 Alright. Well, Cal, I'm excited to talk to you today. So first, I think this question was already asked, but just by show of hands, how many of you use Slack or know about Slack? Maybe I should just ask how many don't, because I think it's everyone. Cal, maybe give folks a sense of what's the latest with Slack? We heard about the fundraise, but just in terms of numbers, kind of, where are you? Sure. So, we're at about 9 million weekly active users, so people who are using Slack every week to get their work done across about 50,000 companies all around the world. That's pretty impressive. In my experience, there just aren't that many companies that have been able to reach this scale this fast. I mean, 2013 was really not that long ago. And so I'd like to talk to you today about what it takes to build that, from culture to people to products and scaling, and how do you build this kind of rocket ship? But every rocket ship has a founding story, so I think we can start with that, and yours is interesting to say the least. It's also not your first rodeo, because you were also co-founder of Flickr. So tell us about how it all began, kind of, where you are and what you've learned. Yeah, so it's a somewhat similar story to the founding of Flickr as well, in that we didn't start out to make Slack. We weren't super passionate about enterprise collaboration software. We didn't, like, grow up really wanting to make enterprise software. We're really excited about making games, and so we started the company back in 2009 to build a massively multiplayer online game. And we spent four years and a lot of money failing to make games. And after four years, we realized the game just wasn't working out. Flickr also came from a failed attempt to make a game, and so we realized we definitely don't know how to make games. We were terrible at this. But what can we turn it into? And throughout the building of the game, we'd been split between San Francisco, which was where our engineering office was, and Vancouver in Canada, which was our, like, game studio. We had our artists and animators and sound design and level design role in Vancouver. And the way that we'd been collaborating, based on using IRC, so Finnish technology, IRC with a bunch of tools bolted on top. So we'd been running our whole business in this messaging platform. And we found the more people paid attention to messaging, the more you wanted to put information in there. So if everyone's eyes are there, we wanted to put in when people bought things in the game, or when in-game events happened, or when a piece of artwork was produced and ready to be animated, or a level was designed and ready to be tested, or a customer had a support issue. We started posting all of these things into messaging. And the more things we posted there, the more people paid attention. So it was this virtuous cycle. And by the end of the four years, our business was entirely running on messaging. We had a company-wide mailing list that four years in had had around three emails sent to it. And they were just about benefits, the things we couldn't put on our messaging platform. And we realized that whatever we wanted to do next, because we're kind of done with games, like it was a real passion to build games, we were just fucking terrible at it. We demonstrated several times that we can't make games. So whatever we want to do next, and we had a background in consumer software, so we built Flickr, we realized that whatever we wanted to do next, we wanted to work in the same way. And if we wanted to work in the same way using messaging at the core of how we collaborated, then maybe other teams like us would too. So maybe other small development teams, people building software, would find a tool like this useful. And what we quickly found was that it wasn't just small development teams, it was small teams of all kinds. So, you know, increasingly, you know, a lot of, there are increasing number of knowledge workers, information workers. And all not just cross-engineering, but you know, whether that's like sales or marketing or business operations or media, all of these kind of professions are a team sport. Like it's a collaboration is hugely important because nobody really does anything by themselves. And this collaboration piece is key to all kinds of teams and all kinds of companies. And we quickly also realized that we thought early on, small companies, small teams is definitely our audience. We understand how those work. We are a small team ourselves. But I think what we didn't realize was that even the largest company has just made up of a bunch of small teams, you know, a company that has 100,000 employees. It's not that all 100,000 employees talk to each other every day or work on the same project. It's really any large companies made of small teams. And so a tool that helps small, medium-sized teams collaborate can be hugely useful across all kinds of companies. And you recently launched the product called Enterprise Grid. I think it's a super interesting thing to build for small teams, but also large teams and large enterprises. So where are you in terms of just enterprise traction? And how do you think about building for all of these various consumers and customers? Yeah, so while definitely our first audience was in small teams at small companies, we see Slack now being used from the smallest kind of two, three-person family businesses up to the largest like Fortune 100 companies. These huge enterprises, you know, the companies that make other people's enterprise software are all Slack customers today. So we see it being used in one person, not really one person, two person teams, three person teams, but also 100,000 person teams. And while there are a lot of kind of different requirements for those larger customers, a lot around administration and audit and compliance and automation, it's really this you, inside those large companies, it's still small teams of people who have the same collaboration needs. They need to be able to message, but also, so the key thing that makes Slack different from email, and most companies who adopt Slack previously were using email at the base, maybe some mix on top of that of like some people SMSed and some people use WhatsApp and some people use Facebook Messenger, and this group of people use Skype, and the only way to talk to that team was on AOL Insta Messenger, but really email is the underlying substrate that ties the company together. The big difference between email and Slack kind of on a fundamental level is the idea of channels. So that on email, we're collaborating on something, we send emails back and forth, we come to some decision, and then that decision is made, we move on to the next piece of the business. If we do that inside a channel, we have the same interaction, but people around us also get to see how and why that decision was made, the information that went into it, the process, and you get this kind of automatic ambient awareness of how other bits of the business are doing. This is something that we saw when we were building the game, that we might be working on some engineering issue for a new feature, and the customer care team would see that and know that that was coming up or know we were working on that, or the animation team might see what was in production on the artwork team in a way that wouldn't have happened over email. And that kind of group way of working together is hugely valuable for both small teams and really large companies as well. Do you think email is ever going to go away? I don't think email is like the cockroach of the internet. Nobody likes it, but it's going to be impossible to kill. The fax machine is still something that people have, and the fax machine was never even very good at anything, and it's still ubiquitous, and I think email will be much harder to kill, so there'll probably be email after the robots take over and kill all of us and take all of our jobs, they will still be sending email, it will be impossible to get rid of. That doesn't mean, I think the problem with eliminating email is that you can't set out to get rid of it, and we didn't, but there are contexts in which email becomes less useful. So now in 2017, it would be weird to email your friends and family because you use SMS or you use WhatsApp or you use Facebook Messenger, and email has died out in that particular domain. And it's because it's not a great tool. When you look at the structure of an email, you have a subject line and a greeting, and then maybe you have to ask about somebody's family, and then you have your actual question, and then you have your sign-off, and then you have a long footer about, like, this is confidential, please don't print this, save the trees, and there's that little nugget of information in the middle there, but all this structure around it, and it's not a great format for talking to your friends and organizing a night out. But if you're exchanging hundreds of thousands of messages, like, a week with the team that you work with constantly, email is not a great container for that. You know, you want that both high bandwidth communication, but also to integrate with the tools you're using for getting your job done. You know, we've moved from this document-centric model of computing in the office, which was around, you know, a Word doc or a spreadsheet to an increasingly, like, object in the cloud-centric version of the way we use software. You know, the thing that matters now isn't a file that we're passing back and forth, in many cases, it's this record in Salesforce, or this decision point in your ERP software, or this set of metrics in your marketing automation, and being able to collaborate around that makes a lot of sense. So speaking of robots killing everyone and communicating over email, how do you think about AI? I know that when you think about larger customers, the issue with, you know, getting good signal to noise out of the communication that happens is pretty important, but where does AI fit into how you think about the world, and how do you think about AI? Yeah, I think the problem... AI as a term is, like, super loaded with, like, you know, like generalized artificial intelligence, and, you know, you can talk to a robot like it's a human. I think that is, like, the whole robot's killing us and taking away all jobs is at least, like, two years out, right? So in the meantime, I think we're starting to actually see, like, the ML machine learning side of AI become actually useful, like the whole deep learning breakthrough that happened a couple of years ago being applied to specific problem domains is starting to bear fruit. So the way we think about machine learning at Slack is in terms of... there's been a lot of research the last couple of years that knowledge workers, information workers, spend a huge percentage of all of their time searching for information, trying to answer a question, and that's usually information that already exists within their company. And a big portion of that is just trying to find the right person to ask a question to, like, who is it who knows the answer to this question I have that the answer definitely exists. Now, this is not a great use of time for skilled humans. It's not the thing that we really excel at. It's something we're pretty bad at and is ultimately a bit of a waste of our time that gets in between the bit when we do creative, productive work. And so to the extent that we can use machine learning over the dataset that your company builds inside Slack to be able to answer questions automatically or route you to the person who can answer something the best, then I think that can be a huge productivity win. And it feels very incremental. It's not, like, hugely changing the way you work, but I think it can have a big productivity multiplier if instead of having to search back through your email and, like, I'm pretty sure we had a conversation about this and who was that conversation with just to be able to ask Slack on what quarter did we go over $100,000 of revenue and Slack can just say, here is the answer somehow using magic. So let's switch gears a little bit and talk about people because you can't build a great company without people. And I'll weave in some of the questions from the audience here too. One of the questions is how did you scale and what was the team like in the beginning? And I'll compliment that with you guys have a strong work hard and go home culture, which I think is a little different. So how do you think about culture? How do you think about the people and how do you scale that? Yeah, I think culture is the aspect of scaling to where we are now has been both the most difficult and the most important. So there's the technical scaling aspects and figuring out how we deliver a software that we sell to very large companies as well as very small. But the most kind of the most challenges and I think the place in which we really want to maintain that sense of being a startup has been around culture. So the way it is usual in the evolution of startups that are successful and become large that people start to feel like, oh, it's not like the old days. We've really lost that sense of what it was like when we were four people in the garage and had no money and we were just trying to find product market fit. And I mean, to some extent, you never get those days back because now you get paid and people use your software. It's much easier to build something when nobody is using it at all. But I think the bit that we kind of really want to enshrine as the culture of working at Slack is that the thing which has set us apart from other kind of enterprise software is that we are, first and foremost, building a product for human beings to use. So we spend a really large amount of time talking to our customers through support, through tens of thousands of tweets. Twitter is a very big feedback channel for us through going out and talking to our largest and our smallest customers doing user research. And the primary focus of what we're building is to try and make something that feels really good to use. Now, when you think about the phrase enterprise software, to me, that means something I'm forced to use by an IT team that every interaction with it makes me think, fuck, I hate this. I just want to get some piece of work done. This is so badly built. The person who built this clearly hates everybody who is using it. And it's not because the people who build enterprise software are evil. It's because the economics of it is you will make a bit of software that you sell to an IT team, not to the people who use it. And the thing that matters is your enterprise compliance or how it hooks into some other bit of enterprise software, not the experience you get when using something. And I think from both the gaming and consumer background that we come from and just focus on building something that we were using is that we spent nearly all of our time thinking about the experience of using this to get a task accomplished. A really good piece of collaboration software will change the way that your team works, but also kind of fades into the background a little bit. It's not that we want people using Slack to be constantly thinking, wow, Slack is a really good tool. It's that we never want people to be thinking, fuck, this is getting in the way of what I'm trying to do. And that's often the way people feel about the tools they use. Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense. How do you think that scales across the world? You were just in Asia, the Nordics are big for you? Yeah, I think that Slack, you know, we have users kind of all around the world and across different languages and different cultures. And I think that regardless of, I think it's somewhat universal across different cultures that knowledge work is inherently collaborative. It is a team sport and that people need to work together. I think there's been this kind of increasing trend of transparency in the workplace, kind of work-life balance and separation, but also we're feeling closer to your team and in the company's interest, like feeling closer to the mission of your company. And I think tighter collaboration definitely helps people do that. Cool. Well, we're pretty close on time. So last question, since you've failed to start two gaming companies, what is your favorite game now and what are you playing? So I think the big shift since the last failed game company that we made is the shift towards mobile, and I mostly play on mobile now. Two weeks ago, I was really excited about the new Animal Crossing on mobile, but it's kind of garbage, so I'm not excited about anything this week. Thanks, Carl. I think we're out of time. Thanks very much.