Social Capital’s Mamoon Hamid sees Slack shaking up the workplace | Re/code

Attempting to move beyond group/team chat

"Since 2013, Slack has become a bit of a wunderkind and gets a lot of buzz, but that buzz lies in its popularity with young tech and media companies. (Re/code’s parent Vox Media is a customer.) But to merit the investments it has secured — a combined $540 million at a valuation of nearly $4 billion as of this month — it will have to scale up suitable for use at large companies — something Hamid said is already happening. Of Slack’s Top 20 deals, he said, 10 are with Fortune 100 companies. And while Hamid couldn’t mention their names — Slack hasn’t disclosed some of its largest customers — the names of non-startups using it include the retailer Urban Outfitters, electronics giant Samsung and NASA, as in the U.S. space agency.

That said, there’s still work to do. Even at big companies, Slack tends to be used in individual departments, not across full corporations. That’s the next big step, the one that’s sometimes described by the wonky phrase “enterprise scale.”"

Social Capital’s Mamoon Hamid sees Slack shaking up the workplace | Re/code