Slack is where work happens.

Around the world, over 600,000 organizations in over 150 countries have turned to Slack as the place to communicate, collaborate, and get work done. Over 10 million people inside those organizations – accountants, customer support reps, engineers, lawyers, journalists, dentists, chefs, detectives, executives, scientists, farmers, hoteliers, salespeople, and many others – collectively spend more than 50 million hours in active use of Slack in a typical week, on either a free or paid subscription plan. They do so because Slack is a new layer of the business technology stack that brings together people, applications, and data – a single place where people can effectively work together, access hundreds of thousands of critical applications and services, and find important information to do their best work.

History

We created Slack initially as an internal tool to help our own team stay on the same page, to be able to easily access conversations, decisions, data, and content that had been shared, and to tap into a variety of software applications from one place. We were frustrated with email. It created fragmented silos of inaccessible information, hidden in individual inboxes. When new members joined the team, they were cut off from the rich history of communication that occurred before they arrived. Transparency was difficult to achieve and routine communication had to be supplemented with status reports and stand-up meetings in order to keep the team coordinated.In addition, despite the fact that email was the universal default routing mechanism for enterprise software, it was also an ineffective medium for sharing and managing the information and activity generated by that software. The notifications and simple workflows, such as approval processes, generated by customer support ticketing tools, human resources management systems, and expense trackers, disappeared into individual inboxes. Email is static and offers no direct integration with any of these tools. In short, email was a tiny window into the vast landscape of business information and software available to us collectively, and we needed to see the whole picture.We needed a new way to work that would help us make the most of both our people and our significant investment in software. What was available was incomplete, inadequate, and unfit for our work at hand. What we needed did not exist. So we built it.Since our public launch in 2014, it has become apparent that organizations worldwide have similar needs, and are now finding the solution with Slack. Our growth is largely due to word-of-mouth recommendations. Slack usage inside organizations of all kinds is typically initially driven bottoms-up, by end users. Despite this, we (and the rest of the world) still have a hard time explaining Slack. It’s been called an operating system for teams, a hub for collaboration, a connective tissue across the organization, and much else. Fundamentally, it is a new layer of the business technology stack in a category that is still being defined.

Slack’s Role

The most helpful explanation of Slack is often that it replaces the use of email inside the organization. Like email (or the Internet or electricity), Slack has very general and broad applicability. It is not aimed at any one specific purpose, but nearly anything that people do together at work.