The Slack DPO

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2019

⏱️ 118 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an... enterprise software company? We give the full Acquired treatment to newly-public Slack, one of the most extreme and successful pivots of all-time. From a log cabin in Canada to a never-ending game and back again, Slack’s journey has more twists and turns than a Hobbit’s tale. Tune in for one APLUSS story you don’t want to miss!

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Links

Kara Swisher’s Flipcam interview with Glitch: https://www.wsj.com/video/tiny-speck-stewart-butterfield-speaks/C51EAD27-FE8E-46AE-B785-6ECF1A9798B0.html
Marc Andreessen on “all will still end well...” https://twitter.com/patphelan/status/1142733251691405312
The Glitch public domain archive: https://www.glitchthegame.com
Naming Slack: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/780906639301812225?s=21

Carve Outs

Ben: The Expanse on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/The-Expanse-Season-1/dp/B018BZ3SCM
David: Give to any non-profit on Alma: https://alma.app/blog/1-4-million-reasons-to-love-alma-search

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	That's wood blocks, right?
0:03.0	Do your best impression.
0:06.0	Let's see.
0:08.0	That's good one. Welcome to Season 4 episode 9 of acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions,
0:31.8	I POs, and direct public listings.
0:34.7	I'm Ben Gilbert.
0:35.6	I'm David Rosenfeld.
0:36.8	And we are your hosts.
0:38.8	Today we are covering the spiritual sister
0:40.9	of our previous episode on Zoom, Slack, and the largest enterprise IPO in history.
0:48.6	And of course it wasn't even actually an IPO, but rather a direct listing.
0:52.4	Barry McCarthy, he rides again, the acquired superhero.
0:56.0	Today we'll talk about what all that means, the crazy history of Slack's evolution from even
1:01.9	before it was founded where its roots really are and
1:05.0	break down their business and their market cap today and what it could do in the
1:08.8	future. Our next sponsor of this episode is Net Suite.
1:13.0	Many of you, especially those at successful large organizations, likely know the name Net Suite.
1:18.0	Perhaps because you found Net Suite when your business was going well,
1:21.0	but your infrastructure wasn't keeping up and your team had to
1:24.0	invent a bunch of manual processes and workarounds.
1:27.0	Yeah, and if you don't know of Net Suite, it may be time. If it is taking
1:31.4	forever to close your books or if you have multiple sources of
	...

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