Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
49 published records
01 / belief
“I think we're already on to the sort of early theme of this episode which is going to be the battle with Microsoft.”
02 / belief
“To me, that's an A, A- to A, probably A. I think the A+ is this catalyzes Salesforce.”
03 / belief
“I think the acquisition is interesting because, as you guys pointed out, it gives Slack this massive professional Salesforce to go push their product into all the [...”
04 / belief
“Is this the first time that the price per share is above the very first day of trading? I think so.”
05 / uncertainty
“I don't know if Slack or Spotify was bigger. They might have been about the same size.”
06 / commitment
“I will say there was a whole milestone—I'm trying to remember how long Microsoft's milestones were; maybe six months—in Office where it was the documentation milestone or the cleanup milestone or something like that around the Office file format because a lot of the DOJ stuff was around, wait, you claimed to have this open file format but you're the only ones who have any documentation on how the file format works.”
07 / belief
“I would say not the bleeding edge pre-chasm–crossing startup stack like Notion and Airtable, but you think about the 500- to 5000-person companies, it's a Google Docs company that uses Slack for internal communication.”
08 / belief
“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.”
09 / belief
“Yup, and of course, the other bidder for LinkedIn was Salesforce. They filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft about it, I think.”
10 / observation
“Public market investors are not short-sighted, they over-index on recent signals, but the reason is because the stock's price and the enterprise value of the company is primarily formed by an investor's view of what the next 30 years of cash flows are going to be.”
11 / belief
“I think we got totally blindsided, if I remember, with LinkedIn, with Whole Foods.”
12 / belief
“I think shared channels have become a part of Slack Connect and that's what Slack Connect is.”
13 / belief
“The good news for you is I don't think anybody's going to acquire Tencent so I think you can let that ride for a long time.”
14 / belief
“I think that is in stark contrast to Slack’s philosophy. Everybody listening to this knows what Slack looks like.”
15 / belief
“We didn't mention the LP program this time, but I think most folks probably know what it is.”
16 / belief
“I think the F to me—we can all debate—is they're wrong strategically that building a best-of-breed alliance is actually not the right strategy.”
17 / belief
“I think, though, actually pure software deals. I can't think of anything else that's happened since.”
18 / belief
“I think the F for me is trying to integrate Slack and Salesforce the products and failing and turning Slack more into Salesforce than Salesforce more into Slack.”
19 / belief
“Slack, as we'll discuss I’m sure, just reported earnings and the numbers look good, yet again. It's one of these companies that has been underappreciated but I think over time is going to build into a juggernaut.”
20 / belief
“Especially since I hear you, Ben, that 55% premium, but when I think about relative to the potential of Slack and the multiples for some of these other class SaaS companies out there, this price does not feel high to me.”
21 / belief
“Next year, this is a billion-dollar run rate company with 86% gross margins that just became free cash flow positive and grew from $10 million (I think) to $36 million in free cash flow this quarter.”
22 / uncertainty
“I don't know how you do that if you're Slack and how you communicate that to the enterprises that people are getting all these alerts.”
23 / belief
“A little heavier on the stock in the cash piece (I think) if I'm right, but roughly 50/50, like 55% or 57% stock.”
24 / belief
“Yeah, so there's the marketing side of it and the ideal customer profile where Slack targets the enterprise and Discord targets communities. But I think an overly simplistic view of the two products to call them similar or the same other than who they're sold to because I think when you think about all the deeper features of each, they're way different.”
25 / uncertainty
“I'm a shareholder, I think you are, Packy. I don’t know about Ben, but I feel the same way about Berkshire.”
26 / belief
“I think that, listeners, is the complete set of opinions that we have on the deal with the facts that we have today, a mere two hours after the deal was announced.”
27 / belief
“In the beginning of the pandemic, that expansion got hit because companies were laying people off and that was leading the contraction in monthly revenue in their existing accounts, but I think most of that's behind them, so it’s interesting.”
28 / commitment
“We tried YouTube Live here so we got to read some of the comments in real time and maybe for future emergency pods, we will do the same.”
29 / belief
“I'm sick of this. The real reason that kind of suffers is that I think that Teams’ bear case.”
30 / belief
“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.”
31 / belief
“To Slack's great benefit, you're just counting this tiny, tiny, tiny discount rate and yet it's not being reflected in the stock price if they're not taking that long-term view that I think you can't be any better than a C for me, unfortunately.”
32 / observation
“For the founders listening to this who have never sold a company before, that is the typical thing that forms a relationship between companies that then leads to acquisition. That's the way to do a dance where you do a partnership, not a bundle distribution go-to market partnership.”
33 / belief
“If your bet on Slack is the same way that you would bet on Stripe, the next great company is going to use this as an infrastructure choice, that has to be the bet that you can keep making and I would say Salesforce buying it loosens my conviction in that dream scenario staying true.”
34 / belief
“I think that view makes sense if you think of Zoom as an enterprise productivity tool which I think a lot of people do, but to me it's actually much broader and the opportunity is this, that we're doing on Zoom right now.”
35 / belief
“I think the only thing is we could do a quick what would've happened otherwise on other potential interested acquirers, probably namely Google.”
36 / belief
“I think that's right, but I do think for this next generation, companies like Huddle are going to come out and combine the best of Discord with all of the below-the-surface-level features of Slack.”
37 / belief
“I think mine is somewhere similar and it just revolves a little bit more around Slack Connect really being what they think it's going to be and not just creating the social network at the horizontal layer but also making being the target in Salesforce a better experience, humanizing the whole sales process a little bit versus getting hit with some awful drip campaign.”
38 / belief
“My thesis on this whole thing is what we’re really seeing I don't think is an alliance.”
39 / uncertainty
“I don't know. I don't think that stench is real or it's going to meaningfully impact people's decisions whether to adopt or not.”
40 / evaluation
“I read all of that and I'm just like, that translates to me as Slack just upped their own salesforce by 100X in terms of headcount in power.”
41 / evaluation
“He went on The Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings and talked about being this connective tissue between different apps and what the next level of integration looks like for Slack. That would've been an amazing way to do this (I think) to be able to just embed Slack in different apps because, to your point, everything that they've done that seems really simple that makes chat seem really simple is really, really hard.”
42 / evaluation
“Slack just reported their numbers and they grew (I think) from 380,000 Slack Connect endpoints to 520,000 Slack Connect endpoints in the last quarter alone. This has been a huge area and focus for the business (maybe in retrospect) running up for a Salesforce acquisition because this certainly does make them a lot more attractive as—like Ben Thompson called it—The Work Social Network.”
43 / evaluation
“Slack might be the most important, because it is the platform, the entry point, the place where you can branch out to many of the other apps from there.”
44 / preference
“I love your idea of opening up the Slack API, not in a way that builds bots within Slack but in a way that embed Slack in your apps so that you don't have to roll your own Slack because it's a crap ton of work.”
45 / evaluation
“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.”
46 / preference
“I think more than anything, it's a way for people to try before you buy the Slack product, because your innovative partner has told you that they want you to use that product.”
47 / evaluation
“I would say that Microsoft Teams has about 10 times the number of users as Slack crossed (maybe) 100 million user range recently, whereas Slack’s in that 12 million range and haven't really reported numbers recently on that.”
48 / prediction
“To hear Stuart talk about it, that's because if Slack threatens email, then Outlook is threatened, and then the whole Microsoft Suite is threatened.”
49 / evaluation
“I really like the point that you made. It is a total red herring to continue comparing Slack users to Teams users because it's complete apples and oranges, and the Slack share price is depressed because it doesn't look good compared to this thing that you really shouldn't be comparing it to.”