The Panic Button That Saved Slack

On May 24, 2012, Stewart Butterfield dialed his board from Tiny Speck’s half-empty San Francisco office to announce the company had spent $17.2 million on a game no one wanted. That morning, 37 team members had been laid off; Glitch was shuttered, servers powering down, future gone overnight. But before the last engineer logged off, Butterfield proposed turning their internal chat tool-written out of desperation-into a business. It was a relic, four years old, with no revenue and not even a name. Two months later, Tiny Speck was reborn as Slack Technologies, with eight developers and zero customers. In August 2013, their free invite-only alpha signed up 8,000 teams within twenty-four hours. By February 2014, Slack went public with 15,000 paid customers and $12 million in annual recurring revenue. Seven years after that board call, Slack shares opened at $38.50 on NYSE, and by closing bell, the company was valued at $27 billion-every cent traceable to that moment of surrender in 2012.