Stewart Butterfield, CEO, Slack
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, Editor-at-Large, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech


Brainstorm Tech 2022: The World According To Slack

Conferences

Hello. Have a speech. How do you bend time and space? Oh my gosh, I forget the name of the company. But we, we did a series of customer stories in the lead up to the direct listing. Um and one of them was with a japanese, Like 150 year old company that makes pipes and hoses. Like that's the category. Um and it was the ceo of the company who said slack allows us to bend space and time. I have no idea what he was saying in japanese, but that was the translation sounds really good. Might have been like past the water. But so last time we had you here on stage in Aspen, on our stage in Aspen. Um, slack had gone, just gone public and you brought a picture of you with your mom after ringing the bell. So did you bring a picture of you and marc Benioff to show us today? Didn't uh that would have been good prepared in advance. But there is a, I guess. Uh No, no, well, it's um, it was the dream force, like the first pandemic one and Mark and I are out on stage and I'm, I'm not a very tall man. Um and Mark is very tall. So we were probably like 12 ft apart. And this wasn't intentional, like it wasn't the stage direction, but it was good because otherwise it would look kind of button Jeff like it's just so much bigger than me that even 12 ft apart on the stage. It created one of those weird optical illusions like where the where the room appears really large, like all right, well you have to bring it next time. So a lot of, a lot of changed. I definitely want to talk about salesforce and slack and how those two fit together today. But but tell us, first of all, just how things have changed for you as a, as a leader, your personal professional, you know, what would have been the biggest transitions for you over the last couple of years? One of them is I moved here to aspen colorado in January of 21. We had come for for the period over thanksgiving to christmas and brought some family. It was a pretty big realization that hey, we could just move here. Um and that's delightful. But I think if you zoom out a little bit, the context for that is Slack. Prior to the pandemic, had 1.5 or 2% of employees were remote and it was usually like a special concession for someone um who had been on the team for a long time in order to establish these relationships and you know, like Our cart granting this permission for people to move. And I was definitely in the class of people who, you know, like February 2020, you asked me could we all transition to working at home like that um, and still maintain the same level of productivity. I would have said no. And so I guess the big change over that whole period and this is ongoing theme of humility, I guess, but it's something that you thought was impossible, turns out to be possible. You're kind of forced to ask what else, what other assumptions do we have? Um That might turn out to be incorrect. There's been a lot. Yeah. Um so it's interesting because for for given what your company does, obviously there's a big correlation on the product side, what you've done and the the direction you've gone in um and the direction the company has has gone and so talk to us a little bit on the product side about some of the new things going on. What does a digital HQ mean? Exactly. Um This is a marketing term. I don't know if we have a service mark or trademark on it, but we probably should. Um but I think it's, it's something that existed prior to the pandemic and doesn't necessarily like it's a category that slack belongs to. But here's a weird thought experiment. If you go back to march of 2020 and you imagine some parallel universe where we were continued to be allowed to travel, do business dinners, use conference rooms, go to the office commute all that stuff, but you took away all the software then more or less every organization would have just disintegrated in 24, hours, like we were just all would have gone out of business. So at some point in the last 20 years the relative importance of the physical HQ and the digital HQ. And by that I just mean the digital infrastructure that supports productivity and collaboration that importance inverted. And none of us really noticed. And um to me that just seems like, I don't know, iron, iron clad, undeniable, um that we just as a matter of objective fact, continued to perform, continue to develop software, continue to sell it, organizations continue to add new employees and grow and attract new customers through that whole period, despite the fact that they were all working from home. And I don't mean to suggest that working from home is intrinsically better and people shouldn't go to an office. The point is just, we were able to do it. And so obviously there is some digital infrastructure that supports productivity, collaboration and if you're like me, uh ceo if you look back over the last 10 years and I thought about real estate leases this much and office build outs and conference room design, seating charts and and all of that stuff um an order of magnitude more than I thought about how people can become more effective users of these digital tools and how they can become more effective collaborators and uh lights are a little bright and maybe it's pointless to ask people to put up their hands, But routinely, when I ask people, Hey, do you know the Amazon, six page memo format, like at the beginning of the meeting, you read the memo rather than doing a presentation, people take 10 minutes and then discuss it. Um you don't have to put the lights, everyone will say yes. And the little rhetorical trick is everyone says yes because there's so few examples of people even trying to make meetings more effective or to take advantage of this. Um excuse me, opportunity to improve the way that we uh work together, that the one example really really stands out. So I think there's a whole host of opportunities that are that are like that and I realized that I was definitely wrong over that period, whereas paying attention and exerting energy, um give us some examples, what are, what are other things that have worked that are new and different for like how long are your meetings have you changed the way you do meetings? Yeah, we really try to put an effort in. But um there are your word organization Almost exclusively of knowledge workers, like certainly more than 95%. And if you look at how I spend my time, um any executive of the company, more or less any manager, it's pretty close to 100% of the time is on communication and that could be reading or writing messages, creating presentations, sitting through other people's presentations, phone calls, one on one meetings, all hands, all of that stuff. Um and if you look across the organization, it's it's definitely more than 50% of people's time on average and maybe more like 60 or 70%. So if you imagine you have a 10,000 person organization, um and just kind of like an average total cost of employment, it's several billion dollars a year that you're paying a payroll costs and most of that is going towards people communicating. So the pandemic really forced us to going back to the transcending time and space, what opportunities do we have to give people more flexibility? What conversations can become asynchronous? And that led to a whole set of tools, but even just going back to the like slack launched in February of 2014 and by halfway through that year we had received this piece of feedback over and over again from different people, but like almost verbatim phrasing, which was something like, hey, I just wanted to thank you for slack. I think it's really great. I'm someone who doesn't often speak up in meetings. I'd like to take a little bit more time to form my, my thoughts. Um and I found that I can really contribute in a way that I couldn't contribute before, so that was like an early hint that I'm not sure. Um it was nice and flattering and made us feel good, but it wasn't, it didn't take it as enough useful signal at the time, but in the pandemic we realized we need to make a lot more tools to either facilitate kind of ad hoc um uh immediate communication and that there's a feature called huddles and we'll come back to that in a second and the other one was to give people more of what they value out of the real time communication like video calls and stuff like that, which is the ability to speak a little bit more naturally have some body language inflection um you know that kind of a richer field of communication and that became something called eclipse and there's kind of a long stream on both of these. But um I think these are real components of the digital HQ of the future. And clips is just literally recorded a little video clip that you're talking, you can record your screen and put yourself in the little corner of the screen so you can walk through a presentation. But the advantages If we're doing a daily stand up meeting at nine that goes till 9 15, everyone goes around the room and says what they're doing this makes it makes us, I could record mine at 8 53 and then watch yours at 10 17 or something like that whenever it's actually convenient for me which frees people up for a lot. But also it means that the clip is portable. We take the um the audio, do speech to text, make a transcript transcript searchable. You can watch it at 1.5 X or two point or you can go back and rewind and you can cause in the middle and go to the bathroom or or whatever you want, what you can't do any meeting but there is this real desire for flexibility which was kind of immediately obvious to me and I think everyone else on the team but really showed up powerfully. So now when I see a clip just like open the transcript kind of skim through it a little bit, click on the line that she was interesting and and start the video from there, which is something that would have been hard to do before. And then just super briefly the idea is to recreate the spontaneity and serendipity of office based conversations. So it's not a call that necessarily starts or stops. That could be like open in this channel. People are joining and then leaving and you leave it open for the course of several hours and maybe the conversation even peters out um which you would never do on a zoom call, but then three minutes later someone asked a question, everyone can hear it just like they would if you're at your desk. My guess is that most people in the room here use this feature, how many of you are on slack to begin with? Not a lot of upside for me. Yeah, you really shouldn't have come. So speaking of asynchronous, um our editor in chief Allison, I don't know if you're in the room right now Allison. Um but that's okay but she she recently discovered that you can schedule slack messages to be sent out at a future time and tweeted about it. What a game changer. This is gonna make me a much better less dreadful manager which she's she's a very good manager but um but it's it's it's interesting like these kind of these tweaks these features um that not only allow us to collaborate better but also to you know where I spend so much time in slack today so much more than I did pre pandemic. You know there's good, there's bad to it right. Um what else are you doing or thinking about that will enable um people to have just a bit more of a of a balance and uh you know that's just become so much trickier when you're working remote. Right? Yeah so that it's a great example because um this is like a way too long of a story but the original reason we added the do not disturb feature wasn't so that you the recipient wouldn't receive notifications. Um Although that's obviously how it works, It was more so the sender wouldn't feel this tension between like for me for example it's 11:30 PM. I just thought of this thing I was supposed to say to someone or someone. Either I have to like write it down somewhere and then remember to do it tomorrow morning or I can send it right now but if I send it right now then that person is getting a message from the ceo at 11 30 PM and they're gonna feel obliged so that there's this whole host of features that try to encourage people to um people kind of pick their point on the continuum between synchronous and asynchronous because the Messaging aspect of slack and the notifications make people feel like it should be an immediate response if someone sends you something. But what we want is actually what that feedback we got back in 2014, which was um I want to take a little bit of time to think about this. Um and I want to formulate, you know, a fuller more carefully thought out response and and that's really what we want is to be able to um to give people that option or opportunity so you can find the natural cadence in a given a bit of work that really uh suits that bit of work. Okay, I'm gonna go to you guys in just a sec, see if anybody has a question for Stuart, but real quick on on Salesforce um you are now a part of Salesforce um going back to when you were last on stage, you were dealing with some um Microsoft things at the time. Um we asked you about Microsoft, you said it's hard to maintain a real focus on quality, on user experience and the bigger you get, the harder it is, Salesforce is pretty big, What what makes you confident that you will be able to retain the kind of product focus and and uh you know, customer focus that you've, you've always had with slack and previous companies. Um well I think it it is just like the amount of will if you're willing to exert to make that happen, and I think that's maybe made a little bit easier by the scope of the opportunity right now. So there's definitely the reason that the acquisition happened is because we have a real Microsoft. I thought that was funny. Only Stewart had a nervous laugh, but I don't know what to do it again. Maybe Microsoft? No, that's very thoughtful. Um because we did have a lot of shared vision and we didn't have that vocabulary that we didn't talk about digital HQ. But the reason they said that the category that exists with or without slack is because all of the Salesforce tools are a component of that as well. Like if you think about the, remember glengarry glen ross and they have the leads and they're like little index cards and they kind of hold them back. Obviously no one does that, no one puts all their customer information on sticky notes, they use sales cloud or some equivalent and that that is uh important component of the digital infrastructure that supports productivity and collaboration. So there's like this real opportunity to look much more expensively, whether that's sales or service or marketing or commerce or whatever. Uh But also I think there's just such an obvious opportunity now, whereas we had strong convictions about what we should do with slack from the very earliest days, but they were much more born out of intuition and kind of like almost like not religious actually but kind of more like a religious belief now that I feel like there's all of this empirical evidence, we're pretty far ahead of anyone else in terms of the um the product capabilities and what we're doing to support them so that the opportunity for us now seems to like press that advantage and keep going and I think that's really a common vision with all of sales. Where and how has it changed recruiting for you? Is it do you approach it differently now or? Yeah, I mean just like for the very simple fact that we had 15 offices in 10 different countries before the pandemic and in the U. S. That was new york and san Francisco and in Canada that was Vancouver Toronto and it was London Dublin Tokyo, Osaka Munich um pretty much to a t all very expensive places to live and very constrained and while you can maybe make an argument that the best of the best in the technology industry would end up in san Francisco or new york, there's millions and millions of people who didn't live there who have turned out to be great employees will be able to hire in those places. We've been able to give employees who lived in those places the flexibility to move away. Whether that's like moving from san Francisco to sacramento to get a 4000 square foot house instead of 800 square foot apartment. Um or moving across the country or even to a different country to be closer to family. Okay. Um real quick like 11 or two word answer here you have another startup in you another another gaming company that pivots to something. I don't think so. Yeah. Hey you move, you move to a great place if you're tired and if you're energetic too, there's a lot of a lot of activities you can do here. Apparently, Stuart thank you so much for for joining us. Please bring a photo next time. Okay. Okay I promise. All right, thank you.