📋 Slack Year Book

2015

At launch in February 2014, they had 15,000 daily users. By February 2015, the app had an incredible 500,000 daily users. Besides the tremendous growth in only one year, the daily users were spending about two hours a day engaged with the app.

Pricing | Slack Slack, The Newest Enterprise Social Network, Is The Latest Effort From Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield • TechCrunch A Review of Slack, Glitch, and The History of Simple Real-Time Communication - Taskade Blog

2013

Slack: Your Searchable, Infinite Brain

Web Source - 2014

(20) Slack on Twitter: "We have lofty dreams of universal search across all team communication. But all the feature requests are for custom animated gif emoji. 🙆" / Twitter Slack on Twitter: "Ever said “I’m on soooo many Slack teams! I need all of them open NOW”? On a Mac? Like beta software? You’re in luck! http://t.co/4Cb7bPlmCB" / Twitter Slack: Be less busy Slack: Be less busy Where work happens | Slack Where work happens | Slack Source: Microsoft mulled an $8 billion bid for Slack, will focus on Skype instead | TechCrunch How Slack Generates 100,000,000 Website Visitors Per Month How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

Why bother building an internal IM tool at the first place

The development team building Glitch consisted of just four people spread out across New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver. To overcome the challenges of communicating across multiple time zones, Butterfield and his team used Internet Relay Chat (better known as IRC), an online chat tool that was enormously popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. IRC served Glitch’s developers fine—for a while. Before long, however, Butterfield and his team felt IRC was no longer up to the task. They needed something more.

From How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

Glitch was unlike any other MMORPG. For one, the game lacked combat mechanics. In a genre popularized by Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft and characterized by fantasy combat between warring factions, Glitch’s nonviolent approach was certainly unique. The game was set in a 2D fantasy world that takes place in the minds of 11 ancient, dreaming giants. Glitch’s surrealist landscapes, imaginative character designs, and extensive customization options were popular with the game’s small but loyal following. In Butterfield’s own words, Glitch was like “Monty Python crossed with Dr. Seuss on acid.”

From How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

A sad announcement from Tiny Speck | Glitch

The announcement: Farewell Glitch, Hello Slack

“We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products. But now is not the time to talk about that.”

From How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

In May 2013, Slack was finally ready for its big reveal. Tiny Speck decided to brand Slack’s beta release as a “preview release” out of concern that the term beta implied the product would be buggy and unstable

From How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

In April 2014, just 10 weeks after its public launch, Slack raised $42.8M as part of its Series C round, led by Social Capital. At that time, Slack had more than 60,000 daily active users and 15,000 paid users just 10 weeks after existing its closed beta, all of which was entirely organic growth.

Microsoft mulled an $8 billion bid for Slack

Slack is actually acrynoym for:

Searchable Log of All Conversation & Knowledge

By May, Slack is being used by around 45 companies in total. In August, Slack is released in a “preview release” beta period. The company deliberately avoids referring to its preview release as a beta, fearing that the term “beta” implies the product is buggy and unstable. Slack is released for desktop, iOS, and Android by the end of the year.

From How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

http://twitframe.com/show?https://twitter.com/stewart/status/780906639301812225/photo/1

First Launch

Website at first Launch

First Pitch line:
Your searchable, infinite brain
Product Description:
Slack is zero-effort knowledge management. All your team communications are shared, indexed, archived and ready for instant retrieval. When you need it, it's all right there.
From Slack: Your Searchable, Infinite Brain

From Slack

There are smart integrations — a nod to the people “scattered across different systems” that Butterfield describes — with Google Docs, Dropbox, GitHub, SVN and Perforce (Source control / repository), Twitter (Social network), Crashlytics (Crash reporting), HelpScout and ZenDesk (Help Desk), Wufoo (Form building), Nagios (IT monitoring), Trello (Project Management), Heroku (Cloud infrastructure as a service), Hubot (Messaging bot), Phabricator (Software management) and Travis (Testing / Continuous Integration). This means that users can track — and most significantly search — across all of what they may do in these different programs, once a user has created a link between files in one program and Slack.

From Slack, The Newest Enterprise Social Network, Is The Latest Effort From Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield | TechCrunch

Integration is one important piece of the puzzle-slack at the first day

Series C round: Raise $42.8M

Websites Updates:

June
Be Less Busy
November
Slack is a platform for team communication: everything in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go.
From Slack: Be less busy

Monetization

Pricing at $8 per user / month

Since its public debut in February, Slack has been growing at a rate of 5 to 10 percent a week and now has more than 120,000 daily users. Fully 38,000 people from 2000 different organizations pay for the full-featured version of the service. It has so far pocketed $1.5 million in revenue. If just those subscribers keep paying, Slack would pull in $3.5 million a year.

the annual billing projections are growing by $1 million every six weeks. And people do tend to stick around at an astonishing rate: 93 percent of people who try Slack keep using it. So it's no wonder that the company has raised some $60 million in venture capital—$43 million in April alone.

From How Stewart Butterfield Created Slack From a Failed Video Game | WIRED

http://twitframe.com/show?https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/433647211952357377

By April 2015, Slack was worth almost $3B. It had more than 750,000 daily active users, of whom 200,000 were paid users.

Animals — Slack Commercial:

Do Amazing Things

Used Daily By 750K Workers, Slack Raises $160M, Valuing Collaboration Startup At $2.8B • TechCrunch

Competition

Microsoft announced Teams
Facebook announced “Workplace“

Announcing our new partnership with Slack - Work Life by Atlassian

Partner with Atlassian

Slack updates privacy policy: Employers can read 'private' DMs without telling workers Slack hits 8 million daily active users with 3 million paid users | TechCrunch Slack is raising $400M+ with a post-money valuation of $7B or more • TechCrunch Slack direct listing: Stock begins trading on New York Stock Exchange Slack Accuses Microsoft of Illegally Crushing Competition - The New York Times

Mircrosoft bid Slack fro $8Billion

Series F, raised $200M

Slack has seen 8 - 10 acquisition offers so far

— From Steward Butterfield

The person at Microsoft leading the charge on Slack was EVP of applications and services Qi Lu. Lu, according to his Microsoft executive profile page, oversees all productivity, communications, education, search and other information services at Microsoft, and he also “sets the vision, strategy and overall direction of the Applications and Services Group,” including R&D for Microsoft Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer, Lync, Skype, Bing, Bing Apps, MSN and the Advertising platforms and business group.

We understand that Lu had envisaged a Slack acquisition for as much as $8 billion, an interesting figure given some other news this week about the startup. Slack was valued at $2.8 billion in its last announced funding round of $160 million in April 2015. However, we and others have heard that Slack is raising another round of between $150 million and $300 million. Our sources have pegged the valuation for the fundraise at $5 billion; others put the figure at between $3.5 billion and $4 billion.

From Source: Microsoft mulled an $8 billion bid for Slack, will focus on Skype instead | TechCrunch

There is another coincidental overlap between Lu and Butterfield: both worked at Yahoo at the same time. Butterfield ran the Flickr photo service that he co-founded and sold to Yahoo while Lu was EVP of engineering for search and advertising.

From Source: Microsoft mulled an $8 billion bid for Slack, will focus on Skype instead | TechCrunch

Slack Has Seen 8-10 Acquisition Offers So Far | TechCrunch

“As the leader of a brand-new product category, we have a huge advantage right now. These next 6 to 18 months are going to be critical for growth and this funding round gives us unlimited flexibility to ensure that Slack’s momentum will continue to pick up steam.” – Stewart Butterfield

From How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

By October 2014, 30,000 teams were sending more than 200M messages via Slack every month. The company raised an additional $120M in its Series D round in October, led by Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. By this point, Slack had raised more than $180M—an amazing figure, considering the product had been out of beta for less than a year. Equally amazing was the pace of Slack’s growth.

From How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

Everybody loves Slack. When people love something, they copy it.

Establish Slack Fund to encourage 3rd-party integrations

In 2016, however, the idea of Slack becoming a platform for automated bots was a decidedly risky proposition. On the one hand, Slack was giving users the ability to make Slack more extensible. On the other, this approach relied on people and companies to integrate with and build new products on top of Slack—something that was beyond Slack’s control. Despite the risks, Slack is betting big on its app and bot ecosystem. The company’s Slack Fund, an investment fund managed by Slack and some of the company’s leading investors, has already invested more than $80M to encourage the development of new bots, apps, and Slack integrations.

From How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

SoftBank funded Slack’s Series G round of $250M

In February 2018, Slack hired its first Chief Financial Officer, Allen Shim, one of the company’s longest-tenured employees.

From nira.com

From How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring

Allen Shim became CFO

Major privacy update:

Employers can read private DMs without telling worker

New record:

8 million DAU
3 million paid users

Raise 400 million, worth 7 Billion

Allen Shim named Slack’s CFO | Slack Chart: Microsoft Teams Powers Past Slack | Statista

From Slack Teams Workplaces - Google Search

Microsoft Teams vs. Slack — Which is Best For Your Team?

New feature: threaded messaging

IPO

April 26th, 2019, Slack went public

Slack: What You Need To Know About The Slack IPO

From slack IPO - Google Search

Slack IPO: What You Need to Know

Financial Higlights

Revenue of $400.6 million in fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2019
Revenue up by 82% from prior fiscal year
Lost $140.7 million in its latest fiscal year, versus $140.1 million in prior year
Cash burn rate in the latest fiscal year was $97 million
Net losses exceed cash burn rate because customers pay up front
Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities: $841.1 million

From Slack IPO: What You Need to Know

Usage Statistics

Daily active users exceed 10 million
Collective weekly usage exceeds 1 billion messages and 50 million hours
Typical paid user connected for 9 hours on at least one device per work day
Typical paid user has over 90 minutes of active usage per work day

From Slack IPO: What You Need to Know

Slack Accuses Microsoft for illegal crushing competition

Numbers

Slack revenue is $533.2M, valuation more than $27.7B Slack revenue is $533.2M, valuation more than $27.7B

This is not that kind of blog post. Slack’s success is something no one could have seen from the beginning, and Stewart Butterfield and his team deserve all of the credit. We’re profoundly grateful he gave us the opportunity to invest.

From Slack | Andreessen Horowitz

Usage Statistics

Used by over 600,000 organizations with three or more employees
More than 500,000 organizations are currently on a free subscription plan
More than 95,000 organizations are Paid customers as of April 30, 2019.
Paid customers increased by 49% in the latest fiscal year from prior year
Payment plans are monthly or annual, based on number of users
Paid customers include more than 65 companies in the Fortune 100
Has 575 large customers that pay $100,000 or more annually, up by 93%
The 575 big customers contributed 40% of total revenue in last fiscal year

From Slack IPO: What You Need to Know

IPO Highlights

Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack - Salesforce News

2019

Acquired by Salesforce valued at $27.7 Billion

Slack raises Series H round of financing from new investors | Slack Microsoft Teams overtakes Slack with 13 million daily users - The Verge

Microsoft is finally revealing exactly how many people are using its Slack competitor Microsoft Teams. The software maker says that more than 13 million people are using Microsoft Teams daily, along with more than 19 million weekly active users. This is the first time Microsoft has revealed an active user count, and the company’s previous update was that 500,000 organizations were using the service back in March.

From Microsoft Teams overtakes Slack with 13 million daily users - The Verge

Teams surpass Slack!!!

MS Teams reach 13M DAU

Acquisition

Lessons from Teams Beating Slack - by Aakash Gupta

From Lessons from Teams Beating Slack - by Aakash Gupta

the game for large enterprises is not about end users. It’s about end BUYERS.

From Lessons from Teams Beating Slack - by Aakash Gupta

The enterprise game is a sales game. MS realized this largest part of the market required sales-led growth. And crushed Slack’s product-led growth in the process.

From Lessons from Teams Beating Slack - by Aakash Gupta

Slack’s was: