Noah Weiss: evaluation

Transcript context

…Speaking of competition, something I wanted to ask you a bit about. Early on Slack was competing against this product called HipChat and that's actually what I used at our startup and we love HipChat. It was so hilarious, just these memes everywhere and their billboards are amazing. But then Slack ate their lunch later on. I'm just thinking out loud, discord feels like that was the big threat and how Microsoft Teams obviously. I'm curious just how you think about competition and even just what you've learned about working in a space where there's a lot of competition and thinking about that long-term and even short-term. Yeah. I mean each of those is an interesting mini lesson learned about those. I think the through line for all of them I would say is still the max that we have in trailing, which is we're customer obsessed but competitor aware. I think it's a little bit different. I think some companies are like ... I don't know, Uber for example, I think was notorious competitor obsessed and they tried to delete customers when they could. I think HipChat. I don't think Slack sought out to kill HipChat. At Foursquare we used ... I think it was called Campfire back in the day for the 37 singles people. It was a whole generation of those products. I think Slack came along and I think they had a couple of innovations. One was they had a great mobile experience that synced across every client. Search actually worked and then they brought a lot of the best parts of consumer messaging into the workplace like the emoji and reactions and all those bits. I think it turns out that if you're 10X better on a couple of those axes, then you can see a huge change in behavior. I think that's what happened with that move from the HipChat Campfire to Slack world. Discords interesting. I mean we keep aware of Discord. But it is so much more focused on the consumer. Originally, it was [inaudible 00:36:23] out for community space. I think at Slack the lesson I would have, I think we learned in a good way is we've always really been focused on groups of people who are trying to do work together. That winds up being a completely different audience to build for than communities. I think that focus has been really helpful and I think Discord's amazing and many people love it and the people who use Discord certainly use it in very different way than people who use Slack at work. I think Microsoft obviously has become over time the biggest competitor there. I think the origin of Teams really was a defensive move for them to protect Office because Office is an incredible, very profitable monopoly in the productivity space. I think when they built Teams it was more of a covering their flank versus Slack on the ascent. I think as Teams has evolved over time, it's become much more of a video conferencing product that competes with Zoom and Google Meet. The people who use Teams use it completely different than Slack where you live and breathe and channels and work and workflows all day long. I think what we've seen there too is that a lot of our customers, they happily use both. Most Fortune 500 companies have either a subscription or a Google Workplace subscription and all of those customers who use those also use Slack. We like to say that Slack is this connected tissue that makes all the rest of your tools that much better. n or a Google Workplace subscription and all of those customers who use those also use Slack. We like to say that Slack is this connected tissue that makes all the rest of your tools that much better. I think there we've taken very much an open ecosystem and platform approach and we've just been focused on how do we keep building the best version of what Slack can be as a new category of software for our customers and staying aware of our competitors, but really obsessed on what are the new ways that we can delight our users as the years go by.…

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