 We are the opening, I can't sit back because of my, I'm just gonna sit here, it's hopefully less awkward. We're the opening act for the former prime minister. Are you ready for that? Yeah, warm up, I'm the hype man, I get it, it's good. Well, I have to say any man that wears shorts and how sinky in November or December has the confidence required for this opening act. So I'm very happy to be here with you. I remember when I first joined Slack's board and Cal's co-founder, Stuart, and I were having a discussion and I said, you know the thing, I'm on Slack all day engaging with my colleagues all over the world and I really, what Slack gives me is a sense of belonging. And he says, that's nice, Sarah, that's not why we built it. He said, when Cal and I really built Slack, the idea behind it was transparency. You used to be working in an organization and you didn't have a sense of what decisions managers were making, why? If you weren't in management, you weren't in the room. You didn't really understand what decisions were being made and if you use Slack as an organization, you really get insight into the decisions that are being made, who's making them and why. And in that way, I think you've changed organizations more fundamentally than I think many other software products have. So today, your business communications software used by tens of millions of people around the world every day, but that was not the origin story. No. So today we're gonna talk about your pivot and I would love to start by talking about when you realized that maybe this game wasn't quite gonna scale. Yeah. So we started out doing something very different trying to make video games. We had had this vision for quite a few years of this game that we wanted to create. It was an online massively multiplayer game. You played it in the browser. It was gonna be collaborative and non-competitive and we'd had this vision. We're very excited about it. That's what we formed the company around and we spent four years and nearly all of our investors' money making a game that hundreds of people loved and that was a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than it needed to be to be a viable business. And the, I think when people think and hear about pivots that they assume that it's some kind of quick decision or obvious decision and I think there's definitely not the case with us. It was a period of probably a year, the fourth year of working on the game where we were in that zone where should we continue doing this? Should we stop? And I think there's kind of three states. A startup can be and there is obvious success where it's like, yes, we should definitely double down on this. It's working. What can we do to control the growth? What can we do to make it go faster? There is obvious failure. This isn't working. We need to try something new. And then there's this like zone that sucks in the middle of it's kind of working. And you really believe that the next thing you do is gonna bend the curve and change the trajectory. And so we should keep trying new things and we just need to try for another week and just another month. And the next thing we do is really gonna make it work. We're in that situation for a long time, unfortunately. And we're having that conversation very regularly about is this really gonna work? Are we gonna be able to do something that will bend it upwards, bend that trajectory, change that conversion, make it fun because we're building games? And it took us a long time to come to that conclusion. And I think the real reason that it came, that we ended up deciding to stop working on the game was that we knew we were gonna run out of money and have to raise more money. And we're gonna have to raise more money without the proof of where we wanted to be and without that growth. And so we ultimately made the decision that we need to stop working on this, spin the company down, we weren't gonna realize our vision and our dream. And so when we did that, we knew that we wanted to keep working together. We were three co-founders and we loved working together. And we knew we wanted to work on something. But we had this period of knowing that the game wasn't gonna happen but that we wanted to keep working together. And so we had a period where we're thinking about ideas. And for a long time, in the years afterwards, we thought it was a period of many months where we went back and forth and brainstormed ideas and came up with tons of different ideas before finally deciding on which direction we were going. But because we have all of the slack logs from that time, we know exactly how long it was and it was about eight days. But it seemed like a really long time. We had all these grand visions. The number one idea for a really long time was we should start a bank because everybody hates their bank. We don't have enough of them, I don't think. Well, I still kind of believe this. Nearly everybody hates their bank and it seems like banks just make money mechanically. So it's a great business. Why doesn't everyone start a bank? But I think we decided that was a bit too difficult and instead looked at what we'd already built internally. So Slack really came from the tools that we had built to build the company, to be able to build the game, to collaborate across our offices while building the game. And how did you get alignment around? It sounds like there was some urgency in eight days around this being the idea. It's obviously, I think it's the first product I have to say that I actually loved and it really, I think raised the bar and expectations for what people, but how did you align? Okay, business communication, this is it. And then you're the CTO in addition to being a co-founder. What change was required? How did you get alignment on the investor side? You kept some of your investors through the journey. We kept all of our investors and I think actually when we pitched the change in direction to investors, we talked to our existing investors who had invested in the game and said, they knew the game, wasn't working out. We were sharing the metrics with them too. We said, would you like the money back? We have a little bit left. They're like, no, no, no, go try something new. Like we'll keep backing you, try something different. We went with this pitch for Slack, put together a pitch deck, which we still look back at now. And their reaction was, oh, this is great. It's enterprise software, we understand this. It's not that stupid game we didn't get. You know, most investors back founders, right? They're back founders and teams and hopefully not if you have a terrible idea, but you back a team because at the beginning, you don't have anything else. You don't have any proof that this is really gonna work, that there's a real market there, that there's a real product there. You back the team. And so I think our investors were very happy when we made that change. But I think the reason that we thought it would make sense as a product and the direction to go in was that it's how we had been working. Now, our vision was that other small technical teams like us were a small company at the peak when building the game with 50 people. And we thought other small technical teams like us would benefit from working in this way. So it's less about the product and more about the process of how we work together. And you touched on the transparency piece. I think any kind of software that you use around productivity or really any kind of software that you use in the workplace tends to have some kind of encodes the philosophy of the people who built it. I think this is especially true of like task tracking software. So if you think about the different ways in which you work if you use JIRA versus Trello versus linear, right? They each encode a way of thinking about how you break down work and organize work. And I think to the extent that we encode some of our philosophy in Slack, it's transparency, right? Public channels by default and the kind of like opt in the pull versus push nature is that we think organizations work better when more information is shared with more people, right? So that kind of philosophy was at the heart of what we're building. And Slack did work out, I would say, now or for a period of time a public company and now again with tens of millions of users around the world. And how did you, and one of the things I like most about you as a person, Cal is your humility. And you always say like it's a combination of luck and the timing was right and there were a lot of great tailwinds, the rise of mobile, the consumerization of IT that helps Slack be for a period of time while when I was chasing it was the fastest growing software company ever at that time. And what worked? How did you capitalize on those tailwinds? You know, and how did you really get this product market fit that the game had not delivered? Yeah, I think it often seems in retrospect like we must have launched the product and had immediate product market fit. But it was actually the first kind of year in which we were developing it and doing our kind of private alpha and our first external beta was really painful. We built a product that worked, the initial product that we built worked really well for a team of exactly eight people who were us. And when we got it into the hands of our very first testers, we learned so much. And it really shaped the product very rapidly, especially over the first six months, really completely changed how we thought about how people would interact with it, how we would introduce people to it. You know, we came from this big disadvantage, if you like, which is that it's hard enough to get people to try things. You know, to convince somebody to try a product. To convince somebody to try a product when you've just failed at your previous product and we want that commitment from somebody like, oh, put your important data on here. We promise it's not gonna go away in six months and this is gonna be a real business. But also we have to convince you to convince everybody you work with to give it a try. So that was a real uphill struggle. And our first, you know, finding our very first test customers was convincing, going to our friends at their startups in the Bay Area and like day after day for weeks and trying to convince them to give it a go. And that there is a different way of working and somehow this will, you know, this will make you more productive or make you happier using software, which sounds kind of ludicrous. And so it was like a real slog to get people to give it a try. And then we learned so much from those people. And I think so much of what Slack became, even like right at the initial launch was shaped so heavily by people using it and giving us their honest feedback. When you go forward a little bit in time, I think a very kind of underappreciated kind of source of really important information in product development was maybe still is Twitter. I don't know if we've talked about this before. I don't think we have. So in the kind of before Twitter era, and it's Twitter very specifically, not really any other social media, in the before Twitter era, if you tried some product, software product, consumer product, whatever it is, and you thought it was good or you thought it was bad or there was something wrong with it, you might tell your friends if you have that kind of relationship with your friends and the topic came up. If it had to be so incredibly good or bad or life-changing that you would write to that company and give them your feelings, right? Like how often have you contacted a company to tell them how you feel about their products? Maybe never. But then Twitter came along and suddenly if you had a slight feeling about anything, you broadcast it to the world. And enough people were doing that when we launched, or even during our kind of beta period, we got so much kind of passive feedback coming back to us about things people liked, things they didn't like, things they were confused with, ways in which they were using the product. It's such a rich channel of real-time feedback at scale that it's like not necessarily a replacement for but definitely an amazing augment to kind of any kind of user experience research and we learnt so much from that and shaped the product around it. The best argument I've heard for X, I have to say. And another tailwind that I think is really, well it's actually, I'm processing what you said because I always think of community as one of Slack's great strengths. And I think of that as like getting actual people together around the world and I hadn't thought about the online part of the feedback that was so instrumental in the early days. In addition to I'm sure the great product feedback that you got from some of your investors. But I will abstain from doing any of that here. But one of the big tailwinds, I can't get off the stage without asking you about AI. And I do wonder one how you're using AI in the product development process today at Slack. And then I'm also curious how you might have built differently had chat GPT been available at the time when you founded the company? That's a great question. I don't know if everybody saw Benedict's talk earlier which was fantastic. I think there is still just we're in this great kind of like step change technology time where it's not exactly clear what most of the applications are gonna be. And it's pretty clear that a lot of things that kind of a being built right now have been built in the past year and not necessarily what the applications of that technology are gonna be over the next five. And the incumbents which we are now, look at the how do we use this to augment features that we have. So how can we augment Slack capabilities using large language models? And then the future version of that looks like some kind of, I don't know, maybe there's gonna be a substantial change in how we interact with technology. I think the, it has, you know, if you think about the really big changes in how we interact with technology in the workplace over the last 20 years, it was really, I mean, I think one that goes less talked about but was really impactful is probably switching from desktops to laptops and really changed people's relationship with when they had access to technology. And then of course the introduction of the smartphone into, and using smartphone in business is relatively recent, even more so recent than just the smartphone in general. At the time when we started Slack, which was only 11 years ago, people weren't really using smartphones for work outside of just sending emails. You know, applications, workplace applications didn't really exist on mobile. Which sounds crazy now, because it wasn't that long ago. But I think, you know, like does AI bring a new kind of level of interaction with technology? Maybe. I don't think conversational interface is probably the kind of future of that any more than it was when, you know, that we had the bot craze, you know, whatever it was five or six years ago and the future of technology was going to be talking to Pepsi on Facebook Messenger, right? But it does enable a whole bunch of new really interesting, you know, modes of interaction. And so maybe it's going to be talking to AIs and maybe it's going to be wearable things in some way. Who knows, right? But there's probably going to be some change to, you know, broadly how we interact with technology as a maybe as a result of this AI. But I think, you know, what's interesting to me as a like product builder at Slack is how we can make Slack more useful for our customers, you know, with AI. And that is really one of the dreams that we've had, dreams is strong, we make software. One of the things that we've wanted to do is if you use Slack for a long time, the longer you use it, the more and more messages you have. You know, we have billions of messages from some of our customers who have been using Slack for a decade is how can we make those more valuable? How can, you know, the, as Bendix said, the kind of infinite interns. What could we do to like give you the superpower of knowing everything that's happened in your company over the last decade? And what would that mean? If you could answer questions about every project that's happened, but also who's the expert in this area of the business? If we do a project on this, you know, who are the people to contact? What is, when we've had this kind of issue with a customer before, what were the actions that we took that were successful and what were the actions that we took that didn't work out so we can avoid that in the future? You know, how can we make anybody who joins the company today be an expert who seemed like they've worked there for a decade and been involved in every possible project? And I think that's a, being able to unlock the power that's in that archive of information that we have for each of our customers, I think is really valuable. And we thought that's valuable for a long time, but just no idea how we'd actually do it. And I think using large language models is probably the way in which we do that. I'm so glad we're having this conversation because actually internally at Co2, where I opened our office in Europe a year and a half ago, we've actually built this. So we're huge users of Slack because we have a team in Menlo Park in New York, London now as a year and a half ago and in China. And everybody in the firm is on Slack and we're constantly debating what's our point of view on electric vehicles, on NVIDIA, both on the public and the private side. And every day we've actually aggregating insights of like, here's what the firm is thinking on these various topics. There's obviously pieces on macro. So we've built that internally and I'm sure you would do an excellent, better job at it. And I'm also curious to ask you, we've talked a little bit about, you talked about the desktop to laptop and people have really changed how they've worked in the last few years, right? Where they're working, when they're working, the amount, the different ways teams are organized. You and I've had many walks around San Francisco discussing this. And so I'm just curious what you think today in 2023, what are some of the alignment challenges within collaboration, productivity challenges within companies today? I think this is kind of related to the AI topic in the sense that perhaps we'll see some kind of massive paradigm change to how we interact with technology, but maybe not in this era. But either way, the capabilities we get with generative AI is in some ways just a continuation on the spectrum of different kinds of things we can automate. And it allows us to automate a whole bunch of work that we weren't able to before. And in every instance, kind of starting with a spreadsheet up till generative AI, what it has done is stopped human workers from doing certain kinds of tasks and allows people to spend their time focusing on things which are more uniquely high-leveraged human activities, which tend to be more collaborative and more creative. And I think if you look back even just at the last decade of kind of knowledge work, it has tended to become a lot more complex and a lot more collaborative and involve more people. And I think fewer kinds of activities for information workers are solo. Like fewer and fewer kinds of work are done alone, more and more things are done on teams. And the biggest challenge with working with groups of people is communication, but really around alignment, how you get people pointed in the same direction and measure of agility for any kind of organization is how quickly you can get everybody realigned when you change direction. And I think that is still just like a fundamentally difficult problem with groups of people. If you've ever tried to go out to dinner with a group of five friends that is almost intractable to decide where to go and it gets geometrically harder as groups grow and that's when you're aligned as friends. Like when you're trying to do something in the workplace, it's obviously much more complicated than that. So I think the challenge still remains this kind of fundamental challenge of how do you get people on the same page, how do you get people pointed in the same direction is gonna be one that is enduring forever, however much technology advances and takes over more and more rote work and I think our definition of rote work will continue to expand, to basically match whatever we can automate with computers then whatever's left becomes the more complex, more collaborative pieces and I think that's the focus of how we can improve productivity for anybody. Sounds like a fun way to work. You know I wanted to ask you this question because one of the things I loved most about working with Cal, Stewart and the team was your very first principles. So it's like the culture was never if I came and said oh but this other company did this or we kind of always did it that way, it was just not on and one of the kind of relatively unique things you did was the direct listing and I'm hoping that the markets will see more of the great companies in the audience going public all around the world in the years to come and I'm just curious reflecting on that, it was a great moment in New York in 2019. You know the decision, what I remember the discussions, you know what made that appealing, do you have any different views or advice to people looking back at that a few years later? Yeah it was, I mean like, it was very much pioneered by Spotify, right? So following in their footsteps and I think it is not a choice for many people because you need to have like some consumer brand recognition but also the reason that it made sense for us was because at that time we just didn't need to raise any money as part of the process of going public. I think it's obviously a very different environment today. We had raised a lot of money and still had a lot of capital and we were also not burning any capital at the time and so for us it was much more of a process of we want to become a public company from like a governance and maturity point of view not we needed to raise money in public markets for the way we would do that. Now I think especially with the position that a lot of organizations are in today that's probably not what they're thinking. It's not that we wanna go, wanna become a public company but we don't wanna raise any money and so that necessarily doesn't make any sense. I think there was that brief period where a few companies were doing direct listings but economically times have changed. Whether we'll get back to that, I think then we also had the SPAC era which is largely over but I think these things come in cycles and it's interesting to have options to not necessarily just go the kind of traditional route and we did what worked for us and it worked out great. Well, Cal, you're a hero. To me personally, it's true. He hates compliments but I get to give them and I know to many people in this audience and the Slack story is one that I think we'll be talking about for decades to come. Thank you and now we have to give the stage over to the main act. All right, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Slash.