Name: Slack CEO Says There's 'No Specific Timeline for an IPO'
Uploaded: 2018-11-02
Duration: 5 min 19 s
Description: Co-Founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield says Slack is 'on the path to pubic readiness'

[ MUSIC ] Stewart, you wowed everyone recently with the news that you raised about half a billion dollars in new funding for Slack. That puts the company's value at $ 7 billion, which is amazing. Given that you got this financial fire power now, what's the next big thing for Slack? Next big thing is continuing to deliver for customers. So it'll be that financial milestones are good fo the company's long term health and significantly few ads but we're a couple percent into where we think we can be, so if over eight billion daily active users and three million paid customers, but we think the market's hundreds of millions of people and so we're still pushing the hat. Everybody is familiar with the name, Slack. And many companies, many people are using Slack in their organizations but now you've developed these so called channels so that people in one company can chat and connect with someone else through Slack at another company. How do you think that these sheer channels are gonna change the way we work? It's still in beta right now, but we've seen really strong uptick. So in markets like the Bay Area where we're very, very successful, about a third of all of the knowledge workers in the Bay Area are active users of Slack. Where we see that kind of concentration, we expect it to tip pretty quickly. So cities like San Francisco, New York Seattle Austin where there's really strong Tech presence here in Chicago. But also cities where we have a strong presence outside of that, Tokyo, London. We expect to see tens of thousands of people before the end of this year. And hundreds of thousands into millions of people in the years to follow. What is all these mean for the future of emails? At what point will emails become totally irrelevant? Email serves so many purposes today. It's like an inbox of receipts from every Lyft ride, or Amazon purchase you make. It's your wedding invitations and baby announcements, it's communication with friends and family, it's people at work sending contracts back and forth. So I think that over the next ten years, the switch to Slack, and systems like Slack is inevitable for every organization, for internal communication But email has, and I mean this in a positive way, the virtue of being lowest common denominator. So, you could expect that everyone in the world has an email address and you're able to reach them that way. So, it's safe. So [ UNKNOWN ] here we are at a Fortune Brainstorm Reinvent Conference where the focus is on, innovating so that, you still keep your customers happy and you stay ahead of The disrupters. How is [ UNKNOWN ] going about this? We try to say head of [ UNKNOWN ] by relentless focus on customers, so we have an enormous customer experience team we call it. And if you write in with a question or a problem with [ UNKNOWN ] you'll get a response within 75 minutes, 98 % customer satisfaction rating And we do that because it makes people happy and they are more likely to recommend us, but it'll also give us tremendous signal on what customer needs are and what the environments that they are working in how they are changing, what we can do to better support them, and As long as we're focused on that, we'll be just fine. This reminds me of a comment that John Chambers told me many years ago when he was running Cisco. And he said that the worst thing leaders can do is being too comfortable and doing the right thing for too long. So what are you doing so that slack doesn't fall into that trap? In the face of growth and success, one of the things you worry about most is people becoming complacent. And it's less about innovation, I would say, than staying true to those things that made the company successful in the first place. Biggest piece of that is dedication to customers and what they're actually looking for. But a lot of it is also staying attuned to the trends, and technology that's changing and evolving. Because of the platform and because of the information we see that customers are engaging in and third- party partners are engaging in. We get a lot signal and a lot of ability to kind of keep up with that. Does it make sense maybe for slack down the road to join forces with another company? Maybe. Being in a bigger company, it will allow you to innovate faster. Yeah, there's two problems. One is just, the more people you have, the more complex things get, but just fairly obvious and intuitive. The other one though, is the more established lines of business you have, the more conflicts there are with any new line of business. And I think it's a real inhibitor to innovation, kinda of classic innovators to learn the story. So I can't unilaterally let eliminate the possibility that we're ever drawing forces with energy company but we think the opportunity is so ig that we're excited to stay independent. So what are your thoughts about selling your shares to the public and doing an IPO? Is that the next step for you? We have no speicif c timeline for IPO, and I odn't mean to be **** about this at all. It would be news if we said that we were never gonna go public. The successful technology company will at some point go public is less news worthy. I, and I think pretty much everyone on Alexa's [ UNKNOWN ] are just really excited by what we do, and the opportunity to have the kind of impact that we have. The financial success and the financial instruments we use to affect that success are a necessary ingredient. I like looking at it this way. Profit is a great diagnostic for the health of the business, but not the purpose of the business. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Slack CEO Says There's "No Specific Timeline for an IPO"

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Co-Founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield says Slack is "on the path to pubic readiness"