Building Slack

An untitled invitation from Stewart appeared on my calendar one morning in the late fall of 2020. Though we met more or less frequently for ongoing product work with the team, it was unusual to get an invitation from him directly. I opened it and found th

In January 2020, a nasty bug swept through our NYC office. Everyone got sick at once and was off for weeks. An uncommonly terrible cold? Some sort of wicked flu? Whatever it was, it knocked our team out. We didn't think too much of it on the west coast. O

Slack was getting too big. Not the company or the business, of course. Those were growing wonderfully, buoyed by our public offering. All of our usage and business metrics were going up and to the right. The good times were rolling. It was late 2019.The p

"Starting three years ago, we started trying to run Slack as a public company. We have been building toward this for a long time." Stewart Butterfield had just rung the bell at the NYSE, signaling the ceremonial start of trading for our freshly minted sto

On April 26th, 2019, Slack filed to take the company public. We'd managed to overcome the most painful growing pains of scaling the company from a fledgling startup to a large, well-funded corporation spread around the globe. Miraculously, we crossed the

Hello friends,First off, thanks for all the questions you sent in for our interview with Cal. It was so fun hearing what was on your mind.Second, thank you for the corrections and for schooling us on your expectations of a podcast transcript. We'll hire s

Listen on Soundcloud. Music by Danny Simmons.IntroductionJR: Thanks for doing this Cal. You've been so helpful as we've been writing all the stories for the newsletter and checking our work and fact-checking us and we really appreciate you taking the time

"If we can't ship safely, we aren't shipping at all," Cal Henderson wrote in our #announce-devel channel.It was September 2018. We had just recovered from our second major self-inflicted outage in a period of weeks. Slack - after experiencing an extended

One of the four big bets in Stewart's Master Plan was to make Slack a network.We initially designed Slack to be used for a company's internal communication. Any company would still have plenty of inbound and outbound communication with the wider world: cu

On the morning of November 2nd, 2016 we arrived to the office to find a paper copy of the New York Times on our desks. In it was a full-page ad welcoming Microsoft to the market that Slack had created. Not coincidentally, Microsoft would announce the laun