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📋 Slack Year Book

2015

Slack: Be less busySlack: Be less busySlack Teams Do Amazing Things — "Animals!" TV Commercial (60 second) - YouTube

Slack is Loved by startups

Slack: What Is It & Why Do Startups Adore It?

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 | SlackSlack, The Newest Enterprise Social Network, Is The Latest Effort From Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield • TechCrunchA 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. 🙆" / TwitterSlack 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" / TwitterSlack: Be less busySlack: Be less busyWhere work happens | SlackWhere work happens | SlackSource: Microsoft mulled an $8 billion bid for Slack, will focus on Skype instead | TechCrunchHow Slack Generates 100,000,000 Website Visitors Per MonthHow 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

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

slack screen shots

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:

Monetization

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

Announcing our new partnership with Slack - Work Life by Atlassian

Partner with Atlassian

Slack updates privacy policy: Employers can read 'private' DMs without telling workersSlack hits 8 million daily active users with 3 million paid users | TechCrunchSlack is raising $400M+ with a post-money valuation of $7B or more • TechCrunchSlack direct listing: Stock begins trading on New York Stock ExchangeSlack 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:

Raise 400 million, worth 7 Billion

Allen Shim named Slack’s CFO | SlackChart: 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

From Slack IPO: What You Need to Know

Usage Statistics

From Slack IPO: What You Need to Know

Slack Accuses Microsoft for illegal crushing competition

Numbers

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

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 | SlackMicrosoft 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!!!

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:

So Teams went hard right:

From Lessons from Teams Beating Slack - by Aakash Gupta

Lesson's learned from Slack & Teams Competition

Lesson's learned from Slack & Teams Competition

Microsoft Teams - WikipediaWorkplace (software) - WikipediaSlack valued at $5.1bn after $250mn investment from Japan’s Softbank | Business Chief North AmericaFlickr - Wikipediahttp://twitframe.com/show?https://twitter.com/stewart/status/1192502404161236992

General Reviews

Why Microsoft Teams Has Been Overtaking Slack | by Richard Fang | The  Startup | Medium

From teams surpass Slack - Google Search

Slack Year Book

2012 - Goodbye Glitch

2013 - Hello Slack

IBM Is Going All-in on Slack As It Modernizes Its IT

IBM goes all in for Slack, rolled out Slack to all 350,000 of its employees around the world, became Slack’s largest customer.

As Slack passes six million daily users, Stewart Butterfield's company is opening up its messaging platform to multi-company use to keep it up.

From www.forbes.com

2014 -- Official Launch

2015 - Grow & Fund Raising

2016 - Official A Unicorn

2017 - Competition

qi lu apps and services vice president at microsoft

From 23 Silicon Valley Power Players Who Used to Work at Yahoo

stewart butterfield

From 23 Silicon Valley Power Players Who Used to Work at Yahoo

SoftBank Vision Fund – Investment in Slack, the Business Communication  Platform | Fintech SingaporeHow and why to use Slack's threaded messages in channels and Apps - Work  Life by Atlassianスレッド形式のメッセージを使いこなすためのヒント | SlackAllen Shim named Slack's CFO | SlackAnnouncing our new partnership with Slack - Work Life by Atlassian

 

2017

2018

Web Source 2020

2018 - No sign of slowing down

2019 - IPO & Bypassed by Teams

2020 - Salesforce Acquisition

Tiny Speck Started in 2009

2012

Growth

Officially launched in Feb 2014

DAU exploded

Growth in numbers

By February

By April 2015:

By June 2015:

By October:

Websites

Aug: Identify it’s 3 core features for the first time:

Channels & Search & Integration

OCT: using NASA Mars team for credibility

A messaging app for teams | who put robots on Mars

From Slack: Be less busy

2013 - Hello Slack

2014 -- Official Launch

Source 2012-2017

Source 2018-2020

Slack Timeline

2012 - Goodbye Glitch

2013 - Hello Slack

2014 -- Official Launch

2015 - Grow & Fund Raising

2016 - Official A Unicorn

2017 - Competition

2018 - No sign of slowing down

2019 - IPO & Bypassed by Teams

2020 - Salesforce Acquisition

2015 - Grow & Fund Raising

2016 - Official A Unicorn

2017 - Competition

2018 - No sign of slowing down

2019 - IPO & Bypassed by Teams

2020 - Salesforce Acquisition

Slack Timeline

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