Re:Slack Platform Launch
by btown on Wednesday December 16, 2015 @12:41AM
(#10742602)
A good comparison that hasn't been mentioned much in this thread is Salesforce's Salesforce1 Fund, which launched with $100M in 2014 to encourage people to build around the B2B app-creation platform it had launched a year earlier [0]. As the parent post mentions, it's important to make the case "compelling" for building best-in-class integrations with a relatively-recently-launched platform (whether or not that platform is sponsored by a historically huge corporation or not).
It's an interesting point that bringing multiple sources of external capital to bear on an ecosystem via a multi-sponsor fund, rather than into the business itself via an IPO, allows the business to grow at a natural rate, and avoids Slack contributing to a "bubble" in which companies race to go public to launch their own platforms. I think we've learned from the last time around that the public markets aren't the best place to manage expectations in technology.
As for why the sponsors made this investment, there's a very good case to be made that (a) efficient free-form communication within agile teams at small and large companies is a pattern as crucial to developing modern businesses as a CRM, and (b) Slack is perfectly poised to capture and hold this new market in the same way that Salesforce was. Certainly worth a $13mm commitment that's diversified amongst companies whose teams could still pivot should Slack not work out.
It's an interesting point that bringing multiple sources of external capital to bear on an ecosystem via a multi-sponsor fund, rather than into the business itself via an IPO, allows the business to grow at a natural rate, and avoids Slack contributing to a "bubble" in which companies race to go public to launch their own platforms. I think we've learned from the last time around that the public markets aren't the best place to manage expectations in technology.
As for why the sponsors made this investment, there's a very good case to be made that (a) efficient free-form communication within agile teams at small and large companies is a pattern as crucial to developing modern businesses as a CRM, and (b) Slack is perfectly poised to capture and hold this new market in the same way that Salesforce was. Certainly worth a $13mm commitment that's diversified amongst companies whose teams could still pivot should Slack not work out.
[0] https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases...