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:
Digital events are great, but you know what's going to be really hard?
These so-called "hybrid events" everyone is now talking about after we get past Covid. Digital + IRL.
Why so hard? A few thoughts here:
First, expense. A decent digital event is hardly free, even if you don't need a venue. Many SaaS companies are still spending $500k to product a digital event. SaaStr will spend up to $2m on our digital events.
Who is going to pay the >extra< expense to add this to IRL event?
Second, experience. Live streaming at events is nothing new. Yes, it works on Twitch. But WebSummit? Dreamforce? SaaStr?
All have tried it, and abandoned it.
The experience has to be great. Bolting on streaming is not enough.
So "SaaStr Inc" revenue run rate fell to $0 in March+April with Covid ... and now is at a $3.2m run-rate, with a goal of $21m in 2021.
That's a big tilt, and a lot of change
The stakes weren't that high, but it was a second life learning on "tilting"
Here's what I learned:
1. Folks process change at different rates. Co-founders can process change the fastest. Some folks though need 10x-20x longer.
You need to >explain< rapid change many, many more times than you think.
2. Some good folks just won't go on that next journey with you. Some folks just won't want to go through the "tilt" and change. They didn't sign up for the new journey.