Slack CEO: No Intention To Make Slack Free

“There is definitely no intention to make Slack free,” says Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. “What we’ve seen in the last little while is the biggest telco in North America is wall-to-wall on Slack. The operator of the largest integrated health care system in the United States is on Slack. The single largest government contractor in the United States is wall-to-wall on Slack.”

Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, says that both Slack and Salesforce have no intention of making Slack free for enterprises:

Slack Connect Key To Value Unlock Of Salesforce Deal

The simple version of the back story is this is a really unique combination. We believe we can accomplish in the next five years what might have taken us 20 years to do otherwise. That’s the heart of it and it’s a pretty big milestone for us. We’re excited. It wasn’t expected by the outside world but we have a lot of momentum now. We came out of this quarter and we announced our results and Salesforce announced their results. Then we announced the acquisition all at the same time.

A little bit of this got lost but we added 12,000 new paying customers in that quarter. It’s up 140 percent from a year ago. It matches the crazy surge that we saw during the early days of the pandemic. That momentum is coming from product improvements and it’s coming from Slack Connect which allows two organizations to communicate across organizational boundaries. That’s actually going to be key to the value unlock over the next few years. Salesforce is all about CRM. It’s all about customers and Slack Connect is 95 percent customer-vendor relationships.

Engagement Layer: Everyone Will See It Later

This (acquisition) is 100% offense. There are some really unique aspects of this particular combination. We weren’t looking to sell the company. I have a great relationship with Brett Taylor, President, and COO of Salesforce. We’ve known each other for a couple of decades at this point. There’s a way in which we see the world that i think very few people see it today but everyone will see it later. One way to say that is to look at the engagement layer. That’s kind of a weird term but it is the place where the conversations are happening, the places where the decisions are being made, as the perfect place to bring together workflows across organizational boundaries.

Salesforce has a really broad suite. But of course, we have 2,400 apps in the app directory for Slack. We have 700 000 custom integrations that were developed by customers. These are like unique little integrations, some of them very small, just sending notifications into Slack, and some of them are sophisticated workflows that run entire businesses. That’s something that we will see an increasing degree of sophistication in the messaging environment and an increasing degree of work getting done directly where the decisions are made.

No Intention To Make Slack Free

When Brett and I were talking we talked about the opportunity for something that’s one plus one equals seven. If you think back to the 90s and Cisco acquiring small hardware startups and then plugging it into their network of 20,000 salespeople and just selling a lot more of that thing. That’s not it. We will do that as well. We obviously have incredible distribution and incredible reach and incredible relationships across all industries and across all geographies. So we’ll sell more Slack.

Salesforce recently announced their plan to get to $50 billion in revenue and we’ll play an important part in that. We’ll also be an accelerant for the adoption of Salesforce’s core products. There is definitely no intention to make Slack free. What we’ve seen in the last little while is the biggest telco in North America is wall-to-wall on Slack. The operator of the largest integrated health care system in the United States is on Slack. The single largest government contractor in the United States is wall-to-wall on Slack.

We win in media and technology, kind of famously, but we also win in retail and apparel and industries that people don’t imagine seeing us. We have 142,000 customers right now. There’s going to be a lot of overlap with Salesforce but there’s also going to be 100,000 plus of those customers which are SMBs and kind of outside of Salesforce’s purview so far. We think there’s the opportunity to bring them into the fold and to connect them all together with Slack Connect.