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Twenty years ago, Cal Henderson was working in London while Stewart Butterfield was making a game called Game Neverending. A thread.
Henderson, a big fan of the game, broke into the email server to join the internal mailing list of Butterfield’s 4 person company. Eventually, Cal convinced Butterfield to hire him.
The game was not going anywhere, so they started focusing on a side project which eventually became Flickr and eventually sold to Yahoo in 2005.
The two founders went back to building another gaming company called Glitch. That didn’t do well either. Another side project, that helped Glitch manage their remote teams now became the core product.
Today Slack has a market cap of almost $15 billion. In the quarter ended April 2020, it pulled in over $200 million in revenues, growing at 49% compared to the year-ago quarter, with a gross margin of 87.3% and a stellar net retention rate of 132%.
Listen in to Cal Henderson talk to @mrgirish in the vastest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast. The two talked about
* Achieving Product-market fit
* Convincing others to use Slack
* Growing beyond the original product-market fit
* The #2 reason why startups fail
* Achieving Product-market fit
* Convincing others to use Slack
* Growing beyond the original product-market fit
* The #2 reason why startups fail
* Success comes from failure
* Giving away your lego blocks
* Go from sprinting to running a marathon
* Stress and the role of leaders
* Succeeding in the post-Covid world
Listen here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1290581/6305959
* Giving away your lego blocks
* Go from sprinting to running a marathon
* Stress and the role of leaders
* Succeeding in the post-Covid world
Listen here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1290581/6305959
They called it Slack. And the rest is history.
