In a $27.7 billion deal in 2021, Salesforce’s finalized the acquisition of Slack, which was integrated into Salesforce. Today Slack is still a product mostly independently managed by Salesforce, which incorporated some of its features within its platform. Salesforce is primarily owned by entrepreneur Marc Benioff.
Slack’s story
Stewart Butterfield is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of the photo-sharing website Flickr.
He went through the founding of several companies, in particular, when he founded Glitch (an online game).
When he was running Tiny Spek, which comprised a set of companies, Butterfield and his team needed a communication system to handle the teams within his organizations.
That tool was developed in-house, and it eventually became Slack.
When Slack launched back in 2013, more and more companies signed up until its growth kept compounding. Where did this opportunity come from?
The timing was right!
Butterfield said in an interview for CNET:
“In the last 15 years, the Microsoft hegemony and Office and Windows worship has broken down, and as a result, we’ve gotten a lot of new and, in most cases, better tools…But that means information is scattered across a bunch of different tools and there’s no one search tool that you can go through to search across all of this.”
From that stage, Slack kept inviting larger and larger groups of companies.
By 2021, it was harder and harder for Slack to compete against Microsoft’s aggressive strategy of bundling Teams into its suite of productivity tools.
That prompted Slack to write a whole advert to prompt Microsoft about it.
Yet, by 2021, it became clear to Slack that to be able to compete with Microsoft’s aggressive bundling strategy, it needed to become part of a larger group.
From there, the acquisition from Salesforce for over $27 billion.
Yet, by the end of 2022, as Benioff went back to lead Salesforce and push more integrations of independent products, like Slack, within the company’s strategy, former Slack’s CEO and founder left the company!
In the meantime, Slack generated $1.5 billion in revenue by early 2023, signaling the incredible potential of the company.
And yet, the need for Salesforce to integrate more and more Slack into the company’s strategy.
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