The Way of the Future

A quick rebuttal on the Slackforce Slacklash

M.G. Siegler
500ish
Published in
5 min readDec 3, 2020

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Look, it’s late. And everyone is happy enough so there’s no pressing need to weigh in here. And you should take everything I’m about to say with some truly massive grains of salt.¹ But as always, I care about jotting something down that will be proven right (or wrong — but mainly right) long term. So to expand a bit on a quick reaction I had to my friend Casey’s post about the Slack/Salesforce deal…

I don’t disagree with some of his high-level points — namely that it’s hard to compete with the enterprise sales/bundling machine that is Microsoft — but I also think they are points that are unique to our current moment in time, yet are stated as immutable facts. And I know a lot of other people believe them to be true and dogma as well. Really smart people. People far more versed in the space than I am.

I just believe my naivety will be a strength in the end here. I believe that much like with Apple 20-some years ago, the timing will be right for the experience of using something — for the actual product — to matter to the point where it changes the equation not just of a market, but of the entire world.

This sounds hyperbolic because it is. But it’s that type of thinking and sea-change that takes a company from the brink of failure to the most valuable company in the world. To a company that is not worth “mere” billions, but trillions. Again, it takes a major change. In thinking. In behavior.

And I believe such a change will happen in the enterprise as well. And I believe Slack will be looked back upon as a huge part of that change. And I believe their deal with Salesforce will help with that. But I also believe it’s going to be a long road. This was never going to be a 2020 thing. Or a 2021 thing. I believe we’re on a path that was paved in a way by Salesforce itself, and then Google, and then Box, Dropbox, Slack, Asana, Airtable, Notion, the list not only goes on, the wave is massive and still growing everyday.

It is still largely true that the best user experience often dies in the hands of the enterprise buyer, but it’s less true than it used to be. And it will get less true still. This isn’t something that changes overnight, this is death by a million papercuts. It’s death by a million millennials.² It’s happening. It has been happening. It will continue to happen.

And that’s why I have and will continue to bet on this space. Slack’s amazing outcome aside, this world continues to evolve rapidly, and at some point that evolution is going to be at such a time where the Microsoft sales force (lowercase) effect is muted. Not by something obvious. Not by one big competitor, but by the world changing around them. Just as it did with Windows. Apple didn’t beat Windows with the Mac, they beat it because the world was primed and ready for the iPhone.³ The “Think Different” ads were correct, but the subject was wrong.

And that unlocked a world in which experience could matter. And so you’ll forgive me when I read the takes that Slack was some sort of failure —aside: we should all aspire to fail to the tune of $28B — because they read like the takes that Apple or the Mac was a failure back in the day. The foil here is even the same!

Some may read the news about Slack’s acquisition and think: Microsoft does it again! But I think a different cohort will read it differently. They’ll see Slack for what it is: the fastest growing enterprise software company in history thanks to a behavior change which created a literal groundswell within organizations. The proliferation of devices enabled the “consumerization of IT” and Slack more than any enterprise company before it, drove that. They drove it all the way to becoming a $20B public company. And to an eventual $28B sale. This has already kick-started a new generation of entrepreneurs to aspire to such heights in the same general fields. We see it every day with new product-focused enterprise software companies launching left and right. Slack is in their decks because Slack is the example, the guiding light that has led the way. This movement is as unstoppable as Microsoft appears right now. The next step is to break the sales advantage and the bundle. And the millions of pieces of paper are making their incisions…

You really need to zoom (lowercase) out to see a bigger picture of what is actually happening here. The timing may not have been right for Slack to go head-to-head with Microsoft, but this is the early part of a very long game. Which is why Salesforce’s bet is so savvy here — would be my bet.

This all reads as if Slack is over with this deal. Certainly it’s true that for many such deals, the acquired company and product is never the same. And while the acquiring company always says the right things at the offset (would they ever not?), the proof will be in the product. But every once in a while, the best such deals not only don’t kill a company, but act as a major accelerant. This Salesforce deal feels like that for Slack for all the reasons listed above. It equips Slack to better fight the battle on the field right now. In the sales field. And frees up immense resources to get back to the core focus: the product.

¹ I led GV’s investment in Slack back in 2014 and was a board observer until the company went public via a direct listing 18 months ago. That said, I have had absolutely no inside knowledge about the company since that point. I have remained a shareholder and user, but that’s it, that’s the current bias.

² Of which I’m one — barely!

³ And I would argue that the web (and specifically, the web browser) is what really did Windows in, breaking a lock-in that made the iPhone possible and brought the Mac back around.

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Writer turned investor turned investor who writes. General Partner at GV. I blog to think.