Thread by @MarceloPLima

1/It's fascinating when companies have "hidden businesses" that nobody is paying attention to. Facebook has two of them: Oculus and Workplace. I've got a whole thread on Oculus here:

https://twitter.com/MarceloPLima/status/1176944195191398401?s=20

2/Workplace is similar to @Slack or @MicrosoftTeams: collaboration software for work. It started as an internal tool at Facebook and then grew to > 40k customers and today > 3 million paid users (seats):

3/Workplace is a real SaaS business with all the integrations you'd want. It's led by two ex Microsoft employees, @codorniou and @_karandeep. The product is free for nonprofits and pricing for regular enterprises is very competitive:
facebook.com/workplace/pric…

4/Who's on Workplace, you ask? Walmart, Spotify, Booking, Nestle, Kering... quite an impressive list. 50% of their implementations have been done through ISV partners--building the enterprise muscle!

5/Workplace leverages a number of $FB strengths:
- Huge infrastructure (Zuck once said "we're building out our data center capacity over the next 5 years on the order of what AWS + GCP have to support all of their customers") see

https://twitter.com/MarceloPLima/status/1098310101927165952?s=20

6/
- Machine learning: Workplace does automatic captioning and transcription of live videos and translates it into 14 different languages
- Portal: that hardware you can use to chat with your kids? It's coming to Workplace, with new collaboration tools

7/
- Oculus: in this session, @marifes reminds us of what work will look like in a pervasive AR/VR world:

8/
If you fast forward several years, you can see that IF (and yes, it's a big if) FB executes well, this company could build a huge enterprise business.

I'd argue that at 11x fwd EBITDA (I don't like ebitda either, but let's roll with it), this is a call option.

9/ @_karandeep says it best:

“One of the benefits of being part of Facebook is that we’re not thinking only of today or tomorrow. We’re part of an organization that’s looking to shape the landscape of technology over the next 10 to 20 years.”

end/
Shout out to Morgan Stanley's Brian Nowak, the only analyst to ever ask about Workplace on $FB earnings calls.

All the videos from latest event:
youtube.com/playlist?list=…

The entire government of Singapore—250,000 people—are on Workplace by Facebook.

This is a great interview with @codorniou on how Workplace is going after the “deskless” frontline workers (retail, factory, nurses, etc), the mission alignment with Facebook, and much more:
pca.st/episode/744c32…

Julien mentions that some companies use both Slack and Workplace because they complement each other

Another excellent interview with @codorniou:
- They messed up go to market early on, and discovered large companies wanted everyone on Workplace on day 1, which was something new at the time

- As a result, Workplace has no land-and-expand: it grows one company at a time

- It also flipped the "moving upmarket" motion upside-down: began w/ large enterprises & then moved to SMBs

- Workplace is a newsfeed product which leverages the investments Facebook made: go on vacation & come back after 3 weeks and the best stuff will be surfaced automatically

- Like Slack, it has inter-company groups & chat

- Julien read a lot of books to adapt and learn and highly recommends "Predictable Revenue": amazon.com/Predictable-Re…

The whole interview and transcript (thanks to @LennyIce for putting this on my radar):
intercom.com/blog/podcasts/…