Slack Technologies co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield is confident that its team communication has advantages over other messengers, including Facebook. Slack also proves that teamwork is the company's strong point.
The company was founded in Vancouver, Canada as Tiny Speck in 2009. Stewart Butterfield with three other partners: Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov founded the company in 2009 to develop an online multiplayer video game called Glitch.
In order to improve communication between team members, the company built its own team communication and messaging system. In the beginning of 2013, Tiny Speck was renamed into Slack Technologies, and offer team communication platform service. As for now, 2 million users access and collaborate in its team communication platform on a daily basis.
CEO Stewart Butterfield, in an interview with Wall Street Journal said that the company has its own advantage over other social media app. One of which is that Slack is a messaging app for teams, aim to encompass the whole spectrum of communications. Slack provides a mass communication which email is unable to provide.
Stewart said there are two benefits of Slack compared to Facebook and other messengers, "The first is, that channel exists before you're a member [of the conversation] and it continues to exist after. Those messages are accessible to everyone. And that means that there's a lot of lateral transparency,"
Other benefit provided by the San Francisco-headquartered company is the storage and retrieval from the previous team communication, team report, documentation, technical specification and other documents. "All of that produces something of value to the organization. And that value accretes over time because [in Slack,] the archives are accessible," he explained further.
Slack has also advanced further beyond messaging. According to Business Insider, Slack recently launched its App Directory where users can download third party apps. It also raised an $80 million venture capital fund aimed at startups that develop Slack-based apps.
The company is also well-known for its diversity and inclusion as a tech company. Last Tuesday Night, the company received an award as the fastest-rising startup of the year from Tech Crunch. Representing the company are four black female engineers, as reported by Huffington Post.
One of the female engineer who represent Slack receiving the award, Kiné Camara said 9% of engineers in Slack are women of color. The fomer Skype engineer said that, "There are many things that are major keys to the success of Slack, not least of which are diversity and inclusion."
Stewart Butterfield has proven that teamwork is the key to success. He is confident that the company's team communication app has more advantages than other messaging system, including Facebook messenger.
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