Working at Slack
Highlights
Slack's Moat (By The Breakout List)
Tier one investors, great product
Multiple founding team members persisted from founding team of Flickr, which sold for $22-25mm in 2005
Insanely fast growth
A CEO who cares about work-life balance (most employees go home at ~6pm)
Screenshots
Slack Homepage
Slack Product Page
Details
Location
San Francisco
Team Size
46 as of August 2014
81 as of December 2015
103 as of February 2015
Product
Team communication
Larger mission
Become the Microsoft that people want to use
“Right now, your data ends up a little bit in Twitter, a little bit in Zendesk, a little bit in GitHub,” Stewart says. “Slack is the one mutual platform where all those things come together. That’s the longer-term thinking.”
Founders
Stewart Butterfield, Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, Serguei Mourachov (Crunchbase seems to think Tony is a co-founder, but I don't believe that is accurate)
LinkedIn: Stewart, Cal, Eric - no LinkedIn, Serguei
History
In 2009, the founders set out to create a game, called Glitch, under the company name Tiny Speck.
Glitch did not succeed. The story goes that Slack was built for internal communication at Tiny Speck, and so they focused the company around Slack.
The company was founded in 2009, however they had been building Glitch for most of that time.
Slack did a limited beta run starting in August 2013.
Slack launched to the public in February 2014.
More Info
Work Environment
- As you'd imagine, they do a ton of communication on Slack
- Slack puts a huge emphasis on hiring people they want to work with (who would have guessed?)
Growth
Product
Used by: Stripe, Rdio, Medium, Airbnb, Braintree, Expedia and Buzzfeed
People love Slack
Valuation
$1.12bn as of October 2014
$2.76bn as of March 2015
More Reading
The Most Fascinating Profile You'll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup
Slack’s One-Year-Old Software Business Valued at $1.12 Billion
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