CEO of Slack on Managing Communication

Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us on the Inbound studio. We're here at Inbound 2017. Very excited to be here with Stuart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack. CEO and founder of Slack, who fresh off the Spotlight stage. Hope everything went well. I heard great things about it. How did it feel?

It was great.

Awesome. So we're going to continue the conversation here a little bit and chat some more and let's get started.

Cool, let's do it.

So just for everyone here and everyone watching, in case you've already covered this, I know there's a lot of different ways to describe Slack. You probably have your own version. Would love to hear it. So how would you call it?

I would call it a work. This doesn't roll off the tongue that easily. A workplace communication platform. So it becomes a central hub for all the communication that happens at work. A lot of that is people typing text into a box and hitting enter and having that transmitted. But a lot of that is also notifications that come from third party systems, whether that's like expense reports or time off requests, alerts going off that your database is down, daily stats, run leads in Salesforce, customer support tickets in Zendesk, all of your activity in HubSpot. So yeah, it can be pretty much anything and it integrates all those in a way that heretofore has not been realized for most organizations.

And so that's a great point. However, there are other. We've got email, we've got text, we've got gchat, there's other ways to communicate. So what inspired you to specifically create Slack with all the functionality that you just explained?

I'm going to do two totally separate answers. So one is, I guess in a sense what inspired us was our accidental creation of the product while we were trying to build a web based, massively multiplayer game. Over the course of three and a half years, we had developed a system for internal communication which we really love, but we didn't even notice. It was kind of like the fish swimming in the ocean. Don't see the water. It didn't have a name, we didn't ever really talk about it. But we did build this whole style of communication for the company around the use of irc, which is the now ancient Internet technology, stands for Internet Relay Chat. And when something drove us so bananas that we couldn't stand it anymore, we would address that and then go back to what we were supposed to be doing and just kind of let it sit. Or when there was an opportunity for an improvement. That was so Great that we couldn't help but take advantage of it. We would go implement that and then go back to what we were supposed to be doing. And it turns out that that method of software design is way better than the kind where you're consciously making decisions because there's much less ego involved, there's much less speculation. It's impossible to replicate because once you know that you're doing it, then you're not doing it subconsciously anymore. So it would be great to think that we're clever enough to have come up with the idea and implement it. And then it was just really successful. It was more like we, through an evolutionary process came up with the idea almost like while we were collectively sleeping. And then at the end of that process when we decided to shut down, the game went up on top of the mountain and were handed stone tablet that said make slack just like this.

That sounds fantastic.

And as for the advantages, this is my I'm going to use the whole 15 minutes month of one answer, but the advantage of slack over email or a bunch of other things that you mentioned. But I think email is the one that we're replacing inside of most organizations, twofold. First one is a lot of internal transparency. And I don't mean the bosses are forthcoming with the workers. I mean the people on the marketing team can see what the sales team is talking about or, or the people on the technical operations team can see what customer support is talking about, or the designers can see what the engineers are talking about. And especially in larger organizations, a huge amount of effort, energy and attention is put into distributing information across the organization. You have like the all hands meetings and the status reports and the daily standups and just like maybe 20, 30, 40, even 50% of people's time is put into this kind of communication which is just the distribution of information and then clarifications around the company. You don't get that entirely for free when you use Slack, but it's like an order of magnitude less effort to get the same amount of alignment. And then the second one is the, the effort that you put into communication creates this archive which increases in value over time. So when you go to join, let's say a 10,000 person company that's been around for 40 years, there may have been hundreds of millions or even billions of messages exchanged before you got there and you have access to none. You have this empty inbox completely cut off from the history. In contrast, our biggest customer is IBM. If you were to go to work at IBM and join the 50,000 plus people who are using Slack. There you have this incredible archive and you can scroll back not just over factual information and decisions and documents and all kinds of straight up information that you need to get your job done. But the social protocols and the norms, the expectations about response time, who knows the answers to what kinds of questions, who really makes the decisions? And that information can take a long time to figure out. The first day of school, feeling on a new job. There's a lot of triangulation of how do things get done here. And getting that faster means that people become productive much more quickly, which is great for the organization, but also great for the individual.

Obviously inbound. We talk a lot about that productivity and making things better and doing better business in a better way. But we also talk a lot about bringing a humanity back to business. And you are doing work with other human beings. And a lot of technology or a lot of times people can put a blame on technology for taking the humanity out of things. How do you think about that? Or you know, A, I guess do you have a response to that in terms of the technology side of things being, you know, a technology company and B, how do you think about that and humans as you're developing a product that they're using and you're ultimately trying to help people connect versus spread people apart?

Yeah. The most general perspective, I think that technology is almost always neutral. It enables a bunch of choices. Humans might be predisposed to make poor choices sometimes. Let's say there's a really fundamental human drive for connection, for communication, for kinship, for social belonging. In the same way that we as a species have had trouble going from hunter gatherer foraging society to early agrarian to an era where you basically have infinite free calories and diabetes is rampant all across the country. In that same way, we go from a world where communication is scarce and relationships are few in number. You grow up in a little village or on a farm and you see other people periodically to a world where there's literally like speed of light, access to anyone else on the surface of the planet 24 hours a day. And we get the kind of equivalent of cognitive diabetes. Like you just get addicted to your phone and you can't help but get the next, like the next social interaction. I think on net we're a better world for all of the advances in technology and it will just take us a while to figure out, figure out how to make best use of them. In the same way that it took us thousands of years to go from societies which had very limited use of any energy other than human bodies were getting worked on to a world where there was windmills and water mills and you had draft animals and stuff. That might seem like a totally bizarre comparison, but bringing it back to Slack, there's definitely a theme in some feedback that we get from customers which goes like this. Thank you so much for Slack. I'm really an introvert. I have trouble speaking up in meetings frequently. I feel like it moves so fast, everyone's interrupting each other. I don't really want to stop what's going on to get my voice heard. But when we're using Slack, I have the opportunity to collect my thoughts and offer that input. And I didn't have that before, so obviously what I just said, but condensed down to a tweet. And it's surprising to me how often that comes up and there is absolutely something is lost in the amount of signal when you read, I don't know, 80 words that someone wrote versus you have a chance to sit next to them. You have their body language, you have all of the inflections in their words, and that signal is reduced. But at the same time, it's a great equalizer. And the act of communication, if it happens in a room with two people with vibrations in the air that bounce off the walls and then eventually disappear, you get a lot less out of that active communication than you do if you put it into a system where other people can read it five minutes later who didn't happen to be in the room right then or a week later. It's searchable and again, part of this archive and ideally something that increases the value over time.

Do you. Sorry. I was thinking about my use of Slack there and I was like, let me think about how I do this. And I feel like I sometimes lose things in Slack. But to your. But then, you know, to your point, you're able to go back and, like, see what everyone's talking about when you were off doing something else. And so there's that value. But then I'm like, oh, where is that thing? And like, I know we were talking about that. So how do you. How do you sort of combat or think about, you know, like, yes, it's help. Slack is helping extend conversations and bring different people into conversations, but it's also sort of like keeping conversation going 24 7. And that can get distracting. So how do you sort of think about that distracting nature of ongoing conversation?

A lot of it is just kind of basic design issues. And Slack can seem completely overwhelming to people who are moving from A different way of communicating inside the workplace. And you'll just have to trust me when I say it would be way worse had we not already put a lot of thought into helping people manage it. Especially around notifications and the degree of attention that the application asks for when you're communicating. And people put around the same amount of time and energy into communication when they use Slack versus email, but they get somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times more access to information depending on the size of the organization. So if it's a five person team, it's probably not radically different. If it's a 50 person team it is radically different. And if it's a 500 person team, it's just a complete, completely different world because you have access to all the stuff that you wouldn't otherwise. And in a 500 person organization, the person who has the most access to information maybe has somewhere between half a percent and 1% of all the messages that are exchanged inside the organization. Same 500 person team using Slack, you probably have access to 20 or 30 or 50% of the communication that's happening. And that makes a really enormous difference. So having said all that, I think there's a long way that we have to go and luckily we have the next couple decades to work on it to make that even easier to manage because there's a lot of books that have been written in all of history and a lot of magazine articles and journal articles and a lot of data in all the databases. But I can start typing something into Google Web Search and I don't even have to finish what I was typing and I already know what I was going to ask and I hit enter and boom, there's the result. And it just asked a question of all of the books and libraries and databases in the world, more or less. And I find out the it doesn't even have to spell the words right. Like it can be completely off and it still knows that's not the experience inside the workplace for most people. Yeah, the experience inside the workplace is I saw this presentation last week, it was great. It had the stat in it. I want to put the stat into the article I'm writing. And now I'm going to blow 45 minutes try to find this thing that I just saw two weeks ago and it's inside the company. So we are making a bunch of strides there. And I would rate our current efforts in search, learning and intelligence, which is the name of the group that works with mostoph at Slack, as good. That's good. A Couple years from now it'll be very good. I think, like five years from now it'll be excellent. And 10 years from now it'll be something that people cannot live without. Like, it'll just be so powerful to be able to lever off of all the communication, all the decisions that were made, all the factual information. Because as knowledge workers, we spend not the bulk of our time, but a really significant percentage, like maybe a third of our time looking for the answers to simple, basic factual questions that don't require any human intelligence or creativity. Like, who is this person's manager? When was this project completed? Does anyone have a contact at this company? And that stuff is really important. And it's exhausting to be the one in the company who's answering the same question for the 150th time in the last couple weeks. Even just like, what's the password for the guest WI fi? That was one of the first. We have a feature in Slack called Slackbot Responses. So you can put in some text and the Slackbot will say something in response to the text. So we put guest WI fi. And so anytime anyone said guest WI fi into message, Slackpot will respond with the password for the guest WI fi. But it's like one silly kind of example, but especially when you get to larger teams that are harder and harder to coordinate, that becomes more and more valuable.

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned in everything that you were just saying there that you've got the next couple decades to be to really figure this out and get people there. You are an entrepreneur and have started multiple companies. So who sort of do you admire and who are your mentors that you talk to and bounce ideas off of that have helped you get where you are today and are going to probably help you through the next?

I don't know, there's one or two. I take my inspiration pretty widely and there's definitely people who I've worked with in the past, like Jeff Weiner, who's now the CEO of LinkedIn, was the head of search at Yahoo. Yahoo, bought Flickr, the photo sharing site that me and the rest of this team worked on before Slack, and I got the opportunity to work with him and to learn a bunch. And I guess maybe I'll wrap this up because I think we're probably getting close to our end with a little story. As you said, there's a wide variety of people outside of business, in family, personal relationships who are very important for me in getting feedback and learning. But there's this one thing that I'm really experiencing now at Slack as we get larger, about 900 people. And I don't like to use the same joke or like to say, to repeat myself. So sometimes I have this weird experience where talking to someone the day before, we have an all hands at the company and I said something to them and like, oh crap, they're in the audience now. I can't say this thing, which is really important for the whole company. Anyway, so I saw Jeff maybe a year and a half ago and it was at this event and he was talking to someone he didn't know, turned out to be a young CEO. And Jeff was saying, well, you have to repeat it so many times like the. It's only when you're absolutely sick of repeating yourself that people even begin to hear it. And I had this like light bulb moment was like, damn, Jeff, I've heard you say that like a dozen times over the last 15 years and I'm only now beginning to understand it. So that's like, it's one really important bit of advice that I am in all of the same conversations that I'm in. Like I'm in all of the meetings that I'm in. And for me it can feel really repetitive. We've been over this a million times. God, I've been talking about this all day. And for most of the other 900 employees in Slack, they have never heard it before. And it's critical information. And getting over that reluctance to be repetitive I think is a really important one for me.

My final question is going to be what do you want to leave the audience with? But I think you kind of answered.

That and well, preemptive.

We're at time anyway, so thank you so much for being here. It's been fantastic. Thank you to everyone here and thank you everyone watching. We'll see you again soon.