1/ Ok since you asked, here are my reactions to the Slack deal and @levie comments to the effect that “the idea that workers would someday choose all their own tools was always a fantasy... Best product doesn’t always win, you also need the biggest sales force.” My thoughts: https://twitter.com/nash/status/1334440471716835329

2/ Bottom-up is still the best way into enterprises for startups. If Slack had to sell top-down, they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. Especially true for products whose advantage is usability, rather than checkboxes. “Show, not tell”. Proof of the pudding is in the eating of it.

3/ Bottom-up works best for new categories of software. Once IT makes a wall-to-wall decision, it settles the matter. In other words, bottom-up works best when there’s no top-down. Nature abhors a vacuum. In this case, an IT vacuum gets filed by “shadow IT.”

4/ Thus it’s incumbent on the startup to quickly convert bottom-up traction into deals. Bottom-up is great for top-of-funnel but you still need a sales team to close. Enterprises don’t self-serve. This was a central learning of Yammer. https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-VCDB-12677

5/ Slack eventually got this right but the initial anti-sales mentality did cost them some time. Let’s put this in context: they had ~7 years of otherwise flawless execution. But still, the sooner that product-first SaaS founders embrace sales, the better off they will be.

6/ In addition to sales, a bottom-up SaaS startup has to get earned marketing right. Use your early logos to consolidate the perception of category leadership before incumbents can react. “The one who defines the category wins the category.” https://sacks.substack.com/p/the-one-who-defines-the-category-wins-the-category-245fee85bfbb

7/ Just because Microsoft is a tough competitor, let’s not act like Slack “lost”. Slack did a phenomenal job, created a massive outcome and would have been fine on its own. It was also up against the toughest bundle there is. Being part of Salesforce bundle does help level that.

8/ Also note that Microsoft is not a latecomer to this party. They bought Yammer in 2012, ~2 years before Slack, in an effort to transition the Office franchise to cloud/social/mobile—an effort that eventually resulted in Teams. They were always going to be a tough competitor.

9/ This is a brilliant acquisition for Salesforce, not just because it gives them a new cloud and an application hub, but because it gives them a way onto every seat in the enterprise. Slack justifies a true wall-to-wall license. This has been Benioff’s dream since Chatter.

10/ Expect more acquisitions to fill out this new “communications cloud” or however Salesforce defines it. //