Story: The Amazing Rise of Slack

It's one of the most unusual ways to build a multi-billion dollar company.

Slack has become one of the most unusual unicorns out there, mainly because of its origin story. Now used by 77% of Fortune 100 companies, and over 100,000 organizations, the workplace chat has become a vital tool for many corporations.

How it all started

Stewart Butterfield and a few other people were looking to create a video game, or more specifically, a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game),created by their gaming company “Tiny Speck.” In the early 2010s, Tiny Speck was raising millions of dollars from VCs, mainly because of their new upcoming game called “Glitch,” and investors were excited about the prospects. In 2012, Glitch was shut down and Tiny Speck appeared to be worthless. But Stewart and his colleagues, while working on the game, had created a chat system since they had 4 employees, situated on all corners of the globe. While they had originally used IRC to communicate, it was time consuming, and confusing as well. They needed something better, and they began to develop the predecessor of Slack, called Linefeed.

The “Searchable Log of All Communications and Knowledge”

The name above is where the acronym “SLACK” originated. While most people speculated that Tiny Speck was no more, the founders realized that this chat system that helped them create their game “Glitch",” had tremendous potential. Soon, they had begun to focus solely on the chat system, and develop it to make it the best it could be. By May in 2013, 45 companies were already using Slack for commercial purposes, and they would soon be ready to release this tool to corporations around the world.

Takeoff

In 2014, they publicly launched. Within a few months, Slack Technologies had raised about $160 million from VCs. One year later, it raised another $160 million. The company grew massively from about 0 to 60,000 daily users within ten weeks after ending their “beta” phase. By October, there were 200 million messages being sent a day on its database, had raised another $120 million, and boasted 386% paying user growth within six months.

Wrapping up

How Slack achieved a 1 billion dollar valuation in just 8 months could have many reasons, but the most significant one is that their technology was different. If you used Slack, you wouldn’t feel like slacking off anymore, because Slack made it fun to get work done, with the great UI, the vibrant colors, and “users weren’t restricted to text based responses,” said nira. com. In 2015, Slack’s valuation was $3 billion. Several years later it went public, and a few years after that, it was acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 bilion.

Slack Technologies is one of many miracle stories in business, it has been able to build one of the world’s strongest customer bases, achieve a whopping $1 billion valuation in 8 months, all while having originated from a company that many considered a failure. You don’t see a company like this every day.

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Sources: nira.com