2020
Salesforce agreed to acquire Slack for a total purchase price of $27.7 billion, paid in cash and stock.
“$27.7 billion total purchase price works out to, I think 45, 86 a share in cash and stock.”
Topic
Slack
44 facts from 14 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2020
The offer was a 55% premium to Slack's share price before the acquisition news leaked and an 85% premium to its price after its September earnings drop.
“that's a 55% premium to where Slack was trading before the news was leaked last week, 85% premium to the most recent Slack stock price crash after their, their earnings in September.”
2020
Slack is to remain independent after the acquisition, with Stewart Butterfield staying as its CEO.
“Slack is going to remain independent. Uh, Stuart is staying with the company, staying as CEO of Slack.”
2020
Microsoft's charts showing Teams passing Slack named Slack directly, which is unusual for a large company.
“atypically they put Slack's name right on the chart and call them out.”
2020
At the time, Zoom was growing about 300% year over year while Slack was growing about 49%.
“Zoom is growing at 300% and Slack's only growing at 49%.”
2020
Packy McCormick says Microsoft Teams has roughly ten times as many users as Slack, around 100 million against about 12 million.
“I think let's say that Microsoft Teams has about 10 times the number of users as, as Slack”
2020
Slack offers roughly 2,400 integrations with other software, which Packy McCormick cites as part of its platform appeal.
“you can use the 2,400 different integrations that they have”
2020
Slack reported its Slack Connect endpoints grew from about 380,000 to 520,000 in one quarter.
“they grew, I think from 380,000 Slack, uh, Slack connect endpoints to 520,000 Slack connect endpoints in the last quarter alone.”
2020
Slack reported about $235 million in quarterly revenue and an 86% gross margin, making it roughly a billion-dollar run-rate business.
“So $235 million this quarter, say next year, you know, this is a billion dollar run rate company with 86% gross margins”
2020
Slack turned free-cash-flow positive, with free cash flow rising from about $10 million to about $36 million in the quarter.
“that just became free cashflow positive and grew from 10 million, I think to 36 million in free”
2020
Salesforce is paying about 27.7 times Slack's next-twelve-months revenue.
“So it's a moderately sized business, like you're paying 27.7 times next 12 months revenue.”
2020
Slack's year-over-year revenue growth slowed from 49% in the prior quarter to 39% in the latest quarter.
“It was 49% year over year. This quarter was 39% year over year.”
2020
Slack's latest results showed paid customers up 140% year over year and Slack Connect endpoints up 240%.
“Paid customers up 140% year over year, Slack endpoints, uh, connect endpoints up 240% year over year.”
2020
Google had to do custom work to build the Google Docs sharing integration inside Slack.
“Like that was custom work that Google had to do in order to enable that in Slack.”
2022
Perplexity's first prototype, around October, was a Slack bot and Discord bot.
“around, like, um, I guess October, we had the the first prototype of Perplexity, where it was just like a Slack bot and Discord bot”
2025
Hayden Field says the chat app Anthropic built with Sonnet 4.5 was about 11,000 lines of code, far smaller than Slack or Teams.
“Obviously, it was only 11,000 lines of code, so much smaller than Slack or Teams.”
2026
Lindy launched Lindy Teammate, an AI employee that works inside a company's Slack and accumulates the team's shared context.
“I think, like, what we are releasing today is called Lindy teammate. It is an AI employee that lives in your slack, connects to all of your tools, accumulates your entire team's context.”
2026
Flo Crivello says the main bottleneck when Lindy crawls a company's Slack history is the Slack API rather than the language models.
“And actually, here, surprisingly, the bottleneck is not even the LLMs, it's the Slack API.”
Undated
Eich says many Slack users at Brave run Slack in the browser rather than as the Electron desktop app.
“We have a lot of our users of Slack at Brave use the browser to load Slack as a web app”
Undated
Chenyi Shi argued Microsoft Teams created competitive trouble for Slack because Microsoft's enterprise platform could extend into workplace chat at low cost to customers.
“I think we all have the experience that Slack is a really, really good product, but good products don't always win.”
Undated
Jackie Rocca says Slack has more than 10,000 AI-powered tools available through applications or third-party developers.
“We actually have more than 10,000 AI powered tools that are available through applications or third party developers.”
Undated
Slack has used AI and machine learning for years in features such as search and channel recommendations.
“we've been using AI and machine learning for many, many years. If you think about our search functionality or when you're recommended different channels to join.”
Undated
Slack has a meetings product called Huddles, though Slack remains primarily a text-based tool.
“We have a meetings product called Huddles, but it's still primarily text based.”
Undated
Slack offers a feature called channel sections for organizing channels.
“We do offer channel sections, which is a great feature if folks haven't checked it out. It's a really nice way to organize your channels.”
Undated
Jackie Rocca describes a use case in which an on-call expert paged during a technical incident can request a summary of the conversation before contributing.
“Maybe that subject matter expert just got paged in the middle of the night.”
Undated
Slack AI search answers let users ask questions in natural language and get answers drawn from the company's Slack conversations.
“with Slack AI search answers, you can simply ask a question, you know, what is Project Gizmo?”
Undated
Jackie Rocca says Slack AI does not create and post messages on behalf of users without their choice to send them.
“we want to make sure that we are not creating and posting things on behalf of our users without them having really the agency to make that choice and send that message.”
Undated
One of Slack's product principles for Slack AI is that customers should not need to be prompt engineers or experts.
“Slack AI should not require our customers to be prompt engineers or experts in the field.”
Undated
The Slack AI team prototyped for several months before shipping its features.
“So we've been prototyping for the last several months so that we can again not make users think.”
Undated
Jackie Rocca says Slack was founded on the idea of being a searchable log of communication and knowledge, unlike email, where knowledge is lost when someone leaves.
“with email, if that person leaves the organization, that knowledge is really lost. With Slack, one of our founding perspectives was really that Slack should be this searchable log of all communication and knowledge.”
Undated
Slack's AI team began with employees prototyping on nights and weekends before a formal team structure and hiring were put in place.
“We actually formed this team through a group of people that was prototyping on the side, really just trying to build experiences in our spare time, a lot of nights and weekends.”
Undated
Slack is evaluating pre-trained foundational models alongside machine learning models it has long had in the product.
“we are evaluating pre trained foundational models. We have things that are machine learning models that we've had in Slack for a long time.”
Undated
Slack is part of Salesforce, which Jackie Rocca says has a strong AI research team.
“We are actually part of Salesforce for folks who might not know, and Salesforce has an amazing AI research team as well.”
Undated
Slack built the architecture for Slack AI so customer data stays within Slack's virtual private cloud rather than leaving Slack's infrastructure.
“we have built an architecture where your Slack data does not leave Slack, everything is hosted within our virtual private cloud, our VPC.”
Undated
Jackie Rocca has worked at Slack for about five and a half years.
“I've been at Slack for about five and a half years now, and it has been an amazing and fun ride.”
Undated
Jackie Rocca previously led Slack's product-led growth team, its self-service group.
“I led our product led growth team for a long time, so our self service group”
Undated
Aaron Levie describes the second era of enterprise software as systems of engagement, such as Slack and Box, which are less structured and more collaborative.
“Then we moved to systems of engagement, which was this idea of like collaborative systems, Slack and Box and other tools, where things are a lot less structured”
Undated
Marc Benioff said Salesforce executives, including him, publish their personal business plans in Slack for transparency.
“At Salesforce, all of our executives publish their personal business plans in Slack. I publish mine so everyone can see what I'm doing.”
Undated
Marc Benioff said Salesforce bought Slack partly because Slack was hitting innovation limits as an independent company.
“It's one reason we bought Slack. You know, Slack was kind of moving along, they were kind of hitting some ceilings in innovation themselves.”
Undated
Nilay Patel says Vox Media has a Slack room called finance support where employees ask a robot to file invoices and give receipts.
“We have a room, it's called finance support, and in this room, people just ask a slack robot to do stuff, file invoices, give receipts”
Undated
Glean builds golden question-and-answer sets for each customer, often from real conversations such as Slack threads, to test changes.
“we build these golden sets, you know, like for each one of our customers.”
Undated
Sankar said Atlan can bootstrap an evaluation set by pulling metadata from business intelligence tools and from Slack questions.
“we can pull metadata from your Slack where people are asking you questions.”
Undated
Dasdan described users' work data as spread across platforms such as Salesforce, Slack, email, Notion and Confluence.
“They have, let's say, sales data in Salesforce, they are using Slack, they have email, they have I don't know, Notion or Confluence”
Undated
Zach Lloyd says about 60% of Warp's internal factory work starts in Slack.
“the most obvious one is Slack, and, like, we're doing, like, 60% of our work is starting in Slack.”
Episodes
- 4 Apr 2023Interview: Hamilton Helmer & Chenyi Shi on How to Build an AWS-Like Second Business1h 31m
- 15 Feb 2022The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave)1h 43m
- 2 Dec 2020Slack + Salesforce Emergency Pod with Packy McCormick of Not Boring1h 32m
- 3 Nov 2026⚡️ The 2026 Software Factory Standard — Zach Lloyd, Warp.dev34m
- 13 Oct 2026Connecting Data at Scale With AI: Dropbox's Ali Dasdan18m
- 2 Apr 2024Solving Real User Problems With Generative AI: Slack’s Jackie Rocca30m
- 2 Oct 2025The good, the bad, and the future of AI agents51m
- 7 Apr 2025UiPath CEO Daniel Dines on AI agents replacing our jobs1h 13m
- 12 Mar 2025Why AI agents are the future of work, with Marc Benioff30m
- 5 Aug 2025Arvind Jain on Building Glean and the Future of Enterprise AI43m
- 20 Jun 2024Transforming Search with Perplexity AI’s CTO Denis Yarats43m
- 8 Jan 2026How Open Context Layers Help Enterprises Build, Govern, & Scale Agentic AI - with Prukalpa Sankar of Atlan24m
- 14 Aug 2026Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses2h 6m
- 29 Jan 2025Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, on Box AI, Enterprise Enthusiasm, and the Evolution of SaaS50m