Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, man. These commercials were so great. Jerry Jones is the owner of the Cowboys, and Deion Sanders when he played for the Cowboys. Deion signed the largest contract ever of $35 million a year. This commercial is, whatever pizza company there, you can get both a deal, you can get both of the two things. There was the negotiation between Jerry and Deion. Jerry’s like, “So Deion, what do you think? $15, $20 million?” Deion’s like, “Both.” Anyway, long-winded way, I think A+ is both. Both the chat communication market is enormous tons of headroom left to grow and Slack develops new monetized features, products, tool sets around that, that they can start to rebuild a bundle of the productivity suite in the enterprise and go from $80 per year, per user to across a suite of products to $100–$300 per user, per year in the enterprise. It’s interesting. If you look at a storage company like Dropbox. Dropbox’s enterprise value effectively comes from the people who share files on it, use it for that, and pay for that. That’s a $10-ish billion opportunity. If you look at group messaging, Slack, that’s a $20-ish billion opportunity. When you look at the aggregate of enterprise email and a full productivity suite with Microsoft Office, it has a trillion dollar opportunity. It’s interesting to think about what the bundle looks like. What do you need to own to be the most valuable piece of that, and I think identity is definitely a piece of that. Well, Slack own identity, Microsoft has Active Directory, there are others that are taking that for the non-Microsoft world; Google obviously has taken a chunk of it. It’s hard to say what the value of G Suite is since it’s not a thing that Google breaks out, but what is the value of their productivity business? I suspect it’s a lot larger than Slack’s productivity business. The big question for me is at what point does Slack do the thing that Dropbox did with Dropbox Paper, and then recently with this kerfuffle thing that I need to understand more or whatever the new Dropbox is. Not to be too opinionated here, but when do they decide to go build more of the productivity stack in a way that is not the periphery pieces of the minnows of communication, but the broader heavy-hitting we’re going right for the jugular? Well, I think the other thing that this screams to me and is one of the most important reasons to become a public company, is not just built internally but acquire. Atlassian has done this extremely well within their niche.…

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