Why will Slack+Salesforce work -- and win?

1/ Slack has become primarily an enterprise sale. Strong synergy here with SFDC.

Slack is approaching 100 $1M+ ACV customers

2/ Salesforce hasn't really made small acquisitions work.

But it's gotten really good at pushing market leaders, at scale, to grow even bigger.

The $1b+ deals -- Mulesoft, Tableau, ExactTarget, Demandware -- have all done well post-acquisition

SFDC is good at this

3/ The Communications segment has over the past 5 years overtaken other areas of collaboration to become the most important area of enterprise collaboration

This is worth owning and Slack is #1 and a pure play here

4/ Defensively, Microsoft has not done quite as much with LinkedIn as Salesforce feared

But connecting the #1 customer record with the #1 communications platform is defensible and powerful

LinkedIn owns the employee record but Salesforce owns the customer record

Finally,

5/ Slack seems to culturally enjoy being a one-product company. It's hard to scale rapidly beyond $1B ARR as a one-product company. Twilio, Veeva, etc. all have multiple $1B+ ARR potential products.

It might be easier to do this as part of SFDC.

A bit more from earlier in the year on just how enterprise Slack has become: https://www.saastr.com/5-interesting-learnings-from-slack-at-700m-in-arr/

Salesforce gets to add 1,000,000 developers + a potential $10B+ product that is #1 in communication

That's a good deal

And a rare gem