One way to describe it is that we are giving everyone a virtual chief of staff-someone who has infinite patience and infinite memory. How will we work five to 10 years out? And what’s Slack’s role in that future? Anything we can do that lets people find information more quickly is something we’re interested in. Slowly, that will happen for people’s experience at work.
Now you can just pinch and zoom into the world. And the degree of effort that people put into it is like the degree of effort that people put into finding geographic information back in the day-like pulling over at a gas station and asking the attendant how you get here or there, or folding and unfolding a map. Often it’s simple, factual questions like, Who was responsible for this project? Who is so-and-so’s manager? Where is the document relevant to today’s meeting? This is so taken for granted that people don’t really see it. But people spend a huge amount of time trying to find the correct piece of information. Inside all the computers of any large corporation is every decision that gets made. This might seem like a weird analogy at first, but we’re trying to do what Google Maps did for the physical world. More recently, you’ve been working on adding artificial intelligence features. The mission was exactly what we ended up doing-to make peoples’ working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. So we wrote a proposal for our investors. But when we shut down Glitch we realized that this may be something that would be useful to other people because we would never work without it again. Benjamin Rasmussen for Fortuneīutterfield: Yes, we started a company to do something totally different and along the way we had invented this “proto” of Slack. We caught up with Butterfield to hear more about workplace trends-not just chatbots, but also artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing, and why you need your own virtual chief of staff. As a result, the privately owned company has ballooned into an 800-person tech player, currently valued at nearly $4 billion.Īt press time, media reports said technology giants including were interested in acquiring Slack, which was seeking additional funding at an even higher $5 billion valuation. Giants like IBM, Capital One, and eBay (not to mention thousands of startups) are Slack customers. More than 5 million workers use his emoji-friendly app daily to message their teams, track and share documents, and yes, send one another dancing bananas. Meanwhile, its founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield, has become a guru of sorts on the evolution of work, including about things like chatbots (those automated attendants that increasingly respond to your customer service questions online).īutterfield, a philosophy-major-turned-techie, isn’t just pontificating-Slack’s customers and its own workforce have provided a massive sandbox for his observations. Since debuting three years ago, Slack has become a popular alternative to that quaint workplace communication tool known as email.
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