12 Percent of Slack Employees Started After Pandemic, Says CEO

“We’re already at the point where 12 percent of our employees started after the pandemic,” says Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. “They weren’t flown to headquarters for a week. They didn’t do the onboarding. They haven’t met casual acquaintances waiting for the elevator or at all hands. These kinds of weak social times and the cultural value that’s built up through those interactions are going to have to be realized in another way.”

Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, announces their acquisition of enterprise directory company Rimeto, which helps employees in large organizations connect with each other more efficiently:  

12 Percent of Slack Employees Started After Pandemic

This morning we’re announcing the acquisition of Rimeto. Their tagline is the enterprise directory reimagined which is a great way to think about it. Obviously, that’s also going to be especially important now. We’re already at the point where 12 percent of our employees started after the pandemic. They weren’t flown to headquarters for a week. They didn’t do the onboarding. They haven’t met casual acquaintances waiting for the elevator or at all hands. These kinds of weak social times and the cultural value that’s built up through those interactions are going to have to be realized in another way.

We started talking (to Rimeto) just before the pandemic hit. I’ve actually never met any of the team face-to-face. No one on our side has met anyone on their side face-to-face. The whole thing was conducted using all of these technologies. We, of course, had a shared channel in Slack with them. It’s them, it’s us, it’s the lawyers, it’s the accountants, the whole kind of suite of entities that are required to pull off a deal like this. I think you’re going to see more and more of that.

Pandemic Causing Much Bigger Reliance On Software

I don’t think we’re going to be back in the office for a while. But to the extent that people do end up going back to offices, let’s say later this year or really next year, it’s still going to cause a generational shift. There is still going to be a much bigger reliance on software. A couple of weeks ago we announced Slack Connect. The idea is to increase the efficacy of collaboration across organizational boundaries while also increasing the security.

Two Sack users in an organization can set up a share channel between them or you can have more than one. In fact, when we did our convertible debt offering a month and a half ago, we did that in a share channel with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Jay Wood, and Latham, and put the whole thing together in that way. It’s a great way to collaborate.

Rimeto Let’s Slack Users Connect Within Organizations

Companies, obviously, are not going to stop acquiring. They’re not going to stop doing offerings. You’re still going to see IPOs and we’re going to see roadshows conducted in that way. When you’re crossing organizational boundaries the profile information, the identity of the person is also important. Inside the company with Rimeto, we’re offering much richer search, much more detailed information about groups and things like skills and backgrounds, not just the phone number and desk location.

We also want the ability to have some of that cross organizational boundaries so partners, collaborators, professional services firms, customers, and vendors can have access to some of that information as well.