What Would Cal Henderson Skip If He Were Launching Slack Today?

Slack CTO Cal Henderson tells GeekWire that a Slack launched today would make fewer product mistakes, because the company now has the data. The cloud lesson is the one he cares about. He would move further up the stack, away from raw virtual machines and toward platform services, including Kubernetes and higher-level Amazon Web Services. The goal is to avoid undifferentiated work that every company does and that does not make Slack better at Slack. At Flickr, he says, a quarter to a third of the team's time went to that work: buying servers in Canada, talking to customs, racking them, then realizing they were short on network cables. Hosted services give that time back.