Filed by Slack Technologies, Inc.
pursuant to Rule 425 under the Securities Act of 1933
and deemed filed pursuant to Rule 14a-12
under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934
Subject Company: Slack Technologies, Inc.
Commission File No.: 001-38926
This filing relates to the proposed merger of Slack Technologies, Inc., a Delaware Corporation (Slack), with Skyline Strategies I Inc.
(Merger Sub I), a Delaware corporation and a wholly owned subsidiary of salesforce.com, inc., a Delaware corporation (Salesforce), pursuant to the terms of that certain Agreement and Plan of Merger, dated as of
December 1, 2020, by and among Salesforce, Merger Sub I, Skyline Strategies II LLC, a Delaware corporation and a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce, and Slack.
The following article published in The
Information on December 3, 2020 was made available in connection with the transaction.
Slack CEO Downplays Microsoft as Factor in
Salesforce Deal
by Kevin McLaughlin
Before word of
Salesforces planned acquisition of Slack leaked last week, investor sentiment about the workplace chat provider had decidedly soured, causing its stock to lose about a quarter of its value since Slack went public in June of last year. A big
reason was competition from Microsoft, that old bogeyman for any upstart in the market for productivity applications.
But Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield,
in an interview on Wednesday evening with The Information, bristled at the notion that Microsoft can squash Slack with Teams, its workplace collaboration product, by leveraging its vast sales and marketing muscle. It almost seems sometimes
like its a matter of faith for people, Butterfield said. Its not based on any empirical evidenceits just people think Microsoft is a bigger company, and they have a huge channel, and so theyll inevitably
win, despite the fact that we win.
THE TAKEAWAY
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Slack CEO says Microsofts Teams doesnt appeal to young companies
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Butterfield estimates nearly all tech companies going public this year use Slack
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He expects Salesforce to continue Slacks permanent remote work policy
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In the interviewwhich took place the day after Salesforce announced it would pay an eye-popping price of nearly
$28 billion for SlackButterfield discussed how the deal came together and why the company can thrive in the market regardless of the competition from Microsoft. Butterfield even talked about the likelihood that Slacks permanent
work-from-home policy, announced in June, will continue under Salesforces ownership.
Butterfield was most voluble on the subject of Microsoft,
whose presence in collaboration software pundits and analysts saw as a catalyst for the Salesforce deal. Microsoft includes Teams as part of its subscription-based bundle of applications at no extra cost, which is a big reason why Slack has told
European antitrust authorities that Microsoft is improperly tying Teams to the dominant application suite.
Microsofts behavior aside, Butterfield
echoed his past comments about Slacks bright prospects for growth. Slack has largely spread through word of mouth inside companies, he says, noting that many existing Microsoft corporate customers have also bought Slacks software, a
testimony to its popularity.
Butterfield also said that Slack has more relevance for a younger generation of startups, which could give it an advantage
in the long term over Microsoft, whose Teams product lacks hipster appeal. I feel pretty comfortable saying that 90% of all the [initial public offerings] this year are using Slack, and for the next generation of companies that are coming up,
it could even be 100% of the IPOscertainly all the tech IPOs, said Butterfield. So whos gonna be in a better position ten years from now?