29 August, 2019

E68- Cal Henderson, Slack

This week on Ep 68 of #OTPBD, we have the Co-founder & CTO of Slack, Cal Henderson. Slack was founded by Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson & Serguei Mourachov. The purpose of Slack is simply helping everyone get their work done. Slack is a one stop communication platform for organisations to work collaboratively and with high efficiency. Cal’s founder journey is definitely one of the adventurous ones. Slack was born out of personal experiences and need felt by the founders themselves.

To summarise the making of Slack, the founders were working towards building an online gaming startup and created Flickr along the way. The founders needed to collaborate effectively & communicate from different cities. After realizing that there was no specific platform to do so, they built one themselves. They wanted to make the platform available to public and turned the product into ‘Slack’, as we now know it. Cal is extremely humble and potentially very relatable for other founders. In this podcast, he shares the difficult lessons he learned when his gaming startup failed. They had to lay off 40-50 employees in the process, which is one of the toughest struggles of being a startup founder. He says: It was our own fault; we were unable to turn our vision into reality. He stresses on how crucial it is for organisations to adapt to change and be agile. He shares his take on IPOs, organisational transparency, future challenges for Slack, Australian startups ecosystem, strategic alignment and much more.

This is an incredible startup journey and we are so grateful to have Cal on #OTPBD. Tune in now to dive deep into the insider story of a multi-billion-dollar tech giant!