Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield

And many of those people are going to go on to join new companies or start new companies or join new teams, found new teams, and they will make the decision.

All right everyone, I know it won't really work on the Zoom, but please give a warm round of applause for Stuart Butterfield for, for coming back to SASTR. Stuart, thank you so much for joining us and taking out the time. It's super appreciated.

No problem, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

So much I'd love to chat about, and I want to talk about everything in Bridging the Gap, but just looking at that video and thinking back to 2015, with 50,000 users in the Bay Area, the IPO, how do you feel? Slack's been such a part of our lives. How do you take it all in? How do you think back on those 5 years?

I don't know if the frog in boiling water is the right metaphor or not, but it's just, I've been in it all day, so it was actually kind of an interesting throwback to see that punctuated gap of 2015 to 2020. Yeah, there are moments when I really appreciate it. Listing day was definitely one of those days. My mom ringing the bell to open trading of the stock. Yeah. And times like that, but the rest of the time it's just work. There's just lots of stuff going on. There's always one more thing, one more hire, one more customer, one more feature. One more investor meeting, and just keep going.

Yeah, and I really want to take careful use of your time, but I want to be nostalgic because we're staying from— we work from home, and it's the end of the day. Looking back, we've been doing this for a while. Flickr was so crazy. It was bought for what, $30 million by Yahoo?

Yeah, $90 million.

And that was crazy at the time, wasn't it? Like, oh my God, this Web 2.0 thing. Did you— Is it all just so much bigger and crazier than you ever thought it was? Is it hard to take in at all?

Yeah, I mean, it's a different world now too, though. It's like Flickr was already acquired maybe like 8 months or something like that before YouTube was even founded. 2000 and— God, it's 2004. 2005 we were acquired, so 15 years ago. At that moment, the coolest phone that you could get was a Motorola Razr. And if people had them, they would conspicuously put them on the table during lunch. So that's just one indication. I bet probably fewer than 40% of American households had broadband access at home. We were still pretty early in the general transition to digital. I guess that's 4 years after Salesforce started with the software, with the line through it, and cloud was born. But it is a completely different universe, trying to think back to that time.

Yeah, it's just— and let's move on to Slack. Just Flickr, we didn't even think of Flickr as a cloud product, but it was actually one of the most disruptive cloud products, right? No one thought, how could you even afford to store your photos on the internet? And it was just at the bleeding edge, and we're kind of doing it again. We're going to— we have limited time, but folks, put your Q&A in. We'll try to at least hit some of the questions at the end. So from consumer and Flickr, I want to fast forward, and I just want to briefly share the slide with folks. You know this slide, Stuart, if you can see it, which is Slack's percent of revenue from the enterprise. But a lot of folks who are OG Slack may be surprised, right? They may think that Slack is mostly a tool for startups or others. They may not realize, but coming up or maybe even past the majority of your revenues from 6-figure and up deals. So Slack has become, at least I would say, fairly enterprise. And I think you use the enterprise language, right? You have a very interesting mix of small, medium, and large now getting bigger, which I want to dig into. But first, tell us what you're hearing today from CTOs and CIOs. What are you hearing? This slide is the last deal you did before you went to sheltered homes. So what can you tell other founders? What are you seeing at the top?

I think it's going to be so specific to the company, the category, the product, but also I think the situation of the customer. I had a meeting with both the CEO and the CTO of an unnamed customer in retail, I don't know, I could say 2, 3 3 months ago, and they were describing how they had just rolled out Webex to the company last year, but they talked about it like they were in the Vietnam War, and it was just awful. Like you couldn't believe how challenging the change management was. Like, this is just an impossible transition for us. And then near the end of the call, the CTO asked me if I thought he should switch to Office 365 from on-prem Exchange. And I was like, Why are you asking me? There's, you know, if you put all the customers on a spectrum and, you know, at this end is progressive, digital-first, kind of thinking really strategically about their technology investments. I forget how many there are kind of at this end of the spectrum who are significantly behind. And, you know, I think there's almost certainly some bias towards who I end up talking to. First of all, because salespeople will put me with the, you know, the more important strategic customers or ones where it feels like it's going to make more of a difference. But generally, if there's an exec at the company who wants to talk to me, it's a good indicator that they're thinking pretty seriously about this stuff. Every once in a while I get a lucky break, but I think that there, you know, investments that seem necessary now are definitely getting made The good news is, if people can bridge the gap, if people can make it through to the other side, I do think for some customers, we're pushing them 3 or 6 months down the road. For others, it's like 3 or 5 years down the road of digital transformation. And we talked about this, actually, in my staff meeting earlier today. Think about, in the last 25 years, how many companies had consultants come in, or internal strategy teams, do like a prepare report about telecommuting in the future and working from home and what it would take. And like, just preparing the report took 9 months, and the plans were all like, you know, 3 to 5 year. And if you asked anyone if they could do it in a week, they would have said it's impossible. And then when it turned out to be necessary, turns out it was possible. So I think that will force reevaluation of a whole bunch of stuff down the line. I mean, there's some stuff that's obvious, like Zoom. We used to sit in a conference room talking to each other. We still need to talk to each other. Therefore, we need some kind of video conferencing, voice and video calling service. Some things are much less obvious. And I do think that once we're out the other side, and I have no idea how long that is, but once we're out the other side, I do expect kind of a further uptick in investment in software technology, digital transformation, cloud. So kind of good news for everyone in the audience.

And what do you, you're probably, I mean Slack's obviously seen incredible growth since shelter at home. But to me, and I'm just more a student and a fan and a user, but it seems like you might have an interesting insight because it almost seems like before shelter at home Slack was a poster child for the innovation budget. I wanna bring innovation into my enterprise and Slack is a tool where I will be a hero in my company. I don't hear much innovation budget happening in April and May, but a ton of budget for must-have, for mandatory, and Slack, I feel like, went from an innovation tool to need it to function in my business. So is there a trade-off there? Are you secretly struggling in some weird corners of Slack at the same time as you're seeing this avalanche of growth and usage?

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I guess we're seeing everything, right? So you mentioned at the beginning the breakdown of enterprise customers, and we use that $100,000 ARR mark It's a little bit arbitrary because there's people who are way beyond that and there's people who spend $50,000 or $80,000. But we have 110,000 customers as, you know, at last quarterly announcement. There's only 500 companies in the Fortune 500, so just kind of necessarily at least 109,500 of them aren't in the Fortune 500. So they're going to be a lot of small businesses. There's state, local, municipal government. There's like academic research labs. There's nonprofits. Startups. So we're really seeing everything. And I think you're right, it's a good point. And I think an ongoing challenge for us, maybe not right this quarter, but kind of historically, and when things resume normalcy, that there is no line item that we're replacing in people's budgets typically. There is no other, you know, like what I said in 2015 is still true. This is a new category. We still have to invent it.

It's still unbudgeted even in 2020.

Yeah. And so that presents some additional challenge. It also gives you a little bit of latitude. I mean, I think net it's a disadvantage, but it does give you a little latitude to sell in a different way. And I think innovation budget is one of those. And obviously, after thousands and thousands of hours of practice, you started to refine ways to communicate to both to the executives and kind of the more procurement, administrative, IT, kind of like people who actually have to deal with the stuff, how to pitch it.

Yeah. And what, with, how have you evolved like your onboarding process and making customers more successful, especially with folks that are maybe the one you described that had spent 5 years evaluating Webex? How do you get them up to speed on Slack in an hour or a day instead of maybe what change management used to be?

Yeah, well, we have a, I haven't experienced a lot of other people, so I don't know if this is really true, but I feel like we have the best customer success team in the business. And there are now many tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of hours of experience. And we used to think, like, Oracle had, through acquisitions, maybe 1,000 or 2,000 people using Slack. And in 15 months, we took it to 100,000 people, wall-to-wall. And that was like the record. That was so fast. That just seemed like, you know, mind-bogglingly fast. And not to the same extent, I don't think, but there was 72 hours to get to 100,000, like a month ago. But I think the success comes when people are willing to invest. And forget Slack for a second. You join pretty much any company. It's unlikely that there's any part of onboarding, like there's all this, Here's our security practices. Here's get your laptop. Here's provision your software. Meet your team. Probably nothing on culture of communication, discipline around communication, expectations. But if you're a manager, you spend more or less 100% of your time on communication. And for many roles inside of enterprises, certainly salespeople, it's going to be close to 100% as well. Even the people who spend the least amount of time in communication are probably 30 or 40% of their time. Even like you imagine the archetypal backend systems engineer kind of person, they still have to write bug reports and code commits and checkouts, and they still have to communicate with their team and their manager. But if you average it out, this is not data, this is just made up. Around 50% of people's time, I think, is on really basic communication and coordination. So not the interesting strategic creative stuff, but just it's the, the daily stand-ups, it's the status reports, it's the quarterly business review, and it's the road mapping sessions and everything that a project manager does. And I don't mean to say that that stuff's unimportant. I think the reason we invest such an extraordinary amount of time is because it's really important. So now you imagine I got 10,000 employees, payroll is $1 billion a year. Half of that is going towards just people trying to stay coordinated, just keep each other up to date on what's going on, just answering each other's questions so that they can do whatever the actual work is. So it's kind of nuts that there's zero or close to zero investment on how we should communicate, how we should run meetings, how we should write memos or anything. There are exceptions, but generally people don't. So We kind of view this— roundabout way to answer the question— that the Slack Success Services are kind of the missing training from onboarding at your company that you maybe should have had. But that's also an effective pitch to customers, and it's, hey, look, you're going to make this change. This is going to affect how people spend a couple of hours a day. Use this as an opportunity to piggyback some other change that you want, to some change in the culture, some change in process, a reorg. And interestingly, in the current environment, kind of looking at the same thing at a global level, the backdrop of global pandemic change is so enormous that you can kind of sneak in anything you want. And we see, I see that talking to other CEOs today, not my customers, just like, there's essentially a group therapy SaaS CEO, roundtable. And it's like, oh, that reorg that we've been sitting on for 6 months because we know people are going to be upset, now's the time to pull it off because no one really cares. Everyone has a much higher tolerance for change than they would otherwise have.

Got it. So you're seeing— I mean, I want to talk about SMEs next, but this is a great time to push through organizational change, as challenging as it is. We have no choice, right? So take it all together. This one from your tweet, Good things on the Mows and Dows and Yows and all the Owls. But 110,000 customers, many would go out of business. I remember when you came to Saastrainer.io in 2015, I was a Slack user, but I wasn't really aware of the fair billing policy back then that you auto-deprovisioned. My jaw kind of dropped. My jaw also dropped when you said you'd never have a salesperson. We can chat about that later. It was a fun time. But I really felt that the fair billing policy was antithetical to how you scale recurring and revenue was wrong. What are you seeing today with your customers that are struggling, right? Not, I mean, it must be material. It's the double digits that are struggling. It's not just the ones that are growing. What are you thinking? What are you learning? And how has Slack evolved to help your SMEs?

Yeah, it's, so we're doing, there's a bunch of things that we're doing. Some is more outreach for new customers. The team's been running one-on-one consultations that just anyone can sign up for if they have a question, who need help getting started, why they should do it. I'm actually doing my first one tomorrow, but the team has done hundreds and hundreds of these. We're also obviously doing more webinars, more training sessions. We have every vertical, every geography. So we obviously, we have customers in travel and hospitality, like probably most of the big companies you can think of in travel and hospitality, and they're obviously hurting pretty hard. There's a lot of people who— I was talking to the CEO of another company, and he's like, "Yeah, my procurement guys are out asking for discounts, as they should be, from everyone for everything." I think there's a little bit of that, like, you know, even if your business isn't especially affected, you might as well be asking for discounts, but it's pretty obvious the ones that are hurting. We also did something where when— when you cancel, like actually cancel a paid plan, which historically has been, you know, very, very low. So we have excellent retention. We do ask you why, and when we see COVID pandemic, you know, lockdown, any of those things in the response, we just write them back and say, well, have a couple months for free, at least, you know, might help you wind things down if you need to wind it down. And worst case, we We know we're not out anything really. In best case, we have a fan for life. So there's a little bit of that. We're trying to be proactive with some of our customers who we know are hurting, but most of that is just driven by fair billing. So we saw enormous spikes and we started to see churn and we kind of have to tease it apart to see what's happening inside of individual companies. I heard someone said something like 80% of startups have had some layoffs. So I have no idea if that's true or not. I also don't know how— who measures that and how you would know. But there's definitely a contraction at the same time as there's expansion. I think net positive for us at this point, but over the course of the year, who knows how that goes.

Yes. So the sort of But the, but the take the free months from us if COVID's impacting you on the exit seems to have helped, right, as one actionable tip.

Yeah, yeah. And I was talking to, again, some of my peers, colleagues. A lot of them are just giving kind of a budget, because it's usually not money that you have to spend, but kind of like an amount of money, revenue they're comfortable giving up, and just letting people in the field make those calls about how much they're willing to go down. And I think everyone feels like that's worth it, because it's not like this is any kind of new insight at all, but acquiring a new customer is expensive. If you can maintain one, that's really, really good.

I want to— just one— I view— and again, I'm not on the other side— I view Slack— but it does tie into another question— I think it's cheap. I think your ACVs are not that high. I think your per-user price is compared to a pure set of applications. Do you see a lot of that procurement pressure or folks that are paying? I mean, if I'm an enterprise and I'm paying $200,000 a year for Slack, it feels cheap compared to my stack. Are you feeling folks that want 10% off just to get it?

Yeah, I mean, it's everything. And sometimes I'm, you know, I don't even know how much we pay for most software. Honestly, I just trust trust my team. And I, as a general rule, think if we're buying software, it's a good deal because it frees up people to do the stuff that people are better to do. And the things that are amenable to automation tend to be more repetitive and kind of mind-numbing, menial tasks. So hopefully I'm not doing anything dumb, but I'm always struck by how irrational people are. And I'll talk to sometimes the CEO of a company like much bigger than us, who wants $100,000 discount. I'm like, what the fuck? What? How are you spending your time? Like this is—

How are they spending their time? That's the mystery to me, right?

Yeah. Like how could that possibly be a priority for you? But, you know, we get, you're crazy expensive because people will compare it to Office 365, which they have to license for the whole company, you know, even if there's only 10% of the company is using it. I look at what we spend on other software. And we spend as a multiple of what we would sell Slack to ourselves. Obviously, we get Slack for free. But we spend about 2x that on Workday. And I'm thinking of things that are basically company-wide. We also spend about 2x that on Zoom, because we have a huge number— like, every conference room is a Zoom room. And is it too expensive? I don't know, because Slack will come out to $0.80 per user per day or something like that. And if you're spending 50% of your time on internal communication and this has a real impact on that, who cares? Like set the thermostat half a degree warmer or cooler depending where you live, and there's your $0.80 a day.

Well, that's interesting. Zoom, you find folks pay twice as much as the total—

I don't know about other people. I just— we do because, yeah, the per user licensing for Zoom is lower, but Zoom rooms are pretty expensive and we just, we have a 1,000 of them or something.

Yes. This one I was super curious about. I find Slack free fascinating. I think Slack is cheap in the enterprise, and I also think it's too free. I think Slack free is like the best— well, Zoom free is pretty good deal too. 40-something minutes for nothing. I get even confused which Zoom I'm on, our paid or our free one. But you said more are upgrading to paid plans.

What is—

what's going on here in this crazy piece of news? These crazy times? And what can folks learn from this?

Um, so we have an internal metric that we call successful teams, because here's what our funnel is like. I went to the website because I was interested in it. I actually created a team, which just basically means I filled out a form and got to the end of the process. I actually launched the app. I sent some invites. Some invites were accepted. People actually used it to send some messages. People started to sustain their usage. So successful teams is like kind of the earliest benchmark where we can say these people are really giving Slack a try. It's like over the course of a week, multiple people are signing in on multiple days. So everywhere from the very top of the funnel to more people showing up on the website, to more teams being created, to more successful teams, to more of those paying, all of those were up. And I, you know, like I said earlier, the success team is more effective and efficient now because customers are really paying attention. I think it's the same thing. I try to make sure we always keep this in mind as designers and product people. People who don't work at Slack really do not care. Slack is not important in their lives compared to their kids messing up at school, or they got in a fight with their spouse, or trying to remember the email, and they wanted to watch Netflix tonight, or maybe they should go to the gym, or all the stuff that's going on in their head. If this is the threshold, that it requires for you to take time out of your day to visit our website, every customer is just, just at that threshold. No one's coming in with an excess of intent. Like, like I might when I need a certain cable and I go to Amazon or something like that, I want to find that cable. I need the cable. I know exactly what I'm doing. Whereas most people are like, I'm curious about Slack. So people are coming with a different attitude, a different intent. Like, we need something I've heard this is good. So they're paying much more attention. They're putting more effort and energy into it. And, you know, if— I don't know if there's a tip based on today's environment for people, but here's like a— I finally figured out how to explain something that's bothered me forever. And that's let's focus on people's comprehension. Let's focus on whether they want to do this thing or not, and less on the friction removing, because you can make it trivially easy and remove every bit of friction from some process, adding an app to a channel in Slack, let's say. But if no one knows what that means or why they would want to do it, then it's completely useless to them. On the other hand, if they knew what the value was and they really wanted to do it, they'd overcome all kinds of obstacles to get there. And that's the— the— not where we focus. We tend to focus— everyone has this kind of growth hacker mindset, kind of largely based on retail, like single interactions. I did the thing, or I didn't do the thing. And where that doesn't work is, uh, it's not a big commitment for me to buy a t-shirt or something like that on an e-commerce site. I make the decision on my own. It's not a hugely consequential decision. I don't need to go away and think about it. But for Slack and for many other tools, I got to risk some of my personal capital inside the company to invite people and say, I think this is worth your time. And I have to put all this energy. And then the whole group has to decide at once. And then we have to decide if we pay. Usually at larger customers, there's legal, finance, security, procurement. There's all these people you got to get involved and kind of enrolled in making this purchase with you. So it's not at all like the friction in the moment, like how hard it is to find the button, um, or how big the text is, is actually relatively unimportant compared to making sure that we're building up a good enough model of what people want. And I think we have made some improvements lately, and that can maybe account for a tiny bit of this, but this is almost all— people are coming in with a much higher degree of intent, like, you know, 5 times more desire to actually get something out of their visit to this website. Got it.

If we had more time, I'd love to explore that making applications frictionless is not enough because we love this idea, right? We all love this idea of taking— we can just think about it as builders, like let's relentlessly take friction out, but it's not enough. And I suspect when you talk to CIOs and CTOs, that's not number 1 or number 2 on their list versus the competition is friction. Isn't it something else? What are their number 1 or number 2? Choose, out of curiosity today? Why are CEOs and CTOs picking Slack?

Well, this is an argument that may not make sense here, but I'm happy to have it in the broad sense. I mean, Slack's the only product that you can choose if you want to do the thing that Slack does at any kind of scale. We have an Enterprise Grid product that allows you to federate multiple workspaces together, For our largest customers, that means thousands or even tens of thousands of workspaces, millions of channels. And Teams, which is the real alternative in some sense, although I think it's much more of a competitor to Zoom or other voice and video calling services than it is to Slack, is limited to 5,000 people per instance, and critically, only 200 channels. And if you want to add a 201st channel, you have to hard delete one of them without the whole history. So it's not that I don't think Teams is a useful product, they're a replacement for Skype for Business. They're migrating people over and people need to do voice and video calling. I think it's also by reputation anyway, the world's best SharePoint browser, 'cause it makes it, now that you have a kind of a locus for interaction around stored files, it's much easier than using SharePoint directly. But people choose Slack because they want something in this category and Slack's kind of their only choice. If, you know, if with a certain set of security requirements or a certain scale, So if you want it, you choose Slack.

Got it. And it just— I would love to have that learning for an hour, but the meta-learning to me is frictionless isn't on that list, is it? That is not on— that is not the stuff—

No. And for a given customer, we had launched international data residency in the fall. And for German customers and a lot of other European customers, they're like, We're not having this conversation until we can have our data stored in Europe. Encryption key management came 6 months or so before that, and there's a lot of customers who were just like, until we can manage our own encryption keys, we can't use this product. So there's that, you know, there's, can we be HIPAA compliant? Is it FINRA compliant? Does it have this? There's that stuff, and then there's, does this, can you convince me that this really fills a need that we have? 'Cause often what they're hearing is kind of an undifferentiated desire among the end users to continue to use Slack or to expand the usage. And all they know is the people like it, but they don't know exactly why. And often end users can't necessarily articulate exactly why they like it either, to be honest. Yeah.

Let's talk about this one 'cause it's fascinating to me. Maybe just give us one or two learnings for everyone else. How do you even keep Slack up? I mean, what are the— I mean, I remember I saw Drew Houston say something maybe 60 days ago saying they had about a 20% elasticity budget at Dropbox. Like, that is far at their scale for files at least, 20%. And that was my experience. You're seeing an order of magnitude more. How is this even possible? And what should we learn from it?

What are a couple of things? Well, I think if this had happened 6 or 9 months ago, we would have been much more challenged to keep up with it. But I think the investments we've been making over the last year have been, you know, they've really, they've paid off. And I think people don't appreciate the scale of Slack. You know, people rarely do this now, but people say, oh, it's a messaging app, I can make one in a weekend or something like that. At peak, it's like, 1.6 million transactions a second or something like that. I could look in the background while we're talking here. It's huge. There's tens of thousands of servers. It's a really complex topology, but we've been focused mostly on automating scaling. And prior to that, there was an enormous effort to kind of untangle parts of the internal technology and the services Because we grew so fast and we were trying to do so much, the engineers who had been at Slack for a long time and had kind of Jedi-level knowledge of how everything fit together could deploy new code and not worry about things breaking that often. But for new people, it was just like, oh my God, every time I try to deploy something, something unexpected breaks in this other part of the system. The kind of refactors that they've been doing, which are always really complicated when you have lots of users and lots of data, 'cause you can't just make the change. It's make the change and then backfill data for sometimes 6 months or a year. A lot of that has really paid off. And if there wasn't something like AWS, I think we would have been much more challenged to accomplish this as well, because a lot of it, literally the systems are automated in the sense that We do have people monitoring, and we have people on call all the time, and they do have to intervene. But generally, theoretically, you could just sit there and watch it on the ops team for a day as suddenly it scales up. Now, that's not to say it's not hard work, because it was enormous work to get to that point.

Yeah, I sort of quietly, as a student, watch on Twitter which services are actually going down that are under load. And Slack and Zoom have held up well. There are plenty out there. I won't name them. Names that I can just see just go down, right? I can just see the login page not work in contention. So, um, but maybe the meta-learning for me is you had to refactor and it was 6 months ago, you had to refactor again to have this sort of infinite horizontal scalability to really make it work. So this one I want to a little bit skip because we did it. Let's just help us a little bit because I know we'll run out of time, um, and let me know if you need to leave this second. But tell us about this tweet. Tell us about stress. What have you— what— how are you guiding the team? What can you share with the rest of us cathartically in terms of helping folks that are— I don't know what we're in, 38 days to this, this is what we are, 40 days in this crazy world we didn't plan for.

Yeah, it seems like a long time. Regular life just seems so long ago now. You know, this, this is not necessarily useful advice if you don't have the means. And I do know people who who have, you know, thought they had 18 or 24 months of cash on hand, and suddenly when revenue drops 90%, they actually only have 45 days of cash on hand, and they have to make pretty dramatic choices. So, you know, some of these options aren't available to everyone, but I think going out of your way to be good to people today will pay off in the long run. And we were out there really early with a message: if you need to take some time off, you need some flexibility, 'Cause the reality is we had people working from home before. They had a home office set up, they had childcare. You know, at 11 o'clock in the morning, they could walk over to their favorite cafe and sit on the sidewalk and enjoy a coffee and then go back to their home office and continue working. This is not like that. Like, you can't get a haircut even, like, never mind anything else. And you're, everyone's waiting to get their home internet connection upgraded and everyone's arguing with their spouse about who gets which part of the kitchen for the next video call. And everyone's trying to figure out what you do with a 6-year-old who's going bananas being locked up in the house. So it's a very hard time. I think we have to remember that. I also just, I personally find it exhausting. Like the, by like 5 o'clock, I'm toasted. The number of hours I'm working is not greater, but maybe I hope I'm getting more done because it just seems so much more challenging than it did in normal life. And we had a big surge of adrenaline, which I think helped and kind of pushed us through some of the early weeks. But, you know, at some point that kind of wears off. And there are a lot of people who are not— who are unhappy, you know, who want to be able to go outside, who want to be able to go to a movie, who want to be able to go to the office, and they want to be able to see people and have, you know, dinner out and stuff like that. And, you know, I don't have any prediction, but my personal guess is that it could take us till the end of next summer before we're out of— like, we're, you know, kind of back to work. I cannot see companies— like, because we don't have to be in the office, so why would we go first? There's no one gives a prize for being first. I can't see us being back in the office before September, and I think that would be— that's the absolute earliest, and I don't expect that to happen.

So, remember, this year or next year?

Of this year. Oh, again, I think that's the absolute earliest. I don't think that's likely, but I can't imagine it happening any sooner than that. And if that's the reality, then we're still, you know, we're maybe 5%, 10%, 15% of the way into this We gotta pace ourselves.

Yeah, I'm just trying to learn, and we'll hit our last point, but I just feel like if, especially Bay Area tech companies were the first to go home, they're gonna be the last to go back. I mean, as a CEO, would you wanna send anyone into an unsafe environment? You never would unless you had to, right? You're gonna be the last person out there, I mean, to say go back to the office if you're not 100% confident it's safe.

Yeah, and you know, we have offices in 15 countries, so there'll be, interesting to see. Like, we shut down Japan a month before San Francisco, but we actually opened it back up. Not everyone is expected to go to the office, but you can go to the office if you'd like. Tokyo was not designed for the whole family, including the kids, to stay in the apartment all day. That's just not how the society works.

Tiny, tiny.

So I think they especially needed it. Now they're closed down again. Australia might open up. Earlier. So, you know, we'll keep an eye on those things. But no, I definitely— I definitely certainly wouldn't want to encourage anyone. And at some point, I think when it seems like it's safer, giving people the option to go and to have a different space to get some work done, I think is something that we would consider. But yeah, I do think this is going to be a long, long time.

Long time. Yeah, the last one I wanted to hit, and then if there's anything else you want to hit with your scarce time, let me know, because it's always interesting to me. I meant this one as a joke, but maybe I'll answer it more. Your cast iron pans as your— but shelter hacks, either tell me a home one, we can have fun, or give me a work one, like from a leadership perspective. Like what have you learned? What's your hack? It could be on Slack, it could be anywhere, but what have you— what's your top learning that's improved things at home or at work?

Yeah, so for on the home front, it's really interesting. You know, I've never— I'm not in the top half. I'm probably in the bottom quartile for like handyman-ness or something like that. And I never learned how to sharpen knives. I love cooking. So finally learned how to sharpen knives. There's a lot more dishes. There's a lot more cooking and cleaning. And I actually kind of like that because unlike, you know, stupid to-do list here, it's finite and it's kind of tangible and I can see measurable progress and I can get it done. So I almost find it therapeutic to cook a big meal and clean up. And so if you don't have cast iron pans, I recommend just get some of the cheap Lodge ones that cost $20 or something and you can scrub them with metal scrapers if you want and they're so good. On the leadership side, I don't think I've been living up to this to the extent that I should, but I was talking to Scott and Mike from Atlassian, and in the early days, they were uploading a short video, like a 90-second video to the whole company every single day, just to say to people, here's what we're hearing right now, here's what's going on in the business, we just want to let you know that, and fill in the blank with whatever, because this global situation is an excellent lesson illustration of kind of one final thought, and that's that human beings hate uncertainty. Like, we just— it's built into every culture, you know, that it can't— things can't be random and unexplained. It can't just be a roll of the dice that it didn't rain here this year. It must be that we didn't sacrifice enough goats or something like that. There has to be a reason for everything, and it has to be knowable and And I think this is really testing all of our ability to even continue to function cognitively in an environment where we don't have that kind of certainty. So on the leadership side— but this could be CEO, this could be line manager, this could be individual contributor on a team who wants to provide some leadership for everyone else— leaders remind people what's important. And while we can't know what's going to happen with the economy, we can't know what's going to happen with the health and the other impacts of the pandemic, there are a lot of things we can know. And there are a lot of reasons why we do things that people could stand to be reminded of. I mean, this is a great opportunity for people to double down on purpose and the impact that they have on customers and kind of what they want to accomplish, either out of the business or out of their lives. And you just, you can't bring that up often enough, I don't think.

Yeah. Something we're all thinking a lot about these days. All right, Stuart, I would love to chat forever. Anything else you think that founders and others that will watch this would like to know today, or that could be helpful?

Yeah, I'm sorry we didn't get to the questions. I tend to answer pretty verbosely. You know, maybe just going back to the very beginning, I, uh, hopefully as many of you as possible can hang in there while the world sorts its stuff out, um, because I do think the other side of this is going to be great for software in general. Um, a lot of people who thought something was impossible are going to now think maybe it's possible. A lot of people who had resisted certain kinds of change now having been thrust into this great change are more open-minded about what they attempt. So there's that. There's going to be even more opportunity, let's say, 3 years from now than there was last year or 3 years ago.

When we get through it, right? And maybe to just summarize, then we will break. My view— I don't run Slack, but I think the boost that Slack's getting, as an example, I think it will be permanent. Permanent. I don't think anyone that's all of a sudden come to Slack once we get together at home is gonna say, "I don't need Slack anymore." I think you may be in industries that don't benefit today, that are hurt, but when we come out of this, I think we're gonna get an even bigger push than we anticipated before.

Yeah, no, I can see that too.

Yes. All right, Stewart, thanks for making this time. I know you have a lot going on. I'm sure everybody appreciated it. And you're a good friend to Saastr and to everyone in the cloud. We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad you were able to pull this off. I know it must have been a little heartbreaking to cancel the real thing, and hopefully you're back soon.

We'll be back. All right, thank you so much. This was great.