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

Episode Date: May 26, 2020

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

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everybody, it's Neil Life 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 team's product. Slack is a startup. Microsoft is Microsoft. Stuart has a very different

view of the tech giant competition than most of the CEOs I talk to and his perspective on it. It was really interesting. I encourage you to listen to that. Also, one thing I want you to pay attention to. Stewart'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. Stuart Butterfield, you're the CEO of Slack. Welcome to the Vergecast.

Thank you for having me. 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, in midst of 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 and basically just a couple days or a week. Is that pace still going? Is it still crazy for you guys? Is it slowed down? What's it look like? Yeah, definitely not on a percentage basis because we would have taken over the world.

But 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 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 to do? How are we going to manage this? There's been the business results. I'm a little limited in what I can say about the specifics just because we're in the quiet period leading up to our earnings next month. 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 back end 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? Yeah, there's a couple 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. 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. That was in the first 24 hours. So that created a lot of communication back and forth. And we also often, 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's kind of demands on our support infrastructure, the number of customer success managers, but also everyone is just super busy. Our 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 to it was a scramble. Good news was there's a lot of adrenaline in the first couple weeks and also a sense of purpose because it felt important that we allow you and 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 at that time, there's a real feeling And like, we are made for this.

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 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. No, it's actually the whole thing.

So you obviously had an enormous advantage having used IRC in the past, but 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 literally how to operate the system and set policies. And it's very different because, you know, I volunteered for one of these consults and it was a guy in New Zealand starting a novelty business. So you remember like fake puke? Yeah.

Like, yeah. So that stuff. Like New Zealand, Spencer Gives? Yeah. No, like Chinese manufacturing. He was just starting his 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. 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? Yeah. Yeah. 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 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. But there's not necessarily a feeling that you can trust your colleagues' discipline about remembering to mention you and something requires your attention. every organization. Whereas at Slack, we just kind of grew up, it's like 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 100 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 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. 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. 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. Well, during all of this, you rolled out 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. 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 thing. I hope you look at Slack with a little more affection. Well, yeah, I mean, 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, there are 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 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. And that's disruptive to me because I don't really care about Slack or what the UI is like for other people or anything. But yeah, we can't stop changing it. So did you ever have the moment where we're like, we actually need to hit

pause in this? Or were you full speed ahead? We got to do this right now. Yeah, full speed ahead. I mean, there's a little bit of pausing because at the really high end, so 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 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. And then Slack is 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?

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 marketplace. And you can imagine if every company with whom we compete for talent decided 20 or 30 or 40 percent 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 times a week or maybe you work from home for a week and then coming to the office every third week. 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 whatever it is. I want to live somewhere where I can see a lake. Yeah.

And those people would leave and go somewhere else. So 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, because 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 more dedicated towards meetings, a smaller number of fixed desks and the expectation that if you already know,

if you already have this giant list of work and you just got to plow through it, then stay home. And when it's time to do the road mapping session and get together with a 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. 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, which is, I think, maybe the main complaint I hear about Slack, right? 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? 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 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'll check this out. It's kind of like someone, I don't remember who now, called Faves on Twitter, the Humane Read receipt. It just means, like, I took explicit action to let you know that 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, They're ruining our lives. It was illustrated with a woman pushing a shopping cart in a supermarket with two kids tugging on her arm and her other hand as 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 any time there's a technological shift, it takes a while for really almost 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 isn't that expectation and people don't feel obliged to respond. But let me just give you a quick illustration of how complicated it truly is. Yeah. So we decided because of this problem where I want to send you something, it's 11 p.m. 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 p.m. but I'm the boss, you know, and you'll have this.

same experience and people will just assume, oh, he sent it to me now, like, I got to 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 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 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. 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 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, you know, so you can't miss it, really. You know, it's funny about this conversation is I keep looking at Slack. What's going on? 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 talked 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 something change in that relationship? 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 say we want to kill email. if we wanted email dead, it'd be cold and in the ground already. Keeping it around. Do our dirty work.

So we never said that 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.

You know, if it's, people have been there 20 years and have developed workflows 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 SMPP 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'd think genuinely, make life a lot easier because you join the team. 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. 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 a 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. Yeah, I mean, that's really what I'm asking, that acceleration effect of how we're going to work, how we're going to communicate, yep, definitely going faster. But I look at our group. 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 p.m. 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. Are those things you want to bite for Slack, that way of communicating priority or communicating formality? 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 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 internal roles for email inside of a company, like the announcement of an acquisition or divestiture or executive change or something like that, that's okay. they can still use email for that.

As long as, you know, like you use the word where a couple 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 on 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 isn't this thing show up as an expense now? 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 can be network engineers diagnosing a production incident.

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. 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? 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 accommodation you would make for one side or the other actually make it worse. So 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 fiancé, work assistance, it's about it. That's not for like intimate. I don't mean like cyber sex, you know, just like, 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 forth during the day are in iMessage. So it's not that we'd want to make it hard for people to use it for personal reasons. The personal uses of Slack that seem most, I don't know, 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 new wedding, a home renovation project, kind of just operating their family, you know, 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 Star Wars fan club, Slack would be a terrible tool. You know, it's something like Reddit would be much better, and thankfully those things exist. But let me push you. I mean, Discord exists. It is mostly communities around games. I guess games are a kind of project. Kind of, yeah. In one way.

But, I mean, when Slack goes down, we all go to Discord. It's because it's a very different product, a different audience. But at the core of it, it's channel-based mess. 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? 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. Oh, yeah. 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. 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 I would be more inclined to buy that vodka than something else. But it doesn't translate its cachet. way because people just form associations. Slack is already a pretty messed up name for a workplace productivity tool. Discord is significantly worse in that respect. But if you go to the website

and it's all the 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 it has to be FINRA compliant. And for other regulatory reasons, it needs to be ISO 27,0001 and 20,000. 27,018 and blah, blah, blah, well. 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. 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 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 off and plug. Like, it's just, that's how I look at all other software. Like, I don't want to do what Salesforce does. I don't want to do what ServiceNow does.

I don't want to do what Vassian 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. I feel like you just fired shots at half of hacker news. I'm excited for it. It's going to be spicy. So you brought up at Lassian. They obviously operated HipChat. It's gone. You brought up other companies. At one point, I think Basecamp had a had campfire. Campfire is gone. Why do you think Slack won and beat out all those competitors at that's going, 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 that 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? 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 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 and Cap Fire 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 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. 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. The reason I asked 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? 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 inside of Slack because we think it's a superior product. I mean, I don't mean that that's never happened, but 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, 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. 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 did an 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. Our revenue has doubled and doubled. 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 word, then the idea that Microsoft could just crush Slack will go away. Because if they could have, they definitely would have. 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 or the Slack name on their press release. No software company has ever done that. Yeah. 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 one, two hundred the revenue. So it's 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 Octa, you know, another company with whom Microsoft competes with a free bundled product, no mention. If you put in Spataro, Google, no mention. 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. 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 a year, collaboration and productivity, business unit is threatened. Let me just play that out again. You're saying that like the identity verification, you know, your exchange server, Active Directory, all that stuff, Slack's growth in success actually ultimately represents

a threat to that and then the bundled software products with it. 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. Right, because to set up email at your company, you kind of get all that other stuff for free. 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 asterisk there.

I haven't tried all the new cool versus because I know there's a bunch of them coming out and they have pretty interesting-looking features. And 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. It's just flat impossible. But you wouldn't buy $30 million worth of Office 365 for every single person in your company in a site license

unless you thought that email, Outlook, Exchange, and that kind 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 main stuff, and we'll just buy some licenses for Excel, for the people who need it,

or buy some licenses for PowerPoint. And it's obviously just a completely different business for Microsoft. So it'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 sort of 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 sort of cobbled together an office suite for multiple vendors. In this moment, Slack offers some video call functionality, 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? How do you think about forming the colossus against the Microsoft colossus? Yeah. So here's one thing. I think people don't really realize or haven't fully internalized yet.

I'm going to ask you to imagine a bunch of graphs. And the specifics don't matter, but the slope of these graphs. So number of minutes that knowledge workers spend using software per day, like from 1970 till now, number of different software tools or services used by an average knowledge worker from 1970 until now, number of software companies that exist, number of software companies with more than $10 million in revenue, a 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 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 a thousand 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 know if I can name 450 different software companies, but apparently that's how many just Slack buys them. 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 want to make a job offer to someone, you fuck that in workday, and then you create an offer letter in your collaboration tool after scheduling the meetings with your

recruiting scheduler specialty calendar software, and you send out the docket side and start store the copy and box and use ServiceNow to provision them with tools and all that stuff. So people are going to 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 want to make Dropbox better for you because you use Slack.

But same thing is true if you use Box or GDrive 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 most sense for us. It's horizontal. 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 the 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 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 a 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 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, 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 companies, more minutes spent in software, and that's just an inevitability. So, you know, I mean, just to ask very directly, You're not, like, Google is like, oh, my God, we blew it with Google Meet. We got to 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. 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 didn't, they didn't buy it 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 using Slack and the calling service. 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 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. support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

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That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-R-K dot com. Upwork.com. I talk to other CEOs of smaller, mid-sized 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 setting over, like the consolidation is happening too much. 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. 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, I'm sure you've seen that photo where there's 12 of them that they would become more valuable than what at the time was the most valuable and powerful company in the world, IBM.

It would not make any sense to you that that was possible. And looking forward, 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. And now they're going to compete in search with this 40-person company from Mountain View. You'd have been like, of course Microsoft's going to win. They have a thousand times of resources. They have all of these smart people. I mean, they literally have the choke point of like how you get there. They're in trouble for using that choke point. 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 sure lost there. And same thing, 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 Plus. We will promote it inside of Gmail, and they still got their bots kicked. And to me, the lesson of that is, 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. 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 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 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 with SharePoint and with everything else. Yammer exists. I forgot. 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 relatively new that are doing super well. I mean, 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. Do you think, again, I just think 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. So I kind of got in trouble for this before, but I actually like the phrase or the, sorry, the term unsportsmanlike. Because I don't know whether it's illegal. That's the 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, 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 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 year. 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, then we need much richer set of integrations. We should move to Slack. So you can just get people used to the category, and then suddenly come and it puts those customers in 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.

Now, that's the way I look at us purchasing software. As a general 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. 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, the 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. 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 competitor's product. And 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? 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. So 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. 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 team inside of your company and put the name of that team in and then see if they show up and people search. This live demo with high potential to fail because it's the first time I ever

thought of that example. It's not going great. No. What was the team you put in? I put in Green Bay Packers. And I was a super. Maybe I can't find myself. Let me try. Oh, actually, I don't know if you can find yourself. That's interesting. No, it doesn't work either. I tried because I just watched the last dance and no one came up.

All right. Well. I tried. I did my best. 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.

Maybe I just don't have it yet. Maybe Vox Media Slack instances behind the curve. 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 the stock. 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 calling 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, to a lesser extent, I message.

So the tap to record, release to send, kind of send you a quick message. And there was this when Facebook added stories right after Instagram, there's this joke about how all software would add stories. But I can 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 got 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, 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 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. 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 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 in other places. Does that cross your mind? Like if you're going to plan a wedding and Slack, could Slack just like learn more about your wedding and suggest wedding vendors to you? Like is that just too far afield? Yeah, it's a totally different business. Like the selling ads 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 the 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 Excel for literally anything. In Japan, apparently, it was really big, and I think still is in certain quarters to use Excel to lay out business correspondence because ultimately you get this 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 all the other myriad uses of Excel or do we stay focused on the thing that it's supposed to do well? 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, just to come back to this notion, do you want to build another office suite? Is that the goal for Slack or is to make this tool? No, because I don't think the office suite will be as important in the future.

And 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.

If you're in IT inside the company, you have IT asset tracking software and another ticketing system. I can go down this list forever, 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 most things that we end up creating at Slack

anyway, and probably for you as well, other than news articles, which are probably just want to be word processed, they want to be like a complex object that contains a bunch of other things inside that that has the presentation, but also you can dig into the original stats. It's not like 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 of that I don't mean to 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 20, 25, and the

world would have changed already. 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 request for Slack. All right. Why can't I automatically turn off Pings on weekends? There's no good reason. And that is in somebody's list. I'm sure everything is in somebody's list.

It's the lighting around. We have to get into it. More granular options about what specific alerts to send to mobile. Not being worked on presently an area that we're definitely going to work on. Why is this thing still an electron app on desktop? My battery is dying. You can almost guess. If you're a virtual, maybe you couldn't.

virtualist listeners can 100% guess who that came from. That shouldn't be happening as much anymore. Like after the big, the Sonic release. So I doubt it'll be native in the next two years, but never say never. 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 into?

Is it just the bet you made and you're stuck with it? 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 into browser. There's actually a bunch of features that Electron allows us to get at 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 is a pain point for me, and this is not lightning round anymore is offline mode. That's the thing that I personally want the most because I spent so much time in lousy Wi-Fi environment. Who knows? Maybe I never will again. Maybe I'll never leave my house. I finally have a good network set up.

But that used to be a big problem for me. I travel all the time and have trouble connecting. 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 Chrome. And it's like you see them rushing towards it. Okay.

One more lightning around. question. It's not really a feature request, but why is Slack still the same experience if your company is five people or 5,000? 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 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 auto-complete when you use the at name auto-complete because there's only four people. You know, we don't need 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. 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? It's very different now because now I'm just by 6 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 p.m. 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 really more insightful stuff happens. I think of work, just to clarify, I think of work in this context is not communicating. Like, I'm going to write the email, I'm going to read the article, I'm going to think about this, I'm going to generate some work product. Yeah, I mean, I'm the CEO. So 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 preparing or sitting through someone else's PowerPoint, if it's reading and writing emails, if it's phone calls in one-on-one meetings and quarterly business reviews and road mapping sessions and all that. Yeah, that's pretty much the whole job. Many of your answers have been very different than other people. This one, to me, is striking in how different it is.

Yeah. Because so many of the other folks I talk to, myself included, great, I'm going to review your thing. 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. 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 going to show up in draft.

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 hours, every couple 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 to think of something new and original. Sorry, I will end on this same zone. What is your relationship to Slash?

the software like as a workplace productivity tool. How do you manage it? I manage it quite effectively. That's a great answer. 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, you know, definitely can be, I can find it overwhelming, not because there's too many notifications coming in, which is 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. 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 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 I like it I like the idea that you have a Perk for a relationship of Slack because you know how it works and also because you could change it

if you wanted to that must feel great Oh you have no idea Aaron 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 gotta have you back soon No problem my pleasure All right my thanks to Stuart Butterfield The CEO of Slack Just amazingly insightful conversation Really enjoyed it We're going to have him back soon and maybe just ask 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 at 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 on Matt Reckless. It's really helped us put together that guest list. Figure out where we should go. So, again, tweet at me and Matt Reckless. We'll talk to you soon.