Today, Slack has millions of users and reported more than six hundred million dollars in revenue for the last fiscal year. Sean’s company was one of many to embrace this platform when it arrived on the knowledge-work scene. From a financial perspective, the deal probably makes sense. I thought about Sean when I heard about Salesforce’s proposed acquisition of Slack for close to twenty-eight billion dollars. “I hear that sound, it gives me the shivers,” he said. When I spoke with him, some time had passed since this incident, but the memory of the service’s omnipresent notification ping remained strong. In desperation, Sean moved the company off Slack. The team soon burned out, and two engineers quit. Then they heard about a slick new instant-messenger service named Slack that promised to streamline office communication: “There was this hype, so we decided to try it.” Once the team switched to the tool, the rate of back-and-forth messaging intensified, eventually reaching a stressful peak when a demanding client insisted on the ability to directly communicate with Sean’s employees using Slack. “We used to have our Gmail constantly opened,” he said. As with many organizations at that time, Sean and his team relied on e-mail as their primary collaboration tool. In 2016, I interviewed an entrepreneur named Sean who had co-founded a small technology startup based in London.

Slack instant messaging