This is competition, and one of the major reasons why Slack is so valuable, but it’s not just Slack’s core offering why Salesforce is excited about the well-timed acquisition. This has been such a monumental shift in inter-company communication that Microsoft Teams came out with a similar version to augment the clear vertical enterprise strategy of the Office 365 and Teams Suite. On the engineering team, it takes opening up a Slack channel to speak directly with an engineer at the other company, effectively reducing the amount of overhead and churn to 0, improving iteration speed, and reducing time-to-market. These integrations are not always simple, and require customization to meet the needs of our users while they help improve the evolution of our products and roadmaps. I have seen this first-hand at Stripe where we communicate a lot with our enterprise customers as we work on integrations together. Instead of meeting in person or emailing word documents and pdfs back-and-forth to solidify requirements, send status, and ask clarifying questions, you can now open up Slack to work directly with someone from the other company in realtime, letting you get your answers answered quickly, and unblocking you so that you can both make progress on things like product development and contracting.Īs you can see in the above visual from Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, through this cross-company messaging, and more like a social enterprise play, Slack is developing a horizontal, inter-company messaging platform by connecting companies that would otherwise use traditional communication platforms like email to message back and forth.
In the same way that you might email back and forth with a client or consultant, or use other project management tools to coordinate work across companies, Slack’s real time messaging, it’s adoption rate by other companies, and it’s ease in opening up communication across companies is changing the way we work and conduct business.įor example, if you work in a SaaS company like Shopify that has partnership and integrations with other companies like Stripe, then you need to communicate and coordinate between the two silos somehow. The problem is that core messaging is becoming a replicable commodity and while I don’t believe that internal messaging can kill email as it stands (for reasons of response expectations, message formatting, and length of message), I do believe Slack is well on it’s way to creating serious network effects with one of the most differentiated features of a chat we have seen in the enterprise: cross-company messaging.
This is the core of Slack, which has been deemed an email killer, and is even more core to remote working than ever from the COVID push. It immediately lets you communicate in real time with everyone in your company through low friction concepts like channels, threads, and reactions. Slack has value right out of the gate when you use it internally within a company. This was a good acquisition on both sides, in my opinion, and I want to dive into why. While these are great points that need to be considered, I fear it misses out on the areas of product, data, and platform value that Slack brings to Salesforce and how Salesforce’s resources can help bolster Slack’s ambitions. Most of what I have read hits on a few main points around valuations, sale price, and the competition with Microsoft. Since the announcement, there has been a flurry of articles and discussion on the value of that acquisition to each party, if Slack sold too early, and why Salesforce’s stock price went down in the short-term as a result. This past week Slack was acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion in one of the largest ever acquisitions of a SaaS company at a large 2x premium on top of Slack’s market cap of $13 billion in mid-November. Thoughts on the Salesforce Slack acquisition, platform value, and why “who got the better deal?” is the wrong question.
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