![]() Enterprise collaboration is moving deeper into work apps themselves. Arguably, great answers existed to all of those questions - and the company kept posting impressive numbers to back them up - but Wall Street never bought the story Slack sold.Ĥ. Perhaps the biggest reason Slack "failed" as a public company was its inability to effectively communicate what it did that was special, why that was important, and why it was defensible enough to withstand the assault from Teams.Telling your story well always matters, no matter how big you get. ![]() This is why Slack Connect was such an important initiative for Slack, and why Microsoft trained the full firepower of its Teams marketing against it, while mostly ignoring Zoom even though Zoom is much more directly competitive on the product feature front.ģ.This is true both at the tactical level (integrations, permissions, security, etc) and the strategic: providing seamless connective tissue between work apps inside and across organizations is what makes Microsoft so powerful as an enterprise player - not necessarily because their products are better. ![]() Enterprise products are like icebergs - 90% of the work is below the surface. But the massive power of Microsoft, Salesforce, and to a lesser-degree Oracle and Google's salesforces + bundling distribution abilities enables deals to happen at a scale that most independent companies find difficult to match.Ģ. And they also can (and do!) expand those deals into large, enterprise-wide contracts. ![]() SaaS startups can (and do!) land deals with big companies all the time now through the bottoms-up motion of individual teams adopting the product and paying by credit card.Distribution is still key when it comes to selling enterprise products at the highest levels. ![]() Note: you can find our full June 2019 episode on Slack's history and their DPO here. We dissect the deal itself, Slack's relatively short life as a public company, the impact of Microsoft and Teams, and most importantly what this means for enterprise SaaS startups broadly. Acquired is live on the scene covering Salesforce's blockbuster $27.7B acquisition of Slack, with the help of the internet's #1 Slack bull (and top internet analyst in his own right), Packy McCormick of Not Boring. ![]()
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