20:32Speaker 05

  They can, for their team that they work with most closely, they can scroll back over the last couple of weeks of conversations and see not only the facts and projects that people are working on, but also how people relate to one another, what the sense of humor is and all of that stuff. And I think the net of that is you get up to speed two times faster or three times faster. I'm just making up the number, but you get to speed so much faster. And the same thing is true for changing teams inside, getting up to speed on something. So because the advantages are so significant, I think that shift is inevitable. And of course, you know, bringing it back to the current situation, I think a lot of organizations just got shoved down that timeline of inevitability by six, 12, 18 months, or in some cases, probably a couple of years.

• 21:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that's really what I'm asking. That acceleration effect, how we're going to work, how we're going to communicate. Yep, definitely going faster. But I look at our group, I, we use, again, we use Slack for everything. We use other kinds of tools for other kinds of project management. And yet, we still have a sense, and I get it, when we want to formally communicate something, it's still an email. There's some sort of letter writing formality to email. Or in the case of your 11:00 PM thought, I won't Slack it because I know that everyone has their notifications on because it's a newsroom and they're maniacs. I will literally email it and at the top of the email say, "This can wait," right? Because it's like fully asynchronous and it has that formality to it.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  Are those things you want to bite for Slack, that way of communicating priority or communicating formality?

• 22:04Speaker 05

  We implemented APIs for scheduled sending of messages and I think we're going to end up putting that into the product at some point. Gmail, or sorry, G Suite has now, I don't know that they've normalized it in the sense that most people use it, but at least there's a billion plus user bit of software that has that built in now. So I think from that perspective, much more likely to give more and more tools that allow you to keep track of the things you want to get back to, more control over notifications, scheduled sending, all of that kind of stuff. As for like stealing the last couple, you know, internal roles for email inside of a company, like the announcement of an acquisition or divestiture or executive change or something like that,

• 22:46Speaker 05

  that's okay. They can still use email for that. As long as, you know, like you use the word "where" a couple of times when talking about Slack. And I think that idea of like knowing where to go to ask the question, knowing where to go to give the update, knowing where to go to get caught up in something, is the heart of it. And, you know, that can be accountants closing the books for the quarter or doing an audit because there's just like all this flyback back and forth about, "How come this was deferred revenue? Why doesn't this thing show up as an expense now?" You know, or it can be a group of marketers negotiating the Q3 marketing budget and like in real time, making their case for more online ads versus print or something. It can be recruiters organizing a job fair. It could be network engineers diagnosing a production incident.

• 23:31Speaker 05

  It's really like anything, whatever the work it is that that group does. That's what happens in Slack and all of that would be terribly served by email.

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  So it's funny. You called me out on saying where I will call you out on this very interesting dichotomy, which is we have only talked about work. Slack for many people is also a social space. It is a personal space, particularly now. Slack groups are forming for all kinds of things that have nothing to do with work or careers or professionalism. Are you thinking the product needs to shift to serve your business customers and the people who are using it to hang out with their friends?

• 24:05Speaker 05

  No, is the short answer. And not because I don't care about it, but because it's very, very hard to do both of those well. And I think that most of the kind of accommodations you would make for one side or the other actually make it worse. So, you know, while you were asking that question, I was thinking about my own personal use of Slack and that's down to just my family Slack, which is fiance, work assistants. That's about it. That's not for like intimate. I don't mean like cyber sex, you know, just like, just it's not for, it's for more like shopping lists and vacation ideas or maintenance that needs to happen on the house or something like that. Whereas all the little back and forths during the day are in iMessage. So it's not that we'd want to make it hard for, for people to use it for personal reasons.

• 24:50Speaker 05

  The personal uses of Slack that seem most, I don't know, that, that most fit the shape of Slack are those where it's still a group of people who are aligned around the accomplishment of some goal or set of goals. And that could be planning a wedding, a home renovation project, kind of just operating their family, you know, like between kids, lessons and school and homework and travel and, you know, all that stuff, as opposed to people who just have a natural infinity. Like at the, the Star Wars fan club would, Slack would be a terrible tool. You know, it's, it's something like Reddit would be much better. And thankfully those things exist.

• 25:24Nilay Patel?

  But let me push you. I mean, Discord exists. It is mostly communities around games. I guess games are a kind of project.

• 25:30Speaker 05

  Kind of.

• 25:31Nilay Patel?

  In, in one way. But I mean, when, when Slack goes down, we all go to Discord. It's because it, it's a very different product, a different audience, but at the core of it, it's. Channel-based messaging, so we can actually operate inside of Discord. Do you think of Discord as a direct competitor? Or is that just more consumer and not in your zone?

• 25:50Speaker 05

  No, so I think you're right that functionally experienced users could temporarily substitute Discord for Slack. It depends. If you have any real use of the platform, then I think that you wouldn't be able to carry that over. And there's a couple of other things.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, like the entire verge doesn't go. It's the core sort of newsroom operation that needs to. And it is still pure chaos. Don't get me wrong, but we're able to do it.

• 26:13Speaker 05

  People have a hard time getting over associations and there's certain things like the first time someone asked me about, like a Slack employee asked me about Discord internally, like, shouldn't we be worried? We see open source projects moving over there and stuff. I struggled to find the right analogy, but if Apple launched a vodka brand, Apple just doesn't do anything for vodka. Like that, I would, like, maybe, maybe I would be more inclined to buy that vodka than something else. But it doesn't translate.

• 26:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 05

  It's cachet in that way because people just form associations. Slack is already a pretty messed up name for a workplace productivity tool. Discord is, Discord is significantly worse in that respect. But if you go to the website and it's all this stuff about gaming and live chat and stuff like that, and you're coming as the VP of end user productivity inside of 40,000 person financial services organization. And you have, it has to be FINRA compliant and for other regulatory reasons, it needs to be ISO 27001 and 27018 and blah, blah, blah, blah. Obviously, you're not getting that at Discord. And I think it would be foolish for them to add all that stuff because it's super complex.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  And in the same way, for us to add a really great capable set of purely social tools would also be very complex. Like, good software is just very, very hard to make. And so, you know, there's a lot of people who think it's just X, or X is some app that I already know, and kind of dismiss the effort that goes into it. I think people who think they could make Slack in a weekend or something like that, first of all, obviously just completely impossible. I don't, I think 100% of them would fail even to get 10% of the way through authentication in Slack, like how you sign in. Because you have to support different SSO providers and the SAML protocol and two factor auth and block. Like, it's just, that's how I look at all other software. Like, I don't want to do what Salesforce does.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  I don't do it, want to do what ServiceNow does. I don't want to do what Vasean does. If we can get away with just doing what Slack does and ideally being a multiplier on the value of all those other tools, then that's a great position for us and it's a great position for customers as well.

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  I feel like you just fired shots at half of Hacker News. I'm excited for it. It's gonna be spicy. So you brought up Atlassian. They obviously operated HipChat. It's gone. You brought up other companies. At one point, I think Basecamp had Campfire. Campfire is gone. Why do you think Slack won and beat out all those competitors at Desk? Because they had built it. They were there. But Slack sort of swept them all. And now, you know, there's a handful of big competitors I want to talk about. But Slack has eaten that entire market. Is that a network effect thing? Is that a user interface familiarity thing? How did that happen?

• 28:56Speaker 05

  So I think it's hard to pull these apart. And I think in situations like this, there's always an element of luck or timing, or one particularly influential person decided to use it. And people really rely on social proof. So if you hadn't heard of Slack at all, and then suddenly, under the blue, someone told you, everyone's switching from product X to Slack. And then suddenly, you notice everyone's saying that. You'd think, everyone must know something that I don't know. So, you know, there's a gravitational force, or some increasing return dynamic, once it starts. But the reason that I think it took off relative to HipChat, Campfire, and other tools at that time, is really a very basic feature. And that's, we kept what we call a cursor position, or like what

• 29:37Speaker 05

  the most recent message you've read up to in every single channel. And we immediately sync that across devices. So you could walk across the room, scrolling on your phone, sit down at your desktop, and you're in exactly the same position. And people forget that until Slack came along, the other apps didn't do that. So you always had for every single channel to go find the point that you had read to last, which is incredibly cognitively taxing and incredibly time consuming. So it just turns out that that one feature is really, was really critical. So I don't mean it was all about that. It was also nicer looking UI, deeper integrations, whatever. And I'm sure there's many other features besides that one. But I really feel like that one was such a profound difference in the experience of using the product, that you would tolerate a lot of things you didn't like, just to get that.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

  The reason I ask that question is you're the winner of that battle at that scale. You've got a lot of big clients. You have a huge competitor in Microsoft, which is, I mean, it's funny to see Microsoft go all out on Teams to try to take on Slack, which is a much smaller company. Do you think that they can steal some of your moves that you used that early period to win? Is that a competition you see as directly as they appear to?

• 30:45Speaker 05

  It's complicated. So I don't think the same moves are available to them because I've never heard anyone say, we're going to use Teams instead of Slack because we think it's a superior product. I mean, I don't mean that that's never happened, but I've just, I've never heard it. But they're also, they end up quite different. And there's definitely a sense in which, well, this is how it feels on the inside of Slack. Microsoft is perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us. And Teams is the vehicle to do that, but Teams is much more of a direct competitor to Zoom. I mean, it's if you watch their product announcements or read their press releases, if you look at the features listed, if you think about the 100 billion people who are being migrated from Skype for Business to Teams, it's voice and video calling.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  And Slack has some very limited voice and video capabilities built into it, but that's definitely not why anyone chooses to use Slack. So in that sense, I think it's not, well, they're not directly competing at all. The advantage that they have is lots of enterprise customers already have Office 365. Teams is just there for free. So rather than we didn't evaluation and we tried both Teams and Slack and fully examined all of the possibilities for how we might be better collaborators in this digital age. It's just, we have Teams, don't turn it off because it's already turned on for us by default. At the same time, Teams has been out for three plus years and almost our entire enterprise business has grown up in the face of Teams. Like our revenue has doubled and doubled.

• 32:12Speaker 05

  And I think at some point, people, the narrative will shift. If it's quarter after quarter, us delivering results that show growth in enterprise and just continued growth across the board, then the idea that Microsoft could just crush Slack will, will go away because if they could have, they definitely would have. If you think about this press release they put out in July of last year that had a chart of their daily active users and Slack's daily active users with the Slack logo. With Slack name on their press release. No software company has ever done that.

• 32:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 05

  Like, maybe at the height, Oracle would do something like that. And Oracle definitely puts their competitors' names and charts in their ads, kind of notoriously. But literally, no one else would ever do that. Microsoft has never done that before. And that's at a time when we had 1, 200, the revenue. So that's, it kind of speaks to the commitment they have there. And it is uniquely Slack. So if you Google Spataro Slack, so Jared Spataro is a corporate vice president, responsible for other things, Slack. You'll see a bunch of shit talking about how Slack isn't very good. But if you put in Spataro and Okta, you know, another company with whom Microsoft competes with a free bundled product, no mention. If you put in Spataro, Google, no mention.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  If you put in Spataro, Amazon, no mention. So it is, it is really specific to Slack. And there's a lot of background. But the point is, I think Microsoft benefits from the narrative that Teams is very competitive with Slack. Even though the reality is, it's principally a voice and video calling service. And the reason for that, I think, is if you imagine two years from now, imagine Zoom just cleans up, like 98% share. Cisco says, forget it, we're out, you know, we can't compete with this. It doesn't really matter to Microsoft's core business. Whereas in a different universe where Slack is incredibly successful over the next two years and 98% of knowledge workers use Slack. It does matter to Microsoft because the relative importance of email is hugely diminished.

• 34:09Speaker 05

  And in a world where, you know, Windows doesn't really make a difference, it doesn't give them any leverage to enterprise buyers. What is, what gives them the leverage? It's, people are used to Outlook and we already set up Exchange and there's a billion other things that are connected to it. And it's really complicated to shift. But it's really about email. And if email becomes less important than that whole 35, 40 billion dollar a year collaboration and productivity business unit is threatened.

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  Let me just play that again. You're saying that like the identity verification and you know, your Exchange Server, Active Directory, all that stuff, Slack's growth and success actually ultimately represents a threat to that and then the bundled software products with it.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't mean that you would use Slack instead of those things because obviously they do totally different stuff. I just mean the leverage that that kind of core set of Office capabilities gives people.

• 35:03Nilay Patel?

  Right, because to set up email at your company, you kind of get all that other stuff for free.

• 35:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, and there's absolutely, if you're serious about like making slide presentations, then PowerPoint and Windows is way better than most other things. And I just asterisks there, I haven't tried all the new cool courses because I know there's a bunch of them coming out and they have pretty interesting looking features. And you know, we're a customer of Office 365 and Slack because there's lots of finance people in the world who are like, I can't do this in anything but Excel. Like it's just, it's just flat impossible. But you wouldn't buy, you know, $30 million worth of Office 365 for every single person in your company and a site license unless you thought that email, Outlook, Exchange, and that kind

• 35:50Speaker 05

  of central calendar, Active Directory, all the kind of attendant stuff was especially important. And again, if email declines in relative importance, maybe there's a lot of customers who say, okay, well, we'll use G Suite for the for the main stuff and we'll just buy some licenses for Excel for the people who need it, or buy some licenses for PowerPoint. And that's obviously just a completely different business for Microsoft.

• 36:11Nilay Patel?

  So what's interesting about that is obviously Microsoft sells 365. That's a big revenue line for them. It is a single integrated Office suite. You just try to buy it. It shows up. You get all the tools. Then there's sort of the way our company works, lots of startups work. We use Slack, we use Zoom, we use G Suite. We've sort of cobbled together an Office suite for multiple vendors. In this moment, Slack offers some video call functionalities, but it doesn't offer group video calls. It offers some audio. Calling functionality, do you think that you need to grow that and build that and become a competitor to Zoom? Do you think you need to partner with Zoom? Like, how do you think about forming the colossus against the Microsoft colossus?

• 36:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, so here's one thing I think people don't really realize or haven't fully internalized yet. I'm gonna ask you to imagine a bunch of graphs and not, the specifics don't matter, but just like the slope of these graphs. So, number of minutes that knowledge workers spend using software per day, and like from 1970 till now. Number of different software tools or services used by an average knowledge worker from 1970 till now. Number of software companies that exist. Number of software companies with more than $10 million in revenue. Number of software companies with more than $100 billion in revenue. The average number of software services in use by a large enterprise. Every single one of those is more or less on

• 37:33Speaker 05

  the same trajectory, and it's not like it just stops this year, but those are multi-decade trends that will continue. The average large enterprise now has 1,000 different cloud services in use, and even us, we're only, like I said, 2,100 people. We buy from 450 different vendors. And that's not like different products, it's different vendors. I don't even know if I could name 450 different software companies, but apparently that's how many just Slack buys from. And people forget all the stuff, like you choose any even simple seeming business process, and there'll be 10 or 15 tools behind it, because you wanna make a job offer to someone, you fluck that in Workday, and then you create an offer letter in your collaboration

• 38:14Speaker 05

  tool after scheduling the meetings with your recruiting schedule or specialty calendar software, and you send out the docuSign and store the copy in Box, and you service now to provision them with with tools and all that stuff. So, people are gonna use more software. Our position has always been for whatever software our customers already use, or whichever they choose to use in the future, we'd like to make their experience of those tools better because they use Slack. So, just to put that a different way, if you use Dropbox, we wanna make Dropbox better for you because you use Slack. But same thing is true if you use Box or G Drive or SharePoint, OneDrive, doesn't matter to us. We'd like to make your experience of those tools better because that's the kind of space that we can imagine makes the most sense for us.

• 38:59Speaker 05

  It's horizontal. I mean, if you think about different product categories as verticals, the traditional enterprise software business model has been to choose a vertical, make a product, get some customers, and then choose an adjacency and then sell the new product to the old customers and just keep on doing that over and over again. And I don't think that's the way that Slack is going to grow in the future. To the extent that there's a second act, it's another horizontal, another thing that extends across those services. Because the one kind of negative consequence of the additional minutes spent, dollars spent, the number of tools in use, is that the value of interoperability becomes greater. The kind of the siloing and fragmentation of knowledge into these

• 39:42Speaker 05

  different systems, while it's still definitely a huge net plus to use them, is a real challenge for organizations. And if you have this central medium, if you have this lightweight fabric for systems integration, it's disproportionately valuable. And I think that's it. You know, so like, there isn't, people always say sweet versus best of breed. And there can be bundled or unbundled, you know, kind of products at the margin. But I, I don't know this. I know that Microsoft's total revenue from software, like in the industry parlance, is around six or seven percent of all software revenue. And they're the biggest, right? So behind them is going to be SAP and Oracle. And I don't know what percentage they have, four percent and three percent or something.

• 40:27Speaker 05

  That means that, you know, 90 plus percent of all revenue from software is from companies other than Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. There's just this huge, huge, long tail. And that's unidirectional. There'll just be more companies, more dollars spent per employee per year by, by companies, more minutes spent in software, and that's just an inevitability.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  So you don't, I mean, just to ask very directly, you're not, like, Google is like, oh, my God, we blew it with Google Meet. We gotta like, try harder to compete with Zoom. That's a thing that we see happening right now. You don't feel that pressure to extend the capability of Slack into video in that way?

• 41:03Speaker 05

  No, because I don't like 90% of the time, this is a challenge for us, to be clear. But 90% of the time, we're selling into a new category. So that can be tough, because if it's a zero-based budgeting approach, then no one has budget for a new thing that they didn't buy last year. And you have to explain what the new thing is and why it's valuable. On the other hand, you don't have to compete directly with anyone. Whereas if we came in and we said, we're Slack and we're also all the stuff that Zoom does, and you already have Zoom, or Teams, or Cisco, or Meet, or whatever, now we have to convince you to change. I don't think we get any additional revenue from that customer if they're, you know, if they're using Slack and the calling service.

• 41:46Speaker 05

  I don't think it's especially necessarily more attractive. In fact, a version of Slack that integrates very deeply with Zoom, or Meet, or Teams, Cisco, that's attractive. We're almost never going to have the best version in every dimension of that hypothetical calling service. So yeah, I don't think it gets us any more customers. I don't think it gets us any more revenue. And I don't think it really is better for customers when compared to the alternative of deep integrations with their existing service.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

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• 43:21Nilay Patel?

  I talked to other CEOs of smaller, midsize companies, and there's always just sort of the looming threat of the giant, that we're all going to end up working for three companies at the end of, when this is all said and over, like, the consolidation is happening too much, the pace of new startup formation is too slow, right? There's just all this M&A activity and mergers, and big tech is getting bigger. It seems like you're not feeling that pressure the same way. Just throughout this conversation, it doesn't seem like that is on your mind as a thing you have to fight back against.

• 43:53Speaker 05

  No, I mean, it always seems like that in the moment. It would have been incomprehensible to anyone to suggest that that 1977 Albuquerque hippie version of Microsoft, like, I'm sure you've seen that photo where there's 12 of them, and that they would become more valuable than what at the time was the most valuable and powerful company in the world, IBM. Like, it would not make any sense to you that that was possible. And, you know, looking forward, if you, all you knew was, hey, it's the year 2000. Microsoft owns Hotmail, has a big online presence with MSN, has 90% market share for operating systems, 90% market share for web browsers, basically, complete control over the world's population, how they get online.

• 44:38Speaker 05

  And now they're going to compete with search, in search with this 40% company from Mountain View. You'd have been like, of course, Microsoft's going to win. They have a thousand times the resources. They have all of these smart people. I mean, they literally have the choke point of like, how you, how you get there.

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  They're in trouble for using that choke point.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah, no, I know, I know. And nevertheless, there are people inside Microsoft who believe that this is only because of the Justice Department actions. But they, they sure lost there. And same thing, you know, Google in 2007, saying, damn, Facebook really is getting popular. Good thing we have the hundreds of millions of commenters on YouTube, and the hundreds of millions of users of Gmail, and the hundreds of millions of people doing web search, because we will, for the first time in the history of the company, promote something on the homepage. We will force every YouTube account to use Google+. We will promote it inside of Gmail, and they still got their bots kicked. And to me, the lesson of that is, and by the way, there's a million other examples, but the lesson of that is, the small, focused startup that has real traction with customers,

• 45:39Speaker 05

  I think, sometimes has an advantage versus the large incumbent that has multiple lines of business. Partly for innovators dilemma reasons, partly because bigger organizations are are slow and partly just because, and this might be included in the other ones, there's people at Microsoft who are better off in their career or the prestige of their role or their comp or or something if Teams doesn't win. In other words, customers just buy Office 365. So it's zero sum internally for recognition and acknowledgement with Outlook and with Office 365 Groups and with Yammer and SharePoint and with everything else.

• 46:16Nilay Patel?

  Yammer exists. It's, I forgot.

• 46:18Speaker 05

  And look, Facebook's 17 years old, 16 years old, whatever it is now, and fifth biggest company in the world. And there's lots of companies in that category that are that are relatively new that are doing super well. I mean, we're we're doing super well and we're relatively new. Zoom, same thing. So yeah, the 10 years from now, it'll be obvious or 20 years from now, it'll be obvious why those companies wouldn't be dominant forever and a new thing would come to take their place. But looking into the future, it's very difficult to figure that stuff out.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  Do you think, again, I just think you we will probably have the most interesting answer to this kind of question because I hear the other answer a lot. Do you think Microsoft's competing fairly right now against Slack? I mean, they are bundling the product. They are taking lots of shots at you. They are right. Like, that's a lot to be up against when you still have to charge licenses per seat.

• 47:05Speaker 05

  So I kind of got in trouble for this before, but I actually like the the phrase or the sorry, the term unsportsmanlike because I don't I don't know whether it's illegal. That's a question for somebody else. I do know that it's not principally concerned with selling the product on the merits of the product and the benefit it has for customers, but selling against something. And that seems unsportsmanlike. I don't know about unfair in some absolute sense, like morally, you know, judicially. But I also think that it's a tough thing to have work in the end because here's another way that these things play out. Microsoft deploys Teams to company X. They get really used to it and they find, wow, channel-based messaging is way better way to get work done. They build some integrations

• 47:48Speaker 05

  and they start to get more and more of the company on it and soon the whole company is on it. And then they think, damn, it sucks that we can only have 5,000 people per instance, and it sucks we can only have 200 channels, for instance, and there's no way to federate them together. We should consider moving to Slack, which allows organizations to scale to that level. Or we're kind of stymied by the platform capabilities and we need much richer set of integrations, we should move to Slack. So you just get people used to the category and then suddenly come and it puts those customers can play down the line. So I think at some point, you have to compete on the basis of it's a win for you as a customer to use this product. And that's the way I look at us purchasing software. As a general

• 48:29Speaker 05

  rule, there are exceptions. All software we buy is a good deal, almost definitionally, because it should be replacing some part of someone's job that could be replaced. Like it's only, you can only automate the automatable parts of people's jobs, and those are usually not the parts that are especially demanding of people's intelligence and creativity. So you know, purchasing software frees them up to do something that's a higher use of them. And you have to sell software ultimately on that basis, or you don't win.

• 49:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So a while ago, you were talking about making it easier to use Slack. You were talking about having AI help you navigate the interface. That is in tension with people are going to get used to our competitors' product and they're come to, right? If the interface is diverged too much, you've got some problems there. Are you still thinking about sort of radical changes to how the interface is navigated, to how AI might help you use it?

• 49:25Speaker 05

  Yes. So kind of across the board. And I think you can sequence things in such a way that it's less disruptive to people. I think Teams and Slack are going to be quite disjoint, if you're talking about switching, but Slack in 2014 looks pretty different than Slack in 2020. When we think about how it continues to change in the future, I think there's opportunities for more AI ML stuff, like our little-known people search features. So you type in a search query into Slack, you could be looking for a message or a document, like a specific one, or you could just be looking for information about this topic. And if it's the latter, we suggest people who appear to be experts on that topic. And it's actually, you try it out, like, think of someone who's a sports fan of a particular

• 50:07Speaker 05

  team inside of your company, and put the name of that team in, and then see if they show up in people's search. There's live demo with high potential to fail, because it's the first time I ever thought of that example.

• 50:18Nilay Patel?

  It's not going great.

• 50:19Speaker 05

  No. What was the team you put in?

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  I put in Green Bay Packers and I was assuming, well, maybe I can't find myself. Let me try.

• 50:27Speaker 05

  Oh, actually, I don't know if you can find yourself. That's interesting.

• 50:29Nilay Patel?

  No, it didn't work either. I tried Chicago Bulls because I just watched the last dance and no one came up.

• 50:33Speaker 05

  All right, well.

• 50:34Nilay Patel?

  I tried, I tried. I did my best.

• 50:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. If you put in revenue recognition, for what it's worth, inside of the Slack instance, you find Jonathan Gann, the director of revenue recognition. So at least that demo is reliable.

• 50:46Nilay Patel?

  Maybe I just don't have it yet. Maybe Vox Media Slack instance is behind the curve.

• 50:50Speaker 05

  Could be. But then I talked about the ability to kind of track and manage all the stuff you want to get back to in Slack. I think that's a serious pain point. And just making people aware that there is a history stack that you can go back and forth through, that is often a huge relief. Teaching people some of the basics. But looking further afield, well, I don't think we would ever build a call-in service that has the same guts or purpose as Zoom. I think there's opportunities for asynchronous video or audio communication. I mean, you see the obvious desire for this feature based on people's use of WhatsApp and to a lesser extent iMessage, the tap to record, release to send, kind of send you a quick message.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  And there was this, when Facebook added stories right after Instagram, there's this joke about how all software would add stories. But I could actually see a story like UI in a channel for a given team being pretty valuable because a lot of the messages in these, like at the low level, a group of people working together on something are, I'm going to be gone for lunch for the next 90 minutes because I had to pick my kid up on the way back or something like that. But also just kind of a little update on how it's going, how progress is on this project. And those could be effectively both delivered, kind of created and consumed in a way that might be preferable to text. And then the last thing I think is, whereas we want to give individuals better controls to track and manage all the stuff that's going on Slack.

• 52:15Speaker 05

  Collaborative means to organize the kind of huge rush of information to kind of pull things out and curate them, I think would be a huge advantage. And for every single thing that we can imagine doing ourselves, we would always try to make it available at the absolute stub level for any competitive product that people would want to plug in. Because if people can do that, it only accrues to our benefit. Yeah. The Slack with Slack branded feature X is probably less valuable than Slack with competitor branded feature X in the same slot, because now you're using Slack and you have an integration setup. So, you know, it's like, it's

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  It's a little, it's even stickier. That's really interesting because it, right, that's the idea that Slack contains this corpus of knowledge about your company, and you can service that in different ways, and then you can extend that into different software. Again, I just come back to the notion that people use Slack both for work, and you're very focused on work, and we've mostly talked about work. But that is something you could apply to people's personal lives as they use it as consumers at other places. Does that cross your mind? Like, if you're, if you're gonna plan a wedding in Slack, could Slack just like learn more about your wedding and suggest wedding vendors to you? Like, is that just too far afield?

• 53:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a totally different business, like the Sally Nads and stuff like that. I always use this story internally because I liked it, but one of Aesop's fables is the dog that has a bone in its mouth, and it's walking along, and it comes to a pond, and it sees another dog with a bone in its mouth, which in truth is actually its own reflection. It opens its mouth to grab the other bone, and as a result, drops its own bone into the water. So you can imagine, like, I remember a woman I worked with in, God, 1998 or something like that, had this incredible shoe collection Excel sheet, and there's lots of people who put their baseball cards into Excel or like Excel for literally anything. In Japan, apparently, it was really big, and I think still is in certain quarters,

• 54:17Speaker 05

  to use Excel to lay out business correspondence, because ultimately, you get this like super fine-grained table, and you can get anything to align with anything, however you want. But if I'm in charge of Excel, do I say, let's go after these baseball card collectors and shoe collectors and, you know, all the other myriad uses of Excel? Or do we stay focused on the thing that it's supposed to do well?

• 54:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, at some point, I feel like all software turns into Excel or like it creeps its way towards Excel. When you say you want to go horizontal again, or you think, just to come back to this notion, like, do you want to build another office suite? Is that the goal for Slack or is to make this tool?

• 54:53Speaker 05

  No, because I don't think the office suite will be as important in the future. And I don't, I don't mean that as a criticism of any company or any tool or anything like that. I just mean, think about the relative importance of files in your digital life in the workplace to like records and databases or objects in the cloud. In 20 years ago, everyone had a shared M drive or Z drive or whatever at their office and everyone read Windows Domain Controller. And we were passing files back and forth all the time. And pretty much the only artifact of collaboration outside of a handful of databases were files. And now for most people, most of the time, files aren't very important. So if you're in customer support, it's the ticketing system.

• 55:36Speaker 05

  If you're in IT inside the company, you have IT asset tracking software and another ticketing system. I could go down this list forever, but but files become a forever decreasing kind of category in relative importance. And those office tools are geared towards the creation of those files. Now, they've all moved to the cloud and I think that actually makes a tremendous difference. But the next difference is someone will eventually crack the nut like Coda, Quip, Dropbox, Paper, whatever. Whatever is that's holding back this kind of glorious future where I don't have to decide in advance whether this is a spreadsheet or a presentation or a word document. I have all of those tools available to me and, you know, most things that we end up creating at Slack anyway, and probably for you as well,

• 56:21Speaker 05

  other than like news articles, which are probably just want to be word processed.

• 56:28Speaker 05

  They want to be like a complex object that contains a bunch of other things inside that has the presentation. But also you can dig into the original stats. It's not like the, the chart isn't always going to be a pasted screenshot of the thing that you made in Excel emailed to you. Instead, it becomes really kind of all of a piece. So a little bit, I don't mean I have a specific prediction or special knowledge, but it is a little bit of skate to where the puck is going, not where it is now. I think by the time we were able to build a useful office suite, it would be 2025 and the world would have changed already.

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  All right. So I want to end this. I always ask people how they spend their time, but I would be doing my team a great disservice if I didn't do this lightning round first, which is just feature requests for Slack.

• 57:09Speaker 05

  All right.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  Why can't I automatically turn off pings on weekends?

• 57:13Speaker 05

  Uh, there's no good reason. And that is in somebody's list.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  I'm sure everything is in somebody's list. It's the lightning round. We have to get into it. Uh, more granular options about what specific alerts to send to mobile.

• 57:26Speaker 05

  Uh, not being worked on presently, an area that we're definitely going to work on.

• 57:30Nilay Patel?

  Why is this thing still an Electron app on desktop? My battery is dying. You can almost guess if you're a Virg- maybe you couldn't, Virg listeners can 100% guess who that came from.

• 57:41Speaker 05

  That shouldn't be happening as much anymore, like after the, the big, the Sonic release. So I doubt it'll be native in the next two years, but never say never.

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  Actually, this is like a big thing that we talk about on our show all the time is, is Electron, the prevalence of Electron, are you committed to it? Do you see that as the, if you ask the operating system vendors, it's the bane of their existence, right? Is that something that you're, you're into? Is it just the bet you made and you're stuck with it?

• 58:06Speaker 05

  Um, it's just very useful to take a fully developed web app and then make a bunch of changes. So I mean, it's not just the same app that you get in the browser. There's actually a bunch of features that Electron allows us to get at in the, in the file system and in the operating system more broadly, but it is a complex app. We have two native ones, iOS and Android, and it is much slower to develop in those environments than it is as a desktop app. The places where it really shows up as a pain point for me, and this is not lightning round anymore, is offline mode. And that's the place, that's the thing that I personally want the most because I spent so much time in lousy Wi-Fi environments. Although who knows? Maybe I never will again. Maybe I'll never leave my house.

• 58:48Speaker 05

  I finally have a good network set up, but that used to be a big problem for me. So I travel all the time and have trouble connecting.

• 58:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, the Electron thing, when I review a MacBook, you know, I get a call that's like, make sure you don't use Chrome. Our battery life claim isn't going to survive if you use and it's like you see them rushing towards. Okay, one more lightning round question. It's it's not really a feature request, but why is Slack still the same experience if your company is five people or 5,000?

• 59:14Speaker 05

  It's a good question. It's not entirely because if there's 5,000, you're probably going to be using the enterprise grid product, which allows you to have multiple workspaces. But yeah, it's it's really it's challenging to find ways of organizing information that work for both. So there's some automatic customization that we do now and some more that we're planning. But I think a lot of it is going to be either administrator level or user level customization to suit the specific needs of that person. Because like, there's only four people in your Slack instance, you have a five person startup. You don't really need a whole bunch of like predictive analytics about which bill or which Mary you're trying to autocomplete when you use the at name autocomplete because there's only four people, you know, we don't need

• 59:59Speaker 05

  to be great at predicting which one you want to talk to now or anything like that. Whereas at large companies, I think it becomes really important.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  All right. So I end every CEO interview the same way. It's all changed now, but I always ask people how they spend their time. When do you work? Because I find it very challenging for me to sit down and do work as opposed to go to meetings. You're a very interesting person to ask that question to, given the nature of your business. But then also now you're managing the whole company remotely. So when do you work?

• 1:00:27Speaker 05

  It's very different now because now I'm just by six o'clock. I don't think I have the capacity to do anything else useful or interesting. Maybe a little bit, you know, 8:30 or 9:00 PM, but generally I haven't been during this time. And I think that's because so much more is getting done. But then it depends on what you mean by work. So a lot of work is what I'm doing right now, being in meetings, talking to investors, talking to customers. If it's like really deep thought about something, that's almost always the weekend. While exercising or going for a walk or having a shower, like all the classic, like I'm not sitting at a desk kind of tropes. That's where the The really more insightful stuff happens.

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  I think of working as, just to clarify, I think of work in this context is not communicating. Like, I'm gonna write the email, I'm gonna read the article, I'm gonna think about this. I'm gonna generate some work product.

• 1:01:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I'm the CEO, so it's, the job is pretty much 100% communication. I mean, for any manager, that's most of it. It depends how expansive a view of communication you have, though. If it's, you know, preparing or sitting through someone else's PowerPoint, if it's reading and writing emails, if it's phone calls and one-on-one meetings and quarterly business reviews and roadmapping sessions and all that. Yeah, that's pretty much the whole job.

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  Many of your answers have been very different than other people's. And this one, to me, is striking in how different it is. Because so many of the other folks I talked to, myself included, great, I'm gonna review your thing. I need to block out hours to just think about stuff before I can go communicate effectively. And it sounds like you just communicate all the time.

• 1:02:04Speaker 05

  I have to block out hours to, in the least effective way possible, kind of ADHD my way through 75 Chrome tabs and start composing an email, but figure like, okay, I've already composed this, so it's gonna show up in drafts. So I don't have to worry about finishing right now. I can go back to the other thing that I just remembered I was supposed to do. I can't really think until the volume on that stuff goes down enough. Like, I feel like most of the time, 80 or 90% of my cognitive capacity is used up with like little loops that are spinning. And it might be every five minutes, every 10 minutes, every couple of hours, every couple of days. There's, oh shit, remember to get back to so-and-so. Oh, remember, you know, and I have to slay a bunch of those to have enough actual mental capacity

• 1:02:48Speaker 05

  to think of something new and original.

• 1:02:51Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, I will end on this same zone. What is your relationship to Slack, the software, like as a workplace productivity tool? How do you manage it?

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  I manage it quite effectively.

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  That's a great answer.

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  I know how everything works, so I can work around anything. So when something doesn't work as expected, I know the way around it. And I've just built little techniques. And it definitely can be, I can find it overwhelming, not because there's too many notifications coming in, but just because I have too much to catch up on. There's too many things that people ask me questions directly, which I don't think is the experience of most employees at Slack. But otherwise, we have very good discipline about where conversations happen and when to send messages and how much thought to put into something. If you're going to ask 100 people to read your paragraph of text, take a moment to think through it. And if this is where we're going to end, I think it's a really interesting thought for everyone.

• 1:03:51Speaker 05

  How much does your company invest in internal communication and in training people to be more effective communicators? Probably zero. And then people spend 100% of their time doing it, which is totally nuts. We don't do as much of it as I think we should, but we do a Slack 101 and Slack 102 course for new employees coming in. And we also are a little bit more intentional about the culture of communication. But I think at almost every company, people don't do any training at all and then have their people spend all their time doing this thing for which they're not necessarily well-equipped. So I'll leave it there.

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  I like it. I like the idea that you have a percolation ship of Slack because you know how it works. And also because you could change it if you wanted to. That must feel great.

• 1:04:32Speaker 05

  Oh, you have no idea.

• 1:04:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, Stuart, that was an incredible conversation. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for going over. You went over. That was really great. We got to have you back soon.

• 1:04:43Speaker 05

  No problem. My pleasure.

• 1:04:45Nilay Patel?

  All right. My thanks to Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack. Just amazingly insightful conversation. Really enjoyed it. We're going to have to have him back soon and maybe just ask for more features. That was great. I really enjoyed that. We'll be back on Friday with a chat show and then next Tuesday, another interview show, Friday chat show. I got to say, the interview shows for the next few weeks are going to be great. We just have an absolutely killer lineup of guests. I'm so excited about it. And I love your feedback. You can tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. It's really helped us put together that guest list, figure out where we should go. So, and tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. We'll talk to you soon.

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