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 launch of their new| Building Slack
Ali Rayl knew Slack’s customers better than anyone. As Slack’s first customer support staff, Ali personally answered every ticket during our early alpha and beta rollouts. She was in the weeds of every front line issue as the customer support team grew along with our user base. Over| Building Slack
Backstage, Stewart vibrated with his typical charismatic energy. An assistant checked his lapel mic. Everyone in the company, now numbering nearly 500 people in early 2017, awaited him. He was ushered on stage to enthusiastic applause from the crowd and expectant video participants from our offices around the world. Slack's| Building Slack
We did many things fairly well at Slack. One thing we never did well, however, was figuring out how much office space we’d need. We outgrew our Clementina Street office in July of 2014, just five months after launch. Our new office in a freshly renovated building on Folsom| Building Slack
[This post is about the day that Glitch failed, and how that failure created the opportunity to make Slack. We're sharing it here (out of chronological order) to mark 12 years since the famous pivot.] “We have to shut down the game.” Stewart Butterfield said. I looked at him out| Building Slack
We launched Slack to the world on February 12th, 2014. Thirteen months after starting work, nine months after releasing our early alpha version, and six months after starting our preview release. We crossed the finish line we'd been sprinting toward for the last year, not fully realizing that we were| Building Slack
From John O'Nolan (CEO of Ghost): How did Stewart's infamous "we don't sell saddles here" essay go down internally, at the time? And how do you feel that essay aged, with hindsight? Stewart shared We Don't Sell Saddles Here internally in July 2013, just before we launched our Preview Release.| Building Slack
It was the fall of 2013. Barack Obama was President. Game of Thrones had finished its third season. The red wedding shocked us all. WeWork was worth $440M, and Uber surpassed unicorn status with an eye-popping $3.7B valuation. MoviePass let you see as many movies as you wanted in| Building Slack
By the summer of 2013, we knew we were on to something. The people we’d asked to try Slack – at Silicon Valley tech companies like Rdio, Medium, and ThatGameCompany – were still using it. And they were telling their friends to use it. Small teams within companies started spreading it| Building Slack
As we got started committing ideas to code, we already knew the utilitarian aspects of Slack would work — our own team had proven it through years of use. IRC and other chat apps had dedicated followings. It was clear that Channels and DMs with integrated files and search worked better| Building Slack
Eight of us sat around an old wooden table in Tiny Speck’s Vancouver office. Cardboard boxes and dead batteries were scattered around the abandoned desks of our former colleagues. The place felt big and empty. We’d shut down Ur — the world of Glitch — a month before. We were| Building Slack
