Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…Happy birthdays or so many other use cases? Right, but to the extent that work stops. It's funny where work happens to the extent that work gets federated and happens in apps rather than in the central communication nexus. They're in big trouble. I love your idea of opening up the Slack API, not in a way that builds bots within Slack but in a way that embed Slack in your apps so that you don't have to roll your own Slack because it's a crap ton of work. Any time anybody's like let's implement chat, see Zoom as example A, its chat is awful. Sometimes randomly, I'll paste a link and it won't hyperlink it. This is a massively successful company with just a chat where every time I try and send a message to one person, I accidentally send it to everyone. I think that there's a huge defensive opportunity for Slack to be the way that you implement chat in your app. They just started hitting at it, too, before this. He went on The Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings and talked about being this connective tissue between different apps and what the next level of integration looks like for Slack. That would've been an amazing way to do this (I think) to be able to just embed Slack in different apps because, to your point, everything that they've done that seems really simple that makes chat seem really simple is really, really hard. I included the graph of all the decision trees that need to happen to decide whether to send you a notification at 8:05 PM if I Slack you, and it's really complicated. It is all that stuff that you can just offer as a service through other products that would've been interesting and maybe will still be interesting in the combined company.…

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