Stewart: Yes, I assume it is up to Brett to decide. I do not know. The important thing from my
perspective and certainly from our employees and probably from our customers perspective is, I am and will remain the CEO of Slack.
Emily: Will you become one of Salesforces presidents?
Stewart: I believe so.
Emily: All right, so
look, Slack is a beloved product. You and I have had many conversations since everybody started working from home, but, that said, since the director listing the stock has languished compared to other quote unquote work-at-home stocks. I know that you are trained to tell me that you do not think about that, but Im curious how much that weighed on you and if that played into this deal?
Stewart: No, so of course I do. I notice. But I do not think it played into the deal at all. I think one thing that mightve gotten lost, because
we announced our earnings, Salesforce announced their earnings and we announced the deal at the same time, so there is a lot of information, is that we just came out of an incredible quarter. We grew net new paid customers by 140%, 12,000 new
customers this quarter, and thats the heart of the business, that leads to future billings, which leads to revenue, so we are pleased with the growth. You know part of that is an increase in awareness, or the utility of the product I guess, as
a digital HQ in a world where physical HQs are less well used, thats coming from the pandemic and then working from home. But a lot of this is also improvements to our new user experience, getting better at helping people understand Slack and
helping them get started. But the big source of that is Slack Connect, so that is the ability for two Slack-using organizations to communicate across organizational boundaries. The last four quarters of growth there 140%, 160%, 200%, 240%, so
as it is scaling up to now over a half-million connected endpoints, the growth is increasing. And the last thing I will say about that is it that it is an incredible opportunity to work on the next generation of CRM applications, when you can work
across organizational boundaries.
Emily: Now, what do you make of the narrative that this deal was done because of increasing competition and
increasing threat from Microsoft? That they were starting to beat you in customers and that perhaps the smartest way forward was a tie up with another giant?
Stewart: I think that narrative will be eventually dispelled. Personally, I am sick of talking about Microsoft so Im going to take it from a
slightly different angle here. But just looking at the U.S. and to be clear, we have a very strong business worldwide, Japans our number two market and growing very quickly, U.K. and Europe all very strong but just looking at the
U.S., biggest telco wall-to-wall Slack, largest media company wall-to-wall Slack. And I
have to look at my notes because theres so many here. The largest issuer of credit cards wall-to-wall, the biggest in consumer electronics wall-to-wall Slack, the leading retailer wall-to-wall Slack, number one in apparel wall-to-wall Slack, and if you zoom out from that it is two-thirds of the Fortune 100, its three out of the five biggest companies in the U.S. by revenue. Our customer
is the operator of the nations largest integrated health care system, four of the six biggest telcos, I mean I could go just go on this list forever. Ive given up on trying to point people to the empirical facts here, because there is an
article of faith about the competition that Im unable to overcome.
Emily: So lets take a different tact given that you have fairly
recently built a company from the ground up. You know Marc Benioff started his company 20 years ago, he has done a lot deals thats helped the company keep growing, so what is your advice to salesforce, Benioff and Bret going to be to keep
innovating and stay nimble?
Stewart: Its a great question. Whats interesting is the answer for us, for Slack, for salesforce, for the
combined entity, is the same as for customers. I think it is really leveraging technology to take advantage of our newfound ability to do end-to-end digital transformation. Let me give you one concrete example. Very often our account executives ask
for help from executives, including people like me or you know other executives at the company, with a customer. They want me to send an email, introduce myself, ask if we could have a meeting. And in one world, the account executive goes and asks
their manager, like hey can you get Stewart to please send an email and they go to their director, then they go to an executive, and they happen to know my executive assistant and they ask, and it gets to me and I say, tell me about the
customer, give me some background. Instead, we built a really simple workflow. The account executive puts all the information in it and it gets sent to a Slack channel where everyone can approve it. Giving that kind of structure not only saves
people seconds and minutes here in there, it creates a lot clarity. And the result is we send a lot more of those emails and get a lot more deals.