This is fantastic news. Congrats to Slack and the team.
Slack recently ran a Slack Developer Workshop (conference with 100+ attendees) to a small group of developers in SF. I was lucky enough to be a part of it. They made it abundantly clear that Slack has a strong interest in being an application distribution platform and they are focused on creating a superior developer experience for their ecosystem. It was amazing to hear.
As somebody who grew up on IRC, the power, to me, was in how robust and easy IRC was to build for and around. Bots and commands were very easy to script and get the hang of. In my mind, Slack has actually built something more valuable than IRC. They have built a new model and ecosystem for application distribution, and they've added the right product features to do the job. The next step is to make it insanely easy to develop for and truly surpass the "ease" of the IRC experience for devs. It's inspiring to hear stories about how companies are building entire workflows with Slack being the center of their business; Mike Brevoort of Missions for Slack [1] spoke of a use case they're dealing with where Slack is powering the entire operations of a Canadian craft brewery using Slack + Google Sheets.
What Slack really has the potential to do here, in my mind, is be the application layer for business. Think about companies like Envoy (check-in, etc.) with Slack integration; somebody shows up at your office, you get pinged on Slack. You open Slack on your phone to check the notification, there's Slack Actions available for you to unlock the door (or what-have-you). The time-to-delivery on similar applications without Slack... well, it oftentimes just straight up wouldn't happen. We'll see more of these.
This is what Slack is getting insanely right. They didn't stop at massive growth + having a "good chat app." They're innovating and enabling new and veteran businesses to grow in novel ways.
Disclosure: Slack is an investor of ours [2] and we're also pretty passionate about developer experience. Through that, I've had a chance to interface with a number of their team members and I truly believe it's a fantastic organization. I can't help but root for good people.
Thanks for your comment. I'm a big fan of slack myself and have developed a product on their platform. I'm curious about the Slack fund and their investment process? Do you see a large contingent of companies building standalone products on slack?
Slack recently ran a Slack Developer Workshop (conference with 100+ attendees) to a small group of developers in SF. I was lucky enough to be a part of it. They made it abundantly clear that Slack has a strong interest in being an application distribution platform and they are focused on creating a superior developer experience for their ecosystem. It was amazing to hear.
As somebody who grew up on IRC, the power, to me, was in how robust and easy IRC was to build for and around. Bots and commands were very easy to script and get the hang of. In my mind, Slack has actually built something more valuable than IRC. They have built a new model and ecosystem for application distribution, and they've added the right product features to do the job. The next step is to make it insanely easy to develop for and truly surpass the "ease" of the IRC experience for devs. It's inspiring to hear stories about how companies are building entire workflows with Slack being the center of their business; Mike Brevoort of Missions for Slack [1] spoke of a use case they're dealing with where Slack is powering the entire operations of a Canadian craft brewery using Slack + Google Sheets.
What Slack really has the potential to do here, in my mind, is be the application layer for business. Think about companies like Envoy (check-in, etc.) with Slack integration; somebody shows up at your office, you get pinged on Slack. You open Slack on your phone to check the notification, there's Slack Actions available for you to unlock the door (or what-have-you). The time-to-delivery on similar applications without Slack... well, it oftentimes just straight up wouldn't happen. We'll see more of these.
This is what Slack is getting insanely right. They didn't stop at massive growth + having a "good chat app." They're innovating and enabling new and veteran businesses to grow in novel ways.
Disclosure: Slack is an investor of ours [2] and we're also pretty passionate about developer experience. Through that, I've had a chance to interface with a number of their team members and I truly believe it's a fantastic organization. I can't help but root for good people.
[1] https://missions.ai/
[2] https://stdlib.com/