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What Slack's current CEO Stewart Butterfield and his co-founders originally wanted to build was a game. But the video game called "Game Neverending" disappeared without ever being released.
Forced to find a way to keep revenue alive, the development team used some of the technology built for the game to create an unintended service. In 2004 — when digital cameras were just becoming popular but Facebook and Instagram did not yet exist — a platform called Flickr, where people could share photos online, successfully landed in the market. It was then acquired by Yahoo, which had taken interest in the service's market potential and growth prospects.
"Working at Yahoo, it was incredibly hard to secure the resources we needed. If Flickr hadn't been part of Yahoo, we would have grown much bigger — we missed countless opportunities. Everything was a mess." Butterfield's recollection makes it clear that he felt how important it is to create an environment for collaboration in the workplace, and that this became the spark for creating a service like Slack.
After leaving Yahoo, Butterfield repeated the same mistake. Investing about 26 billion won, he developed and released a new game called "Glitch," but only recovered about 7 billion won — his second failure. The Glitch development team, which was scattered across several cities at the time, had been creating chat groups for internal communication and using a platform that allowed file sharing. They focused their effort on turning that service into something companies would buy. That is the Slack of today, grounded in real-time messaging, search, and archiving. Silicon Valley is overflowing with talented people full of ideas and passion, and it is fertile ground where they inspire each other.
In fact, when Butterfield was working at Yahoo, sitting next to him were Jeff Weiner — currently CEO of LinkedIn — and Bradley Horowitz — currently a senior vice president at Google. But even in this place we envy, failure is everywhere. The founding group of Slack — underdogs with a low probability of winning the competition or succeeding — found opportunity even in their repeated failures. People often say that "learning from failures" is the value of successful companies or talent. Even so, repeating the same mistake twice and turning the experience accumulated through it into practical, powerful success is not as easy as it sounds.
"The most valuable point about Slack is that it is an email killer. Email is a painful way to communicate in an organization. From an earthquake to news of a new coffee machine in the office, every new email — regardless of weight — is stored in your inbox with the same weight. Companies that start using Slack send 50% less email and solve problems through Slack's various channels. If you want to have lunch with someone, instead of wasting time sending and deleting emails, just look at Slack's '#Lunch' channel."
This is part of an article titled "Stewart Butterfield, Email Killer" published in The Wall Street Journal in October 2015. Slack Technologies is a company that provides a collaboration tool platform service — real-time messaging, search, file sharing, video conferencing, and so on. It is one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley, and is now connected with about 100 well-known applications including Twitter, Dropbox, and GitHub. It has become a representative company that is innovating internal corporate communication needed for business. Real-time users reach 9 million per week, and messages sent through this platform have long passed 1.5 billion per month.
Slack is, by its very service model, both a cultural tool that drives a communication-centered organization and a company whose stated values are differentiated from those of other Silicon Valley companies. What is even more interesting is that through its growth story and current position, you can read the new trends being asked of startups.
Management scholar Patrick M. Lencioni argued in the Harvard Business Review that "most companies' core values and propositions are implausible, mediocre, and even insincere. Poorly defined core values create cynical, unhappy employees, drive customers away, and undermine trust in management." Just as the way you run your business has to be different to enjoy a differentiated competitive edge, your company's core values also need their own distinct character and soul.
Slack avoids the ordinary cliches like challenge, sincerity, and creativity, and instead declares six core values.
Slack expresses these values in the following three sentences.
Slack's core values are unusually emphatic about paying attention to other colleagues and their work. They also stress the role of employees in moving the entire group to a higher level — much like the very nature of Slack the service, which lets you "travel across all the channels and know what is happening across the entire company."
The value of "Playfulness" is also not limited to the interesting, fun workplace meaning that Silicon Valley companies typically conjure up.
"Playfulness is a great foundation for interaction between people. It is not simply play or jest — it is an experimental attitude. Only when we look at the world and our surroundings differently do we feel curious, become kind to each other, and end up able to do great things together."
In interviews, Butterfield often asks, "Tell me how much of your success was lucky." What he is looking for in candidates' answers is not simply humility but empathy.
"Without empathy, designing something for someone is very difficult. If you can resonate with people, you can do good work; if you have no ability to empathize, you cannot deliver feedback well or help others improve. I have known many people who, despite their outstanding talent and strengths, did not succeed professionally. It was hard to see anything wrong with them other than their lack of empathy."
The value of "courtesy" is also explained as a way of expressing empathy.
"One way empathy is expressed is by being courteous. Courtesy does not simply mean acting kindly. Respecting people's time matters. Anticipating other people's needs in advance and meeting them — that is the way to respect the other person's time and express courtesy, and it is the foundation of empathy."
So what is Slack doing to express empathy to its customers? A great service must understand a wide variety of users, and to that end, Slack works to hire as many employees from diverse backgrounds as possible. Naturally, that diversity is not limited to boundaries like race, gender, taste, or creed.
Through this, Slack lets different experiences, backgrounds, and empathies fuse inside the service. In early 2015, Slack employed about 80 people; by year-end it had hired 320. And in 2016, it hired 385 — meaning at least one new hire every day on average. Demand growth supported it, but Slack expresses empathy by creating its service through diverse employees in order to understand diverse customers.
In the recruiting process — in keeping with the values it espouses — Slack encourages two-way conversation aimed at getting to know each other. Desirable questions include things like: in what kind of environment does the candidate become most passionate, how can the candidate's own values and the company's values coexist in harmony, what kind of culture would the candidate want if they ran the company, and how would colleagues describe the role the candidate plays on the team.
Through these questions, applicants think about themselves and share who they are and why they want to work at Slack. The interview process is understood not as one of "arithmetically measuring and adding up" qualifications and requirements but as one of drawing the "whole picture." In fact, Slack's interview process — which lasts two to three weeks — is reportedly not strict.
"We are not looking for robots. We want to know how the world out there works, and we want people we can collaborate with — people with playful, curious ideas. We do not look for people who have to force themselves to fit the culture. We want them to tell the whole story of the 'real you' — how you got to where you are today, what you are looking for, what you want to gain going forward."
As they themselves put it, words are hard. Whether formal or informal, in person or remote, conveying your intent and tone accurately to the other person is not easy. So a word that is effectively delivered is correspondingly powerful. Words have the power to encourage, inspire, and create happiness — and at the same time, they have the power to exclude or confuse the other person.
For this reason, improving the way internal communication happens is treated as an important goal of culture management. Slack believes the voice, tone, and manner of internal employees shape the company's own culture, and that when this voice turns toward the external market, it is recognized as the brand.
Two years ago, Slack began tracking and analyzing the terms employees use frequently — and the words they do not use — internally. Based on the results, it created an internal communication style guide and shared it with employees. Some of what Slack considers important is as follows.
This emphasis on the importance of words and communication is not unrelated to the nature of the Slack service itself, nor to CEO Butterfield's background. He does not have the background you typically imagine for a tech-company founder. He majored in philosophy as an undergraduate and earned a master's degree in the history of science.
"Through studying philosophy and the history of science, I learned a few important things. First, I learned how to write clearly. I learned how to argue, which is important in meetings and decision-making. And through the history of science, I came to understand the way people believe facts and truth." The importance of this kind of cultural literacy and capability is gradually spreading even among other Silicon Valley companies that have grown around science and technology. The last story to focus on through Slack is about a new trend blowing through Silicon Valley's giant tech companies.
MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, in their book The Second Machine Age, talked about the new currents in tech companies. Today's tech wave moves in the direction of helping people handle routine, repetitive tasks. Through this, people can focus on new ideas and actions in a world overflowing with information. The development of software and technical services is also gradually being automated.
The arrival of content libraries and plug-in modules means development can happen faster with fewer people. Within this current, the importance of the capability to connect customers and end users to technology — and to grasp what they want — is growing.
LinkedIn ran an interesting study related to this. Among 62,887 LinkedIn members who attended Northwestern University over the past decade or so, they tracked the histories of 3,426 people who chased the Silicon Valley dream and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. The companies these people belonged to included not only LinkedIn but also famous tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Genentech.
Surprisingly, only 30% of the total were in engineering or information technology fields, while the rest were in non-technical occupations. This statistic shows similar patterns when extended to graduates from other specific universities and regions. At the time the study was done, Facebook was recruiting for 146 developer positions but looking for 225 business development specialists and sales staff.
Uber was also looking for 427 brand management, partner support, and customer operations staff compared with 168 engineers. Giant tech companies are now expanding hiring and broadening the horizon of internal management beyond the so-called "STEM" fields of science, technology, engineering, and math. As Deloitte CIO Larry Quinlan argues, being technically excellent is no longer enough. People who understand business processes are needed, and we are crossing into the era of "STEAM," with arts and humanistic literacy ("A") added.
Slack and CEO Butterfield are now recognized as a representative symbol of a new tech-company track. And even as it continues to grow — being called the next Microsoft — Slack runs the company with the perception that "what we worry about is people." This very direction is probably the secret to filling the company with bold coders who have dreams of changing the world, and with alchemists who have the eye and the capability to connect them to customers.