Packy McCormick: evaluation

Transcript context

…Indeed. Speaking of prognosticating about the future and strategic decisions in the landscape, I think you read about really eloquently in your piece about your take on the bear case for Slack as an independent company. This actually totally jives with our friend, Jake Saper, over at Emergence—is about to publish a blog post about the flip of this being an investment theme, he calls it deep collaboration—that there are all these other workflow apps out there now, whether it's Figma, or Notion, or whatever that actually have chat and collaboration built into them so you don't need to go over to Slack in order to collaborate on a Figma document or if you're working on a legal document with Ironclad or something like that. Let's talk about that because I think this is a really astute observation. That's fascinating. A lot of this comes from Kevin Kwok who's more astute than I am on these things. His point that he makes and a great piece that he wrote on Slack is that once every piece of what a business does has a Figma-like software that has collaboration embedded, then Slack becomes this backup. Use it for emergencies, something has gotten wrong in the collaboration tool, so let's go over to Slack and chat about it. Or it becomes what email is today. We make a company announcement here or we do things that are more broad. But when we actually want to get work done, then you're right. We go into Figma or we go into Pitch to do our presentations together there. There are all these different things. I think that is a little bit confusing. His solution—one I think is going to be a pretty hot target right now—is something like Discord that is a chat tool that exists on top of all of the other collaboration tools, and you can be video-chatting. I wrote about remote work, all the work from home products that are being built natively for remote work. Yesterday, there are five good options that I saw just in a couple days of research that are trying to really build something that isomorphically feels and looks like an HQ, but then also there are different noise levels that you hear when you approach people, or when you go further away from people, or you pull up the code that you're working on right there on the screen you have your little video circles around that. There's a really interesting software being built in the space. To me, that's the bear case. Your bull case on Slack (which mine is) is that they can acquire all the young, fast-growing companies and become this central hub for everything they do and grow with them. The biggest threat to the company is that there's an even better, newer way of a software that comes in and cuts off that bottom, and takes all of the younger companies that are coming in, and maybe even Stripe’s going up and stealing the Stripes in the other companies there. To me, that's the big risk because there's one collaboration software that people interact with directly, and then to the next generation of Slacks that are built more for this world where we all have to be collaborating with whatever that software is as the central hub, versus as something that we chat with each other on in the office. I love that point. I think it's so astute that the worst nightmare for Slack is that chat gets good in apps and suddenly I'm like oh, yes, Slack, I pop in there to drop a gift in random.…

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