Slack comes to take over Asia Pacific work LOLs (and opens Melbourne office)
Slack’s Melbourne office will employ about 70 people and is located in an old Carlton Brewery site in Melbourne, designed by Breathe Architecture who have made the building as sustainable as possible with an “ethics before aesthetics” approach.
“We live in a golden age of software,” says Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield (who previously founded Flickr). “Work tools are finally benefitting from the type of exciting innovation we’ve seen in consumer apps for years. We’re making a big investment here in Australia to grow our own Slack team, but more importantly to help teams of all sizes be happier and more productive.”
Here’s a peek at the kind of heritage sustainability all that a US$2.8 billion evaluation can buy.
#Welcome
For business and/or cult meetings
Drink? Sure, thank you
Bags not watering the plants
Nap time
According to Slack, who’s tagline is “be less busy”, teams that use Slack report a 32% increase in productivity, 48.6% reduction in emails, and 25.1% reduction in meetings. 79% agree that it helps improve team culture, and 80.4% say that team transparency is improved by using Slack. This may all be true. All I can say is that it sucks waiting a full minute or so for an email from a guy sitting less than a meter away from me and with Slack, BOOM! it’s there. Oh, and it’s a fun place to share links and talk shit about Jim in accounts.
And it’s not just me who’s into it (through I’m as into it as anyone). Apparently it’s the fastest growing B2B application ever. In just two years, Slack has grown to 2.3 million daily active users, 1.5 billion messages sent per month, and $64 million in annual recurring revenue, much of which comes from use in large and prestigious organisations like NASA, BuzzFeed, Harvard, Samsung, the Wall Street Journal, MIT, Spotify, Idealog (kidding, we use the free version), etc, etc.