The Death of Email? – Part 1 of a conversation with Cal Henderson, Co-Founder of Slack
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Really the thing I think that has set the Bay Area apart historically for technology companies has been the massive supportive network you have around you of people who are either going through the same thing as you, went through it recently, or are about to go through it.
Welcome to Orbit, the HG podcast series, where we speak to leaders and innovators from across the software and tech ecosystem. to discuss the key trends that change how we all do business. This episode is the first part of a conversation recorded at HG's Technology Leaders Summit in February twenty twenty two. Jason Richards, head of Portfolio Technology, speaks to Cal Henderson, co-founder and CTO of Slack. The communication platform swiftly becoming ubiquitous across the modern business landscape.
In the opening Farside chat yesterday morning between Matthew Brockman and I, we discussed the growth of H G during the past year and in particular how it's really underpinned by the H G investment focus on fast paced, growth oriented, profitable software companies. And I'm sure this is what we all aspire our organizations to be. And it's something that we, as people that are responsible for designing, building, delivering software products, really have a material level of influence over. In my opening remarks, I also shared that we strongly believe that our learning is powered through sharing these experiences, whether it's across industry, whether it's from within our portfolio companies, or whether through leveraging the expertise we have within the H G tech team.
So I think we've now in this last session got a really fantastic opportunity to learn from industry and specifically from Cal Henderson, CTO and co-founder at Slack. Cal was integral to the Slack journey where the company went from pretty much zero to twenty seven point seven billion over approximately a ten year period. So I think that probably ticks the p the boxes of fast paced, growth oriented, profitable software company. So hey Cal, great to see you again. Thanks for joining us today. If you don't mind, perhaps we'll just take a few seconds, if you could just introduce yourself to our audience.
Sure. Yeah. I'm Cal Henderson. I'm one of the co-founders and the CTO of Slack. Based in might tell from the accent, originally uh English, but based in San Francisco. So I'm joining you from the west coast. What this afternoon for you, this morning for me.
Thanks for being here. So um now as as I just described really, it's been a pretty phenomenal journey that you've been on with Slack. And perhaps Cal, if you don't mind, m maybe you can set us off just by sort of setting the scene around, you know, an overview of what has that journey been like from the origins through to the point where where you joined and became part of the Salesforce HANA.
Yeah, it's a slightly weird and long story, I think, for certainly for enterprise software and and where we found ourselves. So we started out uh twenty something years ago trying to make video games on the internet, which was not a thing that was a real thing in the early two thousands, kind of before before the you know the internet and especially games as as people know them today really existed. And we ha had this this project, a game that was called Game Never Ending. It's a terrible title 'cause it ended shortly afterwards. But that pivoted into into a Flickr, a photo sharing website from the mid two thousands, completely different to what we were doing with games. And we found some success there.
Worked on that for a little bit, sold it to Yahoo, which used to be an important software company on the internet, no longer exists. And we tried to get back and make games again after that, after a few years. And second time around, we spent what, four years and about sixteen million dollars of our investors' money trying to make a viable business. And by the end of those four years, we had a a uh this web-based massively multiplayer game called Glitch that hundreds of people enjoyed every day. Unfortunately, it needed to be tens of thousands of people for it to be a viable business at the scale that we'd invested in.
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