Slack Startup Quotes

From that point on, she came to work in a black turtleneck and black slacks most days.

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting people to work like they formerly chatted with their girlfriends. This is a business-workflow miracle. For the makers of most consumer apps (e.g., Instagram), the miracle was quite simple: getting users to use your app, and then to realize the financial value of your particular twist on a human brain interacting with keyboard or touchscreen. That was Facebook’s miracle, getting every college student in America to use its platform during its early years. While there was much technical know-how required in scaling it—and had they fucked that up it would have killed them—that’s not why it succeeded. The uniqueness and complete fickleness of such a miracle are what make investing in consumer-facing apps such a lottery. It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds. The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. This was what was wrong with ours. We had a Bible’s worth of miracles to perform:

High Switching Costs Products that require a significant amount of work to migrate away are said to have high switching costs. High switching costs reduce your churn and create a moat that keeps customers from switching to a competitor simply because that competitor is newer, cheaper, or even builds a better product. Most APIs are difficult to leave because to do so requires expensive developer time to integrate with a new product. Companies like Stripe, Twilio, and SendGrid have a pretty hefty switching cost moat. Tools like Slack are difficult to switch from because of the need to obtain buy-in from every manager in an organization. Also, because of the high number of integrations pushing data, Slack requires effort to recreate. Tools with low switching costs are those in which history is mostly irrelevant, and the time it takes to recreate something you’ve built in the tool is low or nonexistent. For example, a social media scheduling tool is easy to switch from because there is no critical history stored or complex workflows that need to be recreated using a new tool. Likewise, one-click SaaS analytics tools that tie into your Stripe account are relatively easy to switch from because they are “one-click easy” to set up.

The team spent several years working on Glitch, but it never caught on with a mainstream audience. The game was shut down in 2012 due to a lack of traction. Butterfield and his team had spent nearly four years working on a failed project. It was a painful setback—but it wasn’t “game over.” While working on Glitch, the team had built an internal productivity tool to streamline communication, and it was very effective. Instead of shutting down Tiny Speck, Butterfield decided to refocus the company around the productivity tool. They would polish and retool their internal app for external distribution, selling it to other companies with a SAAS (Software as a Service) pricing model. They called the new product Slack. The early traction for Slack was outstanding. In 2014, the company (now also known as Slack) raised $42.8 million in a new round of funding from several top tier venture firms. Later that year, they raised another $120 million, valuing the company at over $1 billion.[33] Your project might fail. But if your project fails, you don’t necessarily need to abandon your underlying passion. It’s like driving. When your car stops running, you don’t give up on the prospect of ever driving again—you get a new car so you can get back on the road. Butterfield knew he had a passion for startups, and he knew that startups were tough. When his vehicle broke down, he didn’t stop driving. He took his broken car to the dump, got a new one (with far more horsepower), and slammed his foot back down on the gas pedal.

Your Competition Has Network Effects, Too To figure out a response, it’s important to acknowledge a common myth about defensibility and moats: that somehow, network effects will magically help you fend off competition. This is a myth repeated again and again in startup pitch presentations to investors and entrepreneurs. It’s a lie that entrepreneurs tell to themselves. It isn’t true—simply having network effects is not enough, because if your product has them, it’s likely that your competitors have them, too. Whether you are a marketplace, social network, workplace collaboration tool, or app store, you are in a “networked category.” It’s intrinsic in these categories that every player is a multi-sided network that connects people, and is governed under the dynamics of Cold Start Theory. Effective competitive strategy is about who scales and leverages their network effects in the best way possible. No wonder we often see smaller players upend larger ones, in an apparent violation of Metcalfe’s Law. If every product in a category can rely on their network, then it’s not about who’s initially the largest. Instead, the question is, who is doing the best job amplifying and scaling their Acquisition, Engagement, and Economic effects. It’s what we see repeatedly over time: MySpace was the biggest social network in the mid-2000s and lost to Facebook, then a smaller, newer entrant with a focus on college networks with stronger product execution. HipChat was ahead in workplace communication, but was upended by Slack. Grubhub created a successful, profitable multibillion-dollar food-ordering company, but has rapidly lost ground to Uber Eats and DoorDash.

Bundling eventually stopped working for Microsoft. After the antitrust investigation, the company maintained its dominance on the PC operating systems market, but it lost control of many other markets. Eventually the industry jumped from PC to mobile. Microsoft tried to exactly replicate the network effects it had before—an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers who paid a licensing fee to run Windows Mobile, and app developers and consumers to match—but this time it didn’t work. Instead, Google gave away its Android mobile OS for free, driving adoption for phone makers. The massive reach of Android attracted app developers, and a new network effect was built, derived from a business model where the OS was free but the ecosystem was monetized using search and advertising revenue. Microsoft has also lost the browser market to Google Chrome, and is being challenged in its Office Suite by a litany of startup competitors large and small. It continued to use bundling as a strategy, adding workplace chat via Teams to its suite—but it hasn’t achieved a clear victory against Slack. If bundling hasn’t been a sure thing for Microsoft, it’s an even weaker strategy for others. The outcome seems even less assured when examining how Google bundled Google+ into many corners of its product, including Maps and Gmail, achieving hundreds of millions of active users without real retention. Uber bundled Uber Eats across many touchpoints within its rideshare app, but still fell behind in food delivery versus DoorDash. Bundling hasn’t been a silver bullet, as much as the giants in the industry hope it is.

In a research study called “How today’s fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers,” startup veteran Lenny Rachitsky interviewed early members of teams from Slack, Stripe, Figma, and Asana. In studying how these earliest companies found their first customers, it was concluded that a significant number came from the founders tapping their personal networks: Only three sourcing strategies account for every B2B company’s very early growth. [These are: Personal network, Seek out customers where they are, Get press.] Thus, your choices are easy, yet limited. Almost every B2B business both hits up their personal network and heads to the places their potential customers were spending time. The question isn’t which of these two routes to pursue, but instead how far your own network will take you before you move on. It’s a huge advantage to have a strong personal network in B2B, which you can also build by bringing a connector investor or joining an incubator such as YC. Getting press is rarely the way to get started.44 Just as Uber’s ops hustle worked for solving the city-by-city Cold Start Problem, B2B startups have an equivalent card to play: they can manually reach out and onboard teams from their friends’ startups, building atomic networks quickly, as Slack did in their early launch. Or, many productivity products begin by launching within online communities—like Twitter, Hacker News, and Product Hunt—where dense pockets of early adopters are willing to try new products. In recent years, B2B products have started to emphasize memes, funny videos, invite-only mechanics, and other tactics traditionally associated with consumer startups. I expect that this will only continue, as the consumerization of enterprise products fully embraces meme-based go-to-market early on, instead of leading with direct sales.

More than Words If you’ve ever worked in a startup office, you’ll be familiar with a particular kind of quiet—one punctuated only by tap-tapping from keyboards and the occasional sneeze or chair scrape. Everyone sits with earbuds in, listening to music or podcasts or sometimes nothing at all. Most conversations happen via chat programs like Google Hangouts, Skype for Business, and Slack. Even in more traditional offices, it’s become

When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting

2. Trial and error. Try delegating and try again until it works. This will be part of any approach you take. You need to build some pattern recognition for when someone is starting to flail (they seem overworked and rumpled, they’re late to every meeting, etc.) or when people have more slack in their time. You will learn to iterate on the size of responsibilities, teams, or projects you give someone and build confidence in their skills as they continue to add to their stack.