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Good afternoon, everybody.

My name is Stevensonowski, and I'm here with another

edition of the A16Z podcast. Also with us today is Benedict Evans, and also excited to have Stuart

Butterfield, a co-founder and the CEO of Slack. And so today we're going to do a product-focused discussion

talking about what's going on with Slack, where it came from, and really try to focus on the product and what it is.

And so first of all, we'll just kind of dive right into it.

And that's sort of a dozen questions for Stewart.

So first, good afternoon, Stuart.

Good afternoon. Thanks for having me.

Sure. So let's first go back before you had Slack up and running, both the company and the product.

And when you were just part of another organization or a larger organization, how did you personally go about sharing information there?

And I'm guessing it was a lot like a typical

company thing, like email and it was slow and painful. Because I think that's going to be

important in the genesis of how Slack came to be as a product. I think there's an ongoing joke

about software developers and software designers that among the very first apps that they wanted to crack

are either a replacement for email or a to-do list or a little bit of both.

And I think that's been ongoing in my own career.

I've seen many times I've stopped whatever I was working on

...