David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…That sounds right. Packy, I think you made this point several times. Slack’s growth story, really it's whole life as a company has been we get small innovative organizations to start using the product—sometimes that's small innovative teams within larger companies, but oftentimes it’s startups—and then it grows. As those companies grow, we grow. You made the point that yes, you’re spending all the sales in marketing to acquire these customers early on, but then as those customers grow and they retain and expand with you, that's going to lead to a free cash flow monster, hopefully in the future. What's missing from that playbook is a credible way to go get the big organizations. This feels like they unlocked that. That makes sense. The only question in my mind is if you look at it like Slack is a great way to index startups. Basically, if you want to make a bet that startups grow and have lots of money to spend in the future because they're cash-generating machines and need lots of great tools. Maybe the place that Salesforce actually ends up investing is a migration path from you've loved Slack and now we make it easy to onboard to the full Salesforce CRM suite. It's probably my product background but I don't see that. It's hard for you to imagine what that bridge looks like, where you're like, oh great, you and your team have all been communicating in this place. Therefore, somehow, your Salesforce CRM implementation will now be easier.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.