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Co-founder and CTO of Slack Cal Henderson
Source: Slack
LONDON – Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson said Wednesday he had his doubts about whether companies would be able to work from home before the coronavirus pandemic.
“It was definitely a remote job, like a fully distributed job, skeptical before this year,” Henderson, whose platform makes it easy to work from home, said in a virtual interview at the Web Summit technology conference.
“I was as surprised as anyone that we could be so productive during that shift,” he said. “We were already spread out because we have offices all over the world, but we weren’t fully spread out. Teams are generally co-located. They’re in the same office and they can have in-person meetings and whiteboard sessions and all that kind of interaction.”
Rival Microsoft Teams closed its offices and asked people to work from home in early March before shelter-in-place measures were introduced in California.
“It seemed like it was a short-term thing … we weren’t going to be in this for months,” he said. “In many ways, it felt like it was a snowy day. Now, obviously, it turned out it wasn’t true.”
Henderson said if he had been asked a month before Slack closed its office if he thought it would be possible for large organizations to drift away overnight, he would have said no. “Organizations can’t be productive like this at scale,” he said. “It would just be an impossible undertaking.”
Slack announced Monday that it is being acquired by business software giant Salesforce for $ 27.7 billion.
By acquiring Slack, a business chat service with more than 130,000 paid customers, Salesforce is strengthening its portfolio of business applications and completing its broader software suite as it seeks new areas of growth.
Slack’s annual revenue topped $ 100 million at the beginning of 2017 and reached $ 400 million two years later. The shares debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2019, through a direct listing.
The stock, which opened at $ 38.50, has been on a roller coaster ride ever since, trading close to $ 17 in March of this year, before rising again near $ 40 in June and then falling back below $ 25 mid-November.
– CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this article.
