David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. It’s like, “What is this? It’s link, it’s replacing chat, or replacing email?” and I was like, “Oh, it’s sort of in the middle, it has all these integrations.” Being the first person trying to sell it to your team, if your team wasn’t already using some type of ever persistent chat, it’s actually a hard thing to get people to understand why it would be useful. Through the summer, they worked with a couple of friends, companies to land this messaging. They figured out, they get really good at explaining because most people have never used something like this before. What it is, why you should use it, why it helps, why it’s better than email, and more importantly just making the onboarding process super, super easy and fast. The first decent sized company they get to use it is RDO. RDO is about 120 person organization. They sign up. First, it’s the engineering team that starts using it, then it starts to spread. Pretty quickly the whole company is using it and they’re addicted. From these RDO and a couple of other companies, what happens is the company start evangelizing and all the employees in the company start telling their friends at other companies, “We’ve switched to this thing called Slack. It’s amazing. It’s changing the way we work,” and that starts to build a ton of buzz. Which I’ll say is interesting. It’s that popping out the playbook for a second. It requires a word-of-mouth, not usage because there is an intracompany network effect with Slack where you’re inviting all your colleagues but there’s not a cross company network effect. Whereas you take the flipside of that like Zoom, there’s a cross company network effect because to communicate with someone at another company, you need to click the Zoom link to join and then you’re a user. With Slack, it has to be that I’m getting so much utility out of it at my company and it’s growing within my company that now I go and tell somebody at a different company.…

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