When Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, the deal seemed on its face to make sense, given that the coronavirus pandemic accelerated already growing demand for tools that enable people to work remotely and that roughly 90% of Slack’s enterprise customers already used Salesforce.
Today, the question is: How well are things going?
Salesforce just last week announced some initial integrations with Slack, including introducing so-called account and deal Slack rooms to its “Sales Cloud,” which Salesforce says will allow sales teams to interact around a customer deal cycle. Rob Seaman, SVP for Slack at Salesforce, told TechCrunch last week that, more broadly, “We really want Slack to be the primary engagement surface for our users, their communications, their work, their workflows and the processes and the apps they support.”
But these kinds of public pronouncements don’t get to the heart of what’s happening inside the company. That’s where TechCrunch steps in. At TechCrunch Disrupt happening September 21-23, we are thrilled to be sitting down with both Bret Taylor — the entrepreneur and former Facebook executive who is now the No. 2 executive at Salesforce — and famed Slack founder Stewart Butterfield, to learn far more about their collective mission to take on Microsoft, and what, if anything, the market doesn’t understand about the tie-up between Salesforce and Slack. (Saleforces’s shares are only up slightly from a year ago and priced 16% higher than they were at the start of this year, compared to the S&P 500, which is up 35%.)
Who reports to whom? How independently is Slack being run? How will the two judge the success of the merger, and by when? These are just a few of the many questions we have for these two iconic executives, whose candid conversation with TC is one you won’t want to miss.
To participate in this year’s virtual show, check out the handful of pass options with discounts now available for founders, students and nonprofits. Get your ticket soon, though; prices more than double on September 20. We hope to see you online.