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 was published in The
Irish Independent on December 10, 2020.
No Slacker: how Cal Hendersons 23bn work software giant will handle the force of
Benioff, Microsoft and its Dublin office
Last week, Slack and Salesforce announced an acquisition agreement worth $27.7bn (22.9bn). Its
the biggest tech deal of the year and one of the biggest of all time. This week, Slack co-founder Cal Henderson spoke exclusively to technology editor Adrian Weckler about keeping a separate identity, the tech
industry, remote working, Irelands place in the world and other things.
By Adrian Weckler
Cal Hendersons version of how he and Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield began working together sounds like the
pilot episode of a Netflix dramedy.
Its 2002. Henderson, a British video game obsessive who runs a fan website covering Butterfields online
game, breaks into the latters companys internal mailing list to pick up whatever he can on the sly.
I really wanted to know what was
happening inside the company to help me as a player and to run this fan site, he tells me on a Zoom link from San Francisco.
But when the intrusion
is discovered, Butterfield offers him a job instead of censure.
20 years later, Henderson and Butterfield are still going. They stand over Slack, the
seminal work communications tool that Salesforce has just agreed to pay $27.7bn (22.9bn) for in a blockbuster takeover.
The deal leaves Butterfield
standing to gain around $2bn, with Henderson looking at realising something in the region of $750m.
Slack was actually the pairs fourth effort. The
first, an online game whose hook was that it never ended, morphed into the second, the photo-sharing service Flickr (sold to Yahoo for $35m). The third go was also a game, this time called Glitch. But it fizzled. Butterfield, Henderson and others
were able to pivot it this time into a work-messaging application that they called Slack.
Today, Slack has 130,000 paying customers, including
most of the biggest US firms, and over 12m users overall. Its widely considered to have changed workplace communications, sparking Microsoft into something of a copycat move (Teams). Its global expansion has seen it move to Ireland, too, where
it maintains a 165-strong Dublin office.