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 is a transcript of an interview
with Squawk Box given by Stewart Butterfield, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Slack, on December 15, 2020.
Andrew: Welcome back to Squawk Box. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, 2020 has had some megamergers and acquisitions. One of the most
consequential, Salesforce buying Slack for nearly $28 billion dollars. Its among the biggest deals ever in the software industry and it spotlights how companies are trying to position themselves for a post-pandemic world where the nature
of work may very well be very different. Joining us right now is Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. Stewart, its great to see you.
Its nice to
see you, I think this is the first time we have had a chance to talk on air since the big deal and really an opportunity for you to explain, I think, to the public and more about what really led to this. If you could take us behind the scenes of
your thinking because for so very long we have had conversations about, you know, what the company would look like five years from now, and youd say I want to be an independent company, whats the backstory?
Stewart: I think the simple version of the backstory is this is a really unique combination, and we believe we can accomplish in the next five years
what might have taken us 20 years to do otherwise. So, I mean, thats the heart of it, and its a pretty big milestone for us. Were excited, you know, I think it wasnt expected to the outside world, but we have a lot of
momentum now. We came out of this quarter and we announced our results, Salesforce announced their results, and then we announced the acquisition all at the same time, so I think a little bit of this got lost, but we added 12,000 new paid customers
in that quarter. So, its up 140% from a year ago, it matches the, you know, the crazy surge that we saw during the early days of the pandemic, and that momentum is coming from product improvements and its coming from Slack Connect, which
allows two organizations to communicate across organizational boundaries, and I think thats actually going to be key to the value unlock over the next few years. Salesforce is all about CRM, its all about customers, and Slack Connect is
95% customer vendor relationships.
Andrew: Stewart, what do you say to the critics who say that this is a defensive deal, defensive for Slack
insofar as Microsoft and the Teams product has outperformed in ways that I dont think anybody had anticipated even 18 months ago, and potentially even defensive for Salesforce or that you could argue maybe that its opportunistic for
Salesforce because they want to play very much and feel that they have to play against Microsoft and that this gives them a leg up or at least an opportunity to compete in that way.
Stewart: I think this is 100% offense. And again, I think theres some really unique aspects to this particular combination. We werent
looking to sell the company. I have a great relationship with Bret Taylor, President and COO of Salesforce, and we have known each other for a couple of decades at this point, and theres a way in which we see the world that I think very few
people see it today. But everyone will see it later, and one way to say that is to look at the engagement layer and, thats kind of a weird term, but, the place where the conversations are happening, the places where the decisions are being
made, as the perfect place to bring together work flows across organizational boundaries, and Salesforce has a really broad suite but of course we have 2,400 apps in the app directory for Slack. We have 700,000 custom integrations that were
developed by customers so these are like unique little integrations, some of them very small, just sending notifications into Slack, some of them sophisticated work flows that run entire businesses and thats something that I think we will see
in increasing degree of sophistication in the messaging environments, and an increasing degree of work getting done directly where the decisions are made.