Coronavirus COVID-19 "At Home" Opportunities

[JohnCM]

Slack CEO: Working From Home Will Become Less Stressful -- Barrons.com

BY Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
05/07/2020

The stock began trading last summer at $38.50, fell as low as $15 and change during the Covid-19 stock crash in March, and has since bounced back to $27 as investors have embraced services that seem well suited to the work-from-home economy. Barron's recently spoke with Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield about how the $15 billion company competes with email, why at-home workers feel stressed, and how big Slack can become. His edited comments follow.

On describing Slack:

We say that Slack is a channel-based messaging platform. What if all of [your] emails were organized by project or subject instead of by date? And what if everyone who should have access to it magically did without having to have been CC'd on it in the first place? In Slack, communication moves from in-boxes, which are kind of inherently individual- first, to what we call channels. And channels put the organization or the team first.

You end up creating a channel for more or less everything that's happening across the company. That might be every customer, business unit, office location, team, event, sales process. Everyone knows where to go to answer their question or to get caught up on something. That's really transformative.

On the work-from-home economy:

That's probably a net good [for us]. Slack is not specifically a tool that's designed to support remote work. It's designed to improve the return on communication. For a manager and executive, that's more or less 100% of the job. It's reading and writing emails. It's one-on-one meetings. It's creating or sitting through presentations. But there's a big chunk of that that's just really basic acts of communication and coordination, keeping everyone on the same page, making people aware of decisions. If you can get any leverage on that, it has an impact that's disproportionate to any other changes you can make.

In an environment where people are working from home, absent the normal catch-up routines and communication that they would have had in the office, all of that becomes more important than ever. If this continues, I think the whole world gets pushed -- for some organizations, maybe three or six months, and for other organizations, three or five years -- down this path of inevitability towards digital transformation. That's good for us. And I think it's good for the whole software industry.

On at-home workers feeling isolated or stressed:

There are dozens of little features [in Slack] that try to make it easier for people to give social signals in an environment where they don't have the normal body language. Things like emoji reactions. A whole visual language develops around how people show appreciation or support for one another.

We have had people working from home -- not a huge portion of the workforce, maybe like 5% -- for a long time. They have home offices, and they have child care, and they can take breaks and go sit in a cafe and watch people go by and stuff like that. So I think that a lot of the stress [now] comes from everything else. The macroeconomic uncertainty. The fear around people's health. But also, just on a more practical level, not everyone had a home office set up.

Now you're arguing with your spouse about who gets which part of the kitchen table to do the next video call. And you have a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old, and there's no day care or preschool or school and no nannies and no grandparents available to help. And the kids are going bananas and being cooped up in the house. So that's not normal. If there is a lasting impact in terms of the percentage of people who are working from home, I think it will be much less stressful because people will actually be prepared for that. And when they feel like it, they can still go out and get a haircut or watch a movie or have a drink at the bar.

On how big Slack can become:

We think the core market is really huge because what it ends up doing is replacing the use of email internally. I don't mean in every respect for every organization, but the bulk of it. And we see that manifest with customers that have really significant drops in the use of email. But also things like the meetings. We have 110,000 paid customers as of now. Some of those are huge multinationals with 100,000-plus employees. Some of them are five-person small businesses. There's no reason we shouldn't have a much larger share of, just in the U.S., the 2 1/2 million businesses that have five or more employees.

On making videogames, then co-founding the photo service Flickr, and then co-founding Slack:

I started college in 1992, so just before the web started taking off. The use of computing technology to facilitate human interaction has just fascinated me ever since. It's now 28 years since then. My summer job all the way through college was web designer because there were not that many people who could do it. I worked through the dot-com crash and have been involved in a bunch of companies, some consumer, now enterprise.

We made massively multiplayer games. We made massively multiplayer photo-sharing software, massively multiplayer workplace software. To me, it's a lot of the same ideas. People have a persona or an identity. They're able to send messages. They're able to form groups. There's a sense of presence. Those are common elements to how networks can improve the lives of people and create new possibilities for interactions that wouldn't have otherwise been possible.