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Back to Slack CTO Cal Henderson, with Cal Henderson.

What Does Slack CTO Cal Henderson Tell Startups to Optimize for First?

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. Slack was not designed on day one for more than 10 million daily users. The first version put in people's hands was the wrong one, and the early years were spent learning which parts of a tool that worked for small engineering teams would work for everyone else. He warns that building for massive scale before that fit is addictive for an engineer and a way to get stuck. Cloud hosting is what made the fast loop possible. At Flickr, he says, they bought servers and racked them themselves.

Transcript

Slack CTO Cal Henderson ·

GeekWire

More from this episode

  1. How Did Cal Henderson Meet the Slack TeamCal Henderson has been working with the same set of people and co-founders for a few decades now.
  2. Why Is Slack So Popular With More Than 10 Million Average Daily UsersSlack is bringing hundreds of different work applications under the same roof, enabling companies to use a unified interface for all their communications and…
  3. What Were the Key Technical Decisions by Cal Henderson Which Made Slack What It Is TodayIt could be very addicting to dive deep into a technology and build something for massive scale, only to never see it come true.
  4. How Hard Was Growing Slack Without Amazon Cloud?It would have been much-much harder.
  5. 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.
  6. What Technologies Are You Using at Slack TodaySlack is focused on ways to make engineers more effective and productive, lowering the technical barrier for DevOps.
  7. How Do You Stay Flexible While Paying Millions of Dollars to a Cloud Service Provider Like Amazon AWSOpportunity cost and engineering time are super expensive, and it makes sense to optimize for those, rather than try and save costs on web services.
  8. Did Cal Henderson Say Slack Can Switch Clouds?GeekWire asks Slack CTO Cal Henderson whether a company at Slack's size can switch between Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
  9. Can Artificial Intelligence Make Slack BetterAI can certainly make small interactions better, thereby making your whole experience better.
  10. Did Cal Henderson Break Into Stewart Butterfield's Mail?Breaking-in is a strong term.
  11. What Does Cal Henderson Look for When Hiring for SlackPeople you hire in week one of the company are very different from the people you should hire with 1500 employees.
  12. What Apps Would Cal Henderson Like to See Build on Slack in the FutureHow do you take software that you already use everyday, and use Slack to enrich the usage of those applications?

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