David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…That's true. For me, not having to sit inside of Slack and sell against Microsoft every day, I think this could triple on its own in the next year or so. It’s disappointing from that perspective. On the other side of the table, to say yeah, we're going to plug you into Salesforce and you're going to be able to match the distribution power, at least approach the distribution power of Microsoft. You're going to be able to do all of these things that you want to do, to connect the full ecosystem of best in class products. You can see that that's kind of a tempting thing to be able to do. For the amount that they say that Microsoft isn't that big of a threat, they also sued Microsoft for leveraging their distribution advantage against them. It's not as big. At the very least, it's a big annoyance and a pain to deal with day-in and day-out. Maybe if you combine that with the fact that it's a 55% premium, you're happy to take that deal. I think there has to be some element, though, of just fatigue on Slack’s part to do this because, again to me, they just flipped the cash flow positive. There's no gun to their heads, other than just people being mad at them. I wouldn't have necessarily thought that they would care too much about that. On the other hand, I also don't think—based on our main show episode that we did on Slack—that adding several more billions to his net worth matters that much to Stewart, so maybe he's like this is going to be the best chance to realize the mission the soonest, but it's just a little perplexing to me. You wonder if they couldn't have gone out and just acquired Frank Slootman to come in and rally the troops, rally the Salesforce, and go out and sell against Microsoft. Stewart's very much a product guy and not a sales guy. Maybe that's the other answer here. Instead of bringing on a new CEO who's really more of an enterprise SaaS guy, you just sell the business and you have this successful exit out of 55% premium than all of that.…

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