Slack is an enterprise productivity software startup that is frequently talked about in tech circles as a potential email killer. In October 2014, just 15 months after its founding, Slack became the fastest \u201cunicorn\u201d ever to reach the coveted $1B valuation. The company\u00a0recently raised $160M in Series E, at a valuation of $2.8B, from some of the most marquee VC funds in the Valley. At the time of raising Series E capital, Slack reported 1.1M DAUs (Daily Active Users).<\/p>\n
At the same time, big tech giants such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, still find enterprise email to be an attractive business opportunity. In the last year or so, we have seen multiple investments in enterprise email — GMail for Work, Office 365, and Amazon WorkMail to name a few. Pitted against some of these biggest tech companies in the world, can Slack successfully kill email? What explains Slack\u2019s explosive growth? How does Slack create value? Would it be able to capture this value in the long term to justify its sky-rocketing valuation? These are some of the difficult questions surrounding Slack that I attempt to tackle in this article.<\/p>\n
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What is Slack? Slack is a real-time messaging app for teams that organizes team conversations in channels such as projects, topics, or teams, and allows for simple drag, drop, or sharing of files in these channels. The attached image\u00a0shows what a typical Slack home screen looks like.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n How does Slack create value?<\/strong><\/p>\n
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