Slack was launched in 2014, went public in 2019, and is now a global operation with more than 2,000 employees and 100,000-plus customers. But it hasn’t lost its start-up mentality. And never did it move with more speed and clarity of focus than in March 2020, when the Covid-19 crisis brought on two challenges: dramatically increasing customer demand and an extremely abrupt transition to working remotely.
The company’s customer success and experience teams delivered nearly round-the-clock support free, both to existing customers and to newcomers who needed help getting set up with the product. Interviews with job candidates and the employee onboarding process were moved online. Best torrent client ubuntu 20 04. Marketing developed a public service ad for television committing to help any groups that were working on a Covid-19 response. Slack’s engineers ensured that its systems were operational 99.9% of the time in a period of soaring demand.
Customers with 1,000 or 10,000 Slack users suddenly wanted to expand to 50,000. New customers wanted comprehensive proposals immediately. Organizations of all kinds had to transform the way they worked, all at once. This crisis, Butterfield writes, “has created an opportunity for us and others to become more agile, to take on changes that once seemed daunting, to reimagine organizational culture…and to reposition for future growth.”
Slack Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Stewart Butterfield said he believes he will become one of Salesforce.com Inc.’s presidents after the companies’ $27.7 billion combination is.
Stewart Butterfield Jen Rubio
- Slack started as a video game called 'Glitch.' Then it became so much more, and Stewart Butterfield has been the person overseeing it all.
- Born in a log cabin in British Columbia, Stewart Butterfield studied philosophy in college, taught himself to code, cofounded Flickr, and then cofounded a video game startup that evolved into the workplace communication tool Slack.
- Stewart Butterfield (Getty Images) A 2019 Forbes article had stated that Butterfield had grabbed the billionaire status when the company hit the public market. The report had estimated his net worth to be around $1.6 billion.
- Barbour joined the Board in 2012. He is a Chartered Accountant with more than 25 years' experience providing auditing and advisory services to publicly traded.