Slack's Many Lives

How real companies grow through reinvention.

Slack didn't start as chat-for-work. It started as an internal tool for another company that was failing. Stewart Butterfield and team were working on Flickr, a photo service. It was dying slowly. What remained was a communication tool they had built so they could work without each other.

This moment, the moment when you see that what you built as a means is actually the product, happens often in startups but rarely gets attention. The futility of your original plan becomes clear. You suddenly see what your hand made.

I recognize this in DIP thinking. Inclusive production cannot be planned in advance. You can say: I will design inclusively. But you cannot predict all forms of exclusion beforehand. You build, you see what you built, and only then do you adjust.

Slack's pivots weren't failures. They were observations. With each pivot, they saw something the market needed that they hadn't foreseen. That requires courage. You've invested millions in plan A. Plan A doesn't work. Now you must bet everything on plan B, which you didn't even see two weeks ago.

The leaders who can do this are not the tightest planners. They are the greatest observers. They say: this doesn't work, but what we see now, that works. So we go there. These aren't software engineers rewriting their code. These are designers releasing their assumptions.

Many startups fail because they can't do this. They've fixed plan A and it feels like identity. Abandoning plan A feels like betrayal of yourself. So they stay in it.

Slack could pivot because the team was young enough not to feel like an expert in something that didn't exist.

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Source: Stewart Butterfield interviews and Slack company history