Slack Gets Kinda Famous
Slack in the wild. Hosting Jared Leto and his Oscar. Tweeting with Snoop Dogg. Finding new office spaces.
I suppose it was always just going to be a matter of time. But it still felt a bit shocking, and a whole lot gratifying, to finally see someone using Slack in the wild.
Others had told me about their own experiences seeing real live people using Slack in the wild, so I knew it could happen. But when it happened, in a line at a coffee shop, the young tech worker in front of me gazing at their phone, ignoring the display case of sandwiches, it still thrilled me. “That’s our product!” my brain shouted inside my head.
Slack was starting to grow up and grow out of the small niches where it started, into a broader adoption and wider mindshare. People started to know us.
But not everyone. I mostly still got a puzzled look when I said I worked at Slack — a software company, that makes Slack, a communication product for teams. It’s like text messages with your teammates and the systems you use. But less so all the time.
Nerds on Parade
Seeing Slack in the wilds of coffee shops and public transit, hearing the Knock Brush sound when a new notification arrived, that wasn’t the only sign we were growing up.
In our last round of funding, where Slack had become a billion-dollar “Unicorn” company, some celebrity investors had participated. Those new relationships started to become visible in curious ways.
Jared Leto invested in Slack and visited the Slack SF office with his Oscar. I’m not sure if he goes everywhere with his Oscar, but he came to visit us with it and people felt suitably struck by it golden rarity.
Some hand signs came naturally to express the elation.
Though perhaps it was also time to get back to work.
Snoop Dogg invested and tweeted about Slack in his inimitable way.
It felt like quite a remarkable time to be working at Slack. And back in Vancouver, we were getting a new office.
Enlightened Without Lights
In my last post, Billion with a B, I said that we had become worth a billion dollars and not much changed. Well, I’d like to revise that because one big thing changed: Offices.
In SF we moved into a new office that felt so large when I visited, I could imagine playing a floor hockey game in the empty space. Within a few months it filled in with new people and desks and got so full that me, AJ and Allen were relegated to a janitors closet while negotiating a large deal with a stingy multinational media company. The closet did have good acoustics though.
In Vancouver, we looked at a few office spaces and one captured our heart.
The main space featured amazing wooden post and beam construction.
We felt immediately like we could work there and build our teams around the bones of the building.
We even felt a bit elated by the prospect of it all.
And throughout the whole tour, as we walked the floor and peered out the windows, we never realized there were no lights on. Power had been turned off for the space. The whole floor was bathed in natural light. We were sold and moved in a few months later.
So, now that we had the space and money to grow, we had to hire the team and define what it meant to work at Slack. That’s something to cover in a following post.
Up Next — Do the Best Work of Your Life: What matters? How do we do things here? Finding a Slack culture. Starting to build a sales team culture.