The scale of revenue growth is unprecedented. If you look back over history, whether you're looking at the railway robber baron era or the 1920s or the '50s or the '70s, it used to take a long time for a company to get to the point where they had tens of millions of dollars of revenue. It was almost never an overnight phenomenon.
There are a lot of things that Slack gives you that email doesn't when you think about internal use. Switching to Slack from email for internal communication gives you a lot more transparency.
You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first. In our case, we knew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we looked at our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.
In Slack, you create channels to discuss different topics. For a small group of people, those channels are relatively easy to manage and navigate.
A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently.
Slack is gratifying to work on in the same way that Flickr was. The mission is to make people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive.
When we first started Glitch, there were four co-founders of the company. We built Flickr and worked together at Yahoo and then started Tiny Speck. We were split in Vancouver, New York, and San Francisco. So we used an old chat technology called IRC. Almost nothing went through email.
If one engineer at a startup tries Slack and says, 'I hate it. I am not going to use this,' that's it for us. We won't get evaluated.
A lot of companies lock up for a few weeks once a year for performance reviews. But there's a way to collect feedback in real time from Slack so that by the end of the year, you've already stored up all of this information.
Internally, we sometimes say Slack is like a nervous system, connective tissue, or the internal network.
From the outside, Yahoo was extremely successful. It was making money; it was still bigger than Google. But when I got there, I learned what a disaster of a company looks like from the inside. There were a lot of vice presidents, and it was basically a turf battle between them.
I rarely in a working day go more than 10 minutes without looking at Slack.
I learned so much in the year after Flickr was acquired. People forget, but Flickr launched in February 2004. And a year later, the deal was done with Yahoo, and we closed it in March of 2005. It was really independent for a relatively short period of time.
People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.
I remember working with a guy named Andrew Braccia at Yahoo, and Yahoo was the company that bought Flickr. Everyone on his team was hard working and reliable, did what they said they were going to do, on top of everything, and seemed to be operating at this level of productivity and effectiveness that I found difficult to manage to.
