A top $ 5 billion Slack executive explains the secret weapon to fight Microsoft and Facebook (MSFT, FB)



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  April Underwood Slack Fortune Brainstorm Tech

  • Slack is one of those startups that Silicon Valley likes to boast about. It has grown to international success, 8 million users, and an badessment of $ 5 billion in four quick years.
  • But now he is being sued by giant corporations like Facebook and especially Microsoft.
  • Top Slack exec April Underwood says that the company has a secret weapon: users really like to use it.


Slack Chief Product Officer Avril Underwood – who has been at the start of rapid growth during most of her four years on the market – does not worry terribly about all the big name rivals that come for her.


Not even those from Microsoft and Facebook. Or so Underwood said on stage Monday at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference to be held this week in Aspen, Colorado.


Underwood said Slack now has 8 million daily active users and 70,000 paying customers. She said that just two years ago, Slack really could not support companies with a thousand employees who wanted to use it. Today, Slack has corporate customers who put 100,000 employees on the platform.

But Slack has grown so much that it has attracted the attention of technology giants, including Microsoft and its Teams product, bundled with Office 365. Facebook, too, takes it to Slack with Facebook's Workplace, a version of the social network specifically targeted at businesses.

On the one hand, Underwood seems to take his giant competitors in stride, saying that Slack has a secret weapon to gain The fact that, in general, users actually appreciate it.

"Employees ask to use Slack Very rarely, it's the IOC or the administrator who makes the decision [to bring in Slack]," she says. Thus,
"When competitors are brought in, employees say," No, we do not want to use this tool.

But at the same time she is watching her clearly. Asked about all the money collected by Slack – $ 790 million and counting, according to Crunchbase -, she pointed to her biggest competitors, especially Microsoft, noting that they had far more resources at hand than Slack

. We have a lot of money, but we are facing some of the biggest technology companies in the world and, to be successful, I have always thought we would be competing with Microsofts.

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