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Slack CTO Cal Henderson

GeekWire

Slack CTO Cal Henderson

Workplace chat and collaboration technology company Slack is going public on Thursday, with implications for a wide variety of companies in the Seattle region and beyond. Microsoft is Slack’s primary competitor with its Teams service, and Slack is a big Amazon Web Services customer. And many companies that sell technologies to businesses will be watching…

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Notes

  1. How Did Cal Henderson Meet the Slack Team at 2:00

    Cal Henderson has been working with the same set of people and co-founders for a few decades now. Full answer

  2. Why Is Slack So Popular With More Than 10 Million Average Daily Users at 4:59

    Slack is bringing hundreds of different work applications under the same roof, enabling companies to use a unified interface for all their communications and… Full answer

  3. What Were the Key Technical Decisions by Cal Henderson Which Made Slack What It Is Today at 8:04

    It could be very addicting to dive deep into a technology and build something for massive scale, only to never see it come true. Full answer

  4. How Hard Was Growing Slack Without Amazon Cloud? at 10:28

    It would have been much-much harder. Full answer

  5. What Would Cal Henderson Skip If He Were Launching Slack Today? at 11:50

    Slack CTO Cal Henderson tells GeekWire that a Slack launched today would make fewer product mistakes, because the company now has the data. Full answer

  6. What Technologies Are You Using at Slack Today at 13:29

    Slack is focused on ways to make engineers more effective and productive, lowering the technical barrier for DevOps. Full answer

  7. How Do You Stay Flexible While Paying Millions of Dollars to a Cloud Service Provider Like Amazon AWS at 14:36

    Opportunity cost and engineering time are super expensive, and it makes sense to optimize for those, rather than try and save costs on web services. Full answer

  8. Did Cal Henderson Say Slack Can Switch Clouds? at 15:58

    GeekWire asks Slack CTO Cal Henderson whether a company at Slack's size can switch between Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Full answer

  9. Can Artificial Intelligence Make Slack Better at 17:44

    AI can certainly make small interactions better, thereby making your whole experience better. Full answer

  10. Did Cal Henderson Break Into Stewart Butterfield's Mail? at 20:48

    Breaking-in is a strong term. Full answer

  11. What Does Cal Henderson Look for When Hiring for Slack at 22:07

    People you hire in week one of the company are very different from the people you should hire with 1500 employees. Full answer

  12. What Apps Would Cal Henderson Like to See Build on Slack in the Future at 25:17

    How do you take software that you already use everyday, and use Slack to enrich the usage of those applications? Full answer

  13. What Does Slack CTO Cal Henderson Tell Startups to Optimize for First? at 28:55

    On GeekWire, Slack CTO Cal Henderson says that for almost any software company that is not already a giant, the first job is finding product-market fit quickly. Full answer

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