November 9, 2021 • 35 mins
Forming connections across the workplace is the key to a strong company culture and even stronger bottom line. Whether chatting with someone down the hall, or across the world, the new age of remote work has made tools like Slack more critical than ever. Combining the power of Slack with the advanced wireless connectivity now available in 5G is allowing that work to happen anywhere.
In this episode of The Restless Ones, we sit with Cal Henderson, CTO & Co-Founder of Slack, who’s lifelong love of technology has translated into building one of the most successful software stories of recent years. We’ll hear how Cal capitalized on the work and insights from one of his biggest professional setbacks to create a collaboration and productivity tool used and loved by millions of workers worldwide.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
The ability to use your smartphone, use your laptop from
anywhere is huge and just cuts down one of those
otherwise hard constraints on how people work. Increasing requirements for
bandwidth and latency and a video and studies that show
that video latency has a huge effect on kind of
your interaction with co workers, That milliseconds make a difference
(00:22):
in being able to read people's body language in a
nonverbal communication. And you know, increasingly the Internet feels like
a true utility in the sense of peril water and
that just like nothing works when it's not there. Welcome
to the restless ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I've spent more
than a decade really learning about technology, what makes it tick,
(00:45):
and then describing and explaining that to my audience. But
it's the conversations with the world's most unconventional thinkers, the
leaders at the intersection of technology and business that fascinate
me the most. In partnership with T Mobile for Business,
I explore the unique set of challenges that c t
o s and c I o s and other tech
(01:06):
executives face from advancements in cloud and edge computing, software
as a service, Internet of things, and of course five
g we are often left wondering how the leading minds
in business continue to thrive. Let's find out. Our guest
(01:29):
today is Cal Henderson, chief Technology officer of Slack. Chances
are you're familiar with Slack. The collaborative platform has proven
to be a popular tool even before the days of
the pandemic. Once the business world was forced to pivot
in the wake of COVID nineteen, Slack's role in how
many of us do our work became undeniable. I sat
(01:53):
down with Cal to talk about his background in software development,
how he navigated the transition from pro grammar to a
leadership role, and how he sees technology playing a part
in how we do our work in the future. Cal,
just to start off with, I want to thank you
for joining us on the Restless Ones and welcome to
the program. Thank you for having me excited to be here.
(02:17):
I'm very excited to have a chance to speak with you.
So can you tell us when and how you first
started to get interested in the world of technology. Yeah,
it was from a really young age. I grew up
in the UK um kind of in the countryside as well,
and when I was really young. I have a slightly
(02:37):
older cousin who got one of the first kind of
home computers, one of those things you plugged into your TV,
and it came with a basic interpret city, right, little
programs in basic and I saw this and I was like,
this is so cool. This is now my obsession. And
then a few years later I was like, in fact,
this is what I'm gonna do for the rest of
my life. I don't know that there are jobs doing this,
but this would be cool if there was a job.
And so from like a really young age, like when
(02:59):
a seven or something like that, I was obsessed with programming.
And at the time, obviously technology computers were very different
because it's the pre Internet era, UM, and so it
was about like making local applications, and in the like
nineties graduated to making like Windows apps. But then when
the Internet and when the Web came around, UM, that
was like opened up a whole kind of set of
(03:21):
possibilities because I could make something and I love just
like making software for for people, and so it was
it was like a hobby and a passion. I guess
it still is. And I just knew I wanted to
make software, and it's just like the making of stuff.
It's such a you know, kind of interesting medium. I
just love making software that other people use, especially things
that a lot of people use every day and you know,
(03:43):
makes their lives a bit better. Software is just software,
but it's a tool and has become increasingly important in
everybody's lives and everything everybody does, and that's just such
a cool thing to be part of it. I mean,
you're extremely humble, but I would argue that obviously software
is such an intrinsic part of almost every aspect of
our lives today, whether you are conscious of it or not,
(04:07):
it's present in some regard. Uh, And of course the
hardware that underlies it is equally as important. That you
really got into a field that was just starting to explode,
as I would imagine that by the time you were
first programming in basic, that was probably around the same
time that a lot of people weren't really familiar with
(04:30):
computers on a personal level at all. They had heard
of them and they thought that's a thing that does math.
So you kind of got in right at that perfect moment,
I guess so. I think if I were older, I
think that would have been more of a struggle because
I was there or that threshold of kind of the
explosion of the web, the explosion of personal computers, and
then quite a bit later, you know, the the kind
(04:52):
of mobile shift, which I think has been the really
big shift there and how people think about technology. M
But yeah, it was just well time, you know, I
started my career, like, you know, a decade before Facebook
existed and kind of you know, before the dot com
boom of the of two thousand, which was just such
an exciting time for this thing that was a passion
(05:13):
of mine to turn into something you could make money from.
Like that wasn't my intention. Did it as a passion
because I love making stuff and it's kind of incredible
now the influence that it has on society and how
important it is in everything. But that wasn't the case
twenty five years ago. M M. Well, what what was
your first you know, professional gig in the world of
(05:35):
programming and software development. There was an advertising agency in
the UK and I made some websites for for brands
at that company, and it's like, this is really cool.
I got into static websites. But then it was what
if we had a community around a brand and had
of for like a forum where people could post messages
and that idea of the web as a medium where
(05:55):
people could talk to each other on it as well.
You know, it's had like email and Usenet and I
and things before that, but the web as a platform
for interacting with other people was really exciting to me,
and I think that's what got me on the path
kind of to wearing them today, of building things that
allowed people to interact. And I think you know that
ultimately the changes that you know have been bought about
(06:15):
in society by the Internet, by the advancement of technology.
There's a lot of like information like available to you
now that's hugely different. And I think the really big
impact has been in and still is with the Internet
in connecting people in ways that you weren't able to before.
You know, the collapsing of geographic borders and geographic distance
and the you know, the world. The world is a
(06:36):
lot more accessible and people are a lot more connected
to each other than ever before. Well, and I also
love that with your story we see the transition from
what we used to call the web one point oh
model to the web two point oh. I'm curious, what
would you say was your first sort of leadership role
in in tech. Yeah, I definitely, you know, I got
(06:59):
into technology as I like creating stuff, not because I
wanted to be like a manager of people or a
leader or anything like that. That kind of fell into that.
So with the previous company, we've made website called earth
Flicker that was kind of at the very beginning of
web two dotto, which was photo sharing website and the
you know, we were very we started as a very
(07:19):
small company. We saw this as an a niche incredibly
at the time because Flicker launched in two thousand four.
It was novel the idea of putting allowing people to
put photos on a web page so other people could
see them, which sounds crazy because that wasn't even twenty
years ago, but we were just the first people that
really allowed you to do that. You know, prior to that,
(07:40):
there had been the introduction of a digital cameras, the
very first cell phones with cameras in them. But people
are starting to carry cameras around with them and take
a lot of photos. But really the only thing you
could do was upload them to have them printed at
a Walgreens or like have them put on a mouse
pad or on a mug. And so it's like there's
that shift of people were starting to take a lot
more photos, but there's nothing to do with them, and
(08:01):
we just thought, let's put them on a web page.
And we've got really lucky with the timing. I think
it was more and more people were starting to get
on the internet. More and more people were starting to
take photos and not have anything to do with them,
and suddenly it started blowing up and it was, you know,
at the time, a big phenomenon. And we sold that
in two thousand five to Yahoo, and as the company grew,
(08:24):
I was the head of engineering and so it became
the leader there on the engineering side, kind of by accident. Well,
what were some of the lessons you learned? I mean,
to make that transition from like purely a creative standpoint
to a leadership one, it was incredibly difficult, and I
think the reason being that all of my career and
kind of pre career up to that point, I identified
(08:47):
as a programmer, as a software engineer, and that's how like,
that's what I loved doing, and also how I was
kind of deriving my sense of self worth and the
transition to being in a leadership role certainly as today
where I'm not writing code anymore, not professionally, and I'm
further and further away from you know that the thing
which I enjoyed doing is really difficult to make that
(09:10):
shift away from how you see yourself providing value and
what it is you do and what valuable use of
time is. But the realization that is just much higher
leverage to not do that that, however good a programmer
I was, and I'm not saying I was a great
programmer by any stretch of the imagination, Like five people
are always going to be better, and ten people and
(09:31):
a hundred people and a thousand people are always going
to have better leverage. So you know that switch in
mindset to you know, I make things too, I'm a
multiplier on other people making things. I think is the
is the big shift, And as the team evolved over years,
that was kind of a gradual process. I'm pretty happy
with it today. I'm pretty at peace with me you
place in the world. But I think that was a
(09:52):
big shift, and that was the difficult for me. Yeah,
I imagine that's the sort of thing that you realize
more upon reflection than you do while you're actually going
through it. I think that's both true and there's an
aspect of like like having to come to terms with
it at the time, as well of like, I shouldn't
be spending my time this way because it's not actually valuable.
(10:12):
And I think that's still a lesson at any scale
that you need to keep reminding yourself is what is
a valuable use of time versus what feels like you
could be doing right now. And I think that's often
a challenge for leaders at any scale to separate the
strategic from the tactical, because as organizations get larger, there's
a never ending stream of things you could be doing
(10:34):
that feel urgent and feel simple and straightforward and are
probably rewarding to do as well. They're like immediate gratification.
You get this thing done. It's done. So being able
to take a step back and think, how should I
be spending the balance of my time today, this week,
this month, What is the time that's going into our
next six months or next year, the next three or
five years versus tasks I can complete today. And I
(10:56):
think that in some ways, growing as a leader is
that instant cycle of understanding that you need to be
more strategic and less tactical and keep that balance correct
so I think it's a mental shift to understand that
while that feels rewarding, that isn't the thing that's going
to make you the most successful over the long term. Well,
(11:17):
this is this is fascinating, and we've we've kind of
bled into obviously your time at Slack. I'm curious to
hear more about when you first started working on the
thing that would become Slack and the genesis of those
ideas and how it kind of coalesced and all the
way up into the early era of Slack. Can you
(11:37):
talk a little bit about that. Yeah, So we left
Flicker in two thousand nine, so quite a while ago. Now,
with the intention of making video games. When I say
video games, lots of people think of like, you know,
Call of Duty, shooting people, competitive violent games very much,
not that we're trying to make a web based, massively
(11:58):
multiplayer game around kind of exploration and community and cooperation.
The fact that it's kind of hard for me to
describe it, I think is one of the challenges. The
game was called Glitch, and it had hundreds of excited players.
Unfortunately at a time when we needed thousands or tens
of thousands for the scale of investment, and ultimately the
game didn't work out and we were hounded down. But
(12:19):
during the four years of building the game, we were
split between San Francisco, Vancouver, and New York, and we
built a set of tools to be able to work together.
And we built it on top of I r C
Internet Relay Chat, which is kind of a multi user
chat that's been around since the eighties, never very widely
used and it's long long past it's heyday. Even then
(12:41):
in the in the mid two thousands, and it was
very capable, but very difficult for normal humans to use.
It's like super nerdy doesn't have the ability to see
messages when you weren't online. You can't search for things,
there's a record of what happened in the past. It's
very hard to share files. And so we start of
building all of these tools and modifications on top of
(13:03):
C to allow us to to communicate and work better.
And it was all things built for expediency. So, you know,
the smartphone had come out semi recently. There was no
ir C client for for the iPhone at the time.
We're like, okay, let's make a web page so that
we can at least see the messages from the phone
while we're at lunch in case something happens while we're
at lunch, and much of the building kind of just
happened like that of functionality that we needed to operate,
(13:25):
and by the time we shut the game down, kind
of the whole business was just running on top of
this system. So every bit of business process. So if
a illustrator design something, then they'd upload the file to
pass it off to the animators and it would go
through an approval process and then be integrated into the
game asset management system, and that would all happen through
this messaging platform. And the same for like every time
(13:47):
somebody new signed up for the game or bought something,
that would all flow in and if we needed to
reboot a server, that would happen out of this system too.
It just became kind of the central nervous system of
the company, if you like. We also realized that we
really loved working this way and we would want to
continue to work this way whatever we were doing, and
so maybe the system that we built could be useful
to other companies like us, and at the time, we're
(14:10):
thinking other kind of tech oriented small companies, maybe up
to about fifty people and this would be a good
solution for them, and that's where Slack was born. That's
a fascinating story. It reminds me about a couple of
other companies that kind of started off as offshoots of
something else and then took a life of their own
(14:30):
and ended up eclipsing the company that spawned it. Yeah, exactly.
And we started building Slack at the beginning of a year,
and after a couple of months, we started using it
does selves internally, like we switched over from our previous
system onto this system. Then we enlisted kind of our
first set of alpha testers, who were companies in San
(14:52):
Francisco in the Bay Area that we're friends with. Basically,
it's like went out to our friends and said, please
use this tool for your team, which at first was
a super hard proposition because for Star, you're not just
asking somebody to give it a go. You're asking somebody
to convince their team to give it a go, because
you can't use like by yourself, you need to use
it with a team of people. And secondly, we're coming
off the back of failing to make games, so we're saying, well,
(15:15):
we just failed at what we did, but try this
thing and get your whole company to use it, and
you know, risk your company's productivity on this thing that
we are trying to convince you is going to be successful.
And so I think that was a kind of hard proposition,
a tough sell. But we did eventually enlist some of
our friendly companies to use it, and that was such
an important, you know, kind of part of the development
(15:37):
of it. We went from us using it ourselves with
our idiosyncratic way of working that we're built up over
several years, to just like other normal people who who
hadn't been doing it for several years, trying to use it.
And we learned so much in that period, you know,
that really refined and shape the product over the next
few months as we got that feedback from my alpha testers.
I think that was incredibly important. And also the way
(15:59):
we tried to build Flicker, in the way we've tried
to build everything is with a lot of kind of
real time understanding it ourselves and how we use it,
but also a lot of kind of real time customer feedback,
spending up a huge man time talking talking to customers,
watching customers and how they use things and understand what's
what works for them and what doesn't. And I think
that that customer feedback loop is so important in you know,
(16:20):
kind of consumer ish products, and I think one of
the things that's really made that possible at scale in
the last decade um they think a lot of people
kind of skip over is Twitter. And the reason for that.
In the kind of pre Twitter era, if you used
some product and it was not like terrible but annoyingly bad,
(16:43):
there was some problem with it, it's just like, yeah,
this sucks. It's possible. You might have told your friends
or your partner about that over a drink, and and
that's as far as it would go. It's not like,
you know, you had a poor experience. Normal people don't
write to customer support and say I had a poor
but not terrible experience, and here's what I think. But
for whatever reason, Twitter broke down that barrier, and now
(17:06):
if people have a slightly annoying experience, they will get
on the internet and broadcast it, which on the one
hand is like, well that's a bit much, but on
the other hand, it's fantastic. It is free user feedback
at a level where you get user feedback even if
they're not super angry. Or super happy, you know that
big kind of area in the middle where people are
like a bit happy or a bit annoyed. We can
(17:27):
get thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of bits
to use a feedback completely for free, and that drove
a lot of a kind of early design its eration
still does today. We look at every one of those
and put that into the product development process and it's
it's amazing. It's you know, it's a free, free source
of constant user feedback. It's amazing. At T Mobile for business,
(17:51):
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(18:14):
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(18:37):
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mobile dot com. So you're getting user feedback, you're refining
(18:57):
the product, your learning what are the most common use cases,
things that might not have even applied in your in
your more idiosyncratic approach. At what point in the process
was it clear that you had really hit on something.
I think, on the one hand, I could say at
(19:18):
the point at which we we switched to our kind
of open beta, we allowed anybody to sign up and
start using Slack, and we kind of overnight had I
think it was something like eight thousand people sign up
to try it for their companies. It's like, whoa, that's okay,
we have something here. There's a buzz around it. But
at the same time, that was, you know, especially compared
to years later, it was a very small scale. So
(19:40):
it's like, okay, we think there's a product here, we
think this can turn into a business. But then over
the kind of next few years, it was a constant,
steady increment. Because it was slow and constant, there wasn't
that cliff moment of like, Wow, this is getting really
big or this is going to be really successful. It
was just getting a bit more successful every day, and
so we didn't really feel it. I think, you know,
(20:01):
when you then go back and look at the stats
at how it changed from kind of over the course
of six months or over a year, it looks stark,
But at the time we're in it, we were just
in it and it and it was growing around us.
And I think, you know, much like the success we
had with Flicker was is very attributable to being timing
it right with a lot of kind of extrinsic factors
(20:22):
that were just happening in the world. I think the
same thing happened with Slack. It has been the combination
of the kind of rise of consumer messaging. You know,
people made the switch from you don't email your friends anymore,
use WhatsApp or use eye message, and also the rise
of mobile being an actually important part of people's working lives.
It seems crazy, but back when we started Slack, people
(20:44):
didn't really use phones for work very much. You know,
there was like the the pre smartphone BlackBerry crowd with
their email, but that wasn't that many people. But now,
you know, phone is really essential part of your kind
of work, you know, software experience, and the shift to
the cloud, which I think is also one of those
things that just feels like it's been there forever now.
But the idea that you know, companies you would use
(21:07):
software hosted in the cloud is relatively new thing, especially
at the scale that it's at today. And I think
all of those things came together for something like Slack
to be inevitable just at the time we did it.
You know, if we've done it earlier, it would have
been too early. If we've done it later, somebody else
would have done it. So I think we've really lucked
into the timing, the kind of confluence of all of
(21:27):
those factors happening around the same time. Well, apart from Glitch,
I'm definitely sensing an ongoing theme of being at the
right place at the right time for some of these
I wanted to get more insight into what Cal's job
actually entails, as well as learn more about Slack's evolution
over the last few years. Yeah, so as a CTO.
(21:50):
I run our engineering organization, which is you know, a good,
good chunk of the company. Together with our chief product officer,
we make up the kind of R and D side
of the business um and I'd say like the primary
responsibility is Slack as a service that has to keep
running seven th six to five days a year. It's
a piece of infrastructure and people just expect it to
(22:11):
work when you you know, when your company organization runs
on Slack. If Slack is not working, then work stops,
especially in the you know, last year and a half,
as more and more companies are fully distributed, people are
working from home. It's a utility to people. So a
lot of the responsibility in general at Slack is around
we have to keep that working, keep that going the
whole time. But then on top of that, how do
(22:33):
we evolve that service to be able to offer it
to more and more people, whether that's in kind of
regulated industries with special compliance requirements. You know, building software
for small companies is very different from building software for
large banks or for healthcare providers or things of that nature.
And so it's a lot about how can we evolve
the product, add new features and capabilities while still you know,
(22:55):
maintaining reliability, security, compliance, all that kind of stuff. I think,
you know, the evolution over the last couple of years,
you know, with the pandemic. Seconds tool was obviously used
by a lot of companies, like in the office prior
to the pandemic, but I think this gave us a
really unique opportunity to be able to try and convince
(23:15):
more organizations that there are different ways to work that
you know, you we can build a set of tools
that allows you to you know, work in a distributed
manner without just duplicating how people worked when they're in
the office. I think big trend that we saw and
that we did ourselves was that at the beginning of
the pandemic, we wanted just take all of the ways
in which we worked in an office and lift them
(23:37):
up and put them on the internet, you know, And
that's you know, the massive success of zoom um has
been how can we take those meetings and just do
the same meetings go over the internet. And I think
that was good because it allowed companies to continue to operate.
But I think as the pandemic progress, what we're looking
at was how can we build processes and tools and
capabilities that allow people to approach work differently and make
(24:00):
the most of being in this distribute environment. So two
of the things which we launched recently things like huddles
in Slack, which is kind of always on voice chat
to allow you to transition from kind of messaging to
talking live back to messaging, have that all be searchable
in the same way, and many of our customers are
finding that's a really good alternative to scheduled meetings, So
(24:22):
we're seeing a lot of that. And then more recently
we launched a set of capabilities we call clips for
being able to record video or audio messages really easily
and then share those in the context of channels as well,
so that you know, can replace some kinds of stands
up and stand up and status meetings by having everybody
record little videos or easily doing kind of design presentations
(24:44):
within your team, things like that. So I think the
you know, it is still really a kind of fertile
ground for what are the tools that we need right
now and what are the tools that organization is going
to need over the next couple of years, because it
is just operating in such a different environment now and
that's going to change again as as companies are able
to open their offices back up mm hmm. And I
(25:05):
know that there are a lot of companies out there
that have sort of, at least for the foreseeable future,
planned out almost a hybrid approach to work. And to
your point, I don't think any of that would have
been possible, maybe even as recently as five years ago,
without the developments we've seen in the cloud space, in
the fact that we're seeing connectivity extend wirelessly which enables
(25:31):
all of the mobility. Uh, all of these pieces needed
to come into place for this to be possible, or
I think we would be in pretty dire straits when
it comes to our response to life during the pandemic. Yeah,
I think that's absolutely true. I think it was a
surprise to many organizations that it was possible for people
(25:52):
to kind of really overnight switch to everybody being remote
and business just continued. And I think that it's the
technology has come a long way really recently and enabled
it to be possible. And I think now people see
that it's possible, see the advantages, and a huge number
of people, the vast majority, really enjoy the flexibility that
(26:15):
they've been able to have over the last year and
a half. So while we will see a whole bunch
of returns of the office, and some organizations, you know,
like large banks, have said everybody's going to be back
in the office every day, it's going to be exactly
back to how it was. I think that's going to
be the kind of margin case because so many people
have seen it's possible for them to be productive, so
of course they're going to continue to work as they will,
(26:37):
and the office is still going to exist for the
majority of companies, it's going to be just such a
different experience. It's no longer going to be the place
where most people go every day to sit at an
individual desk and do individual work. It's going to be
a place where you go to do collaborative work, to
meet people, and that you don't go into every day.
I was curious to find out what cal thought about
(26:58):
emerging technologies, and I was surprised to discover that this
lover of speculative fiction has a pretty grounded approach toward futurism.
I came across a great story about uh some some
folks who essentially hacked a system to utilize Slack as
a user interface or back end to some Internet of
(27:21):
Things applications. Specifically, they had it so that they could
use a command in Slack to UH to turn on
a light outside of a meeting room to let people
know that the meeting room was in use. And as
someone who podcasts, I mean, we have the same sort
of kind of set up here. The thought of having
that so that I don't have to get up and
(27:42):
turn on a physical switch that appeals to me. But
beyond that, it just it opens up this idea of
of the creative and the hacker and the finding ways
to utilize systems to do things that perhaps even the
creators of those systems had not originally intended. Do you
kind of feel an affinity for that sort of hacker
(28:04):
ethos the idea of this is really cool what it does.
Let's see what happens if we try to make it
do this other thing. Absolutely, I think that's kind of
a key part of what we wanted to design into
Slack from the beginning, honestly, is the idea that there's
more and more software tools, more and more automation that
we use in our lives. You know, the kind of
(28:25):
the average number of like bits of SASS used by
you know, medium sized enterprise company is now like a
couple of thousand, which is sounds crazy, but there's more
and more bits of software for more and more kind
of niche roles. And that's both off the shelf software
but also you know, any any company at scale, what
is it? Mark and recent said every company is a
software company at a certain scale because you have to
(28:47):
build tools for what you're doing. UM, you know, specific
to to what you're doing, specific to the challenges you
have as an organization. And so I think one of
the really important things is, you know, Slack is orientered
around having a very open platform that anybody can be
all done. That is, whatever piece of software you're using
or whatever you're building, you can get data inter Slack,
and you can get data outer Slack, and you know,
(29:07):
command things like this. UM we've seen lots of really
interesting things from our customers. Who ever, a customer in
Japan who added kind of toilet door sensors to all
of their bathrooms so that they could know in Slack
if the bathroom was free, because it was on a
different floor and they didn't want to have to walk
all the way down there to know if the door
was locked. UM, and you know or you know, we
(29:29):
have customers who do things more related to their business
out in the fields, you know, so like vehicle fleet
that they manage can report in through Slack and things
like that, and Slack as an open platform on which
people can build things which we could never have imagined
and also things which didn't exist when we built Slack. Right,
there's new new technologies being developed constantly, and I think
that the you know, technologies products that are successful over
(29:52):
the next five to ten years are going to be
ones which allow you to work with other bits of
software and so, you know, in this phase of technology cycle,
it's how can you tie more things together and how
can you bring information and data into one place to
how you synthesize it all well. And I think that
philosophy also taps into something that is really important in
the open source world, which is that you can have
(30:15):
the smartest people in your organization all working together to
create stuff, but that collective intelligence is still a drop
in the ocean when you open it up to everyone
and you get all these ideas that you could not
have possibly come up with with the group of people
you've assembled, as well as the fact that you know
you've enabled someone else to succeed in whatever it was
(30:38):
they were doing. And I really like that that ethos.
One of the things that's our favorite topic to talk
about here on the Restless Ones is the rollout and
implementation of five G technologies. What role do you see
five G playing in the future of of work? I
think the kind of general availability of ubiquitous connection to
(30:59):
the Internet has changed how people think about location of
where they were. One of the factors that's played into
how things have gone over the last year and a
half is just the ability for it to happen. The
ability to you know, use your smartphone, use your laptop
from anywhere is huge and just cuts down one of
those otherwise hard constraints on how people work. Increasing requirements
(31:21):
for bandwidth and latency, you know, video and studies that
show that video latency has a huge effect on kind
of your interaction with co workers, That milliseconds make a
difference in being able to read people's body language in
a nonverbal communication, and so it is kind of default assumption.
It is the substrate that other things are built on
that just needs to to work all the time. And
(31:42):
you know, increasingly the Internet feels like a true utility
in the sense of parrel water and that just like
nothing works when it's not there. The idea of having
sort of a like a fiber level connection potentially without
having to actually have the fiber that is such a
freeing experience. Especially in a world where remote and mobile work,
(32:07):
We're going to see more solutions geared towards that future
hybrid work space. I think that are is going to
be increasingly reliant upon things like like high speed wireless
connections because that's what reality is requiring. I couldn't let
Cal go without asking him one more thing, what is
(32:28):
your favorite science fiction novel? Oh? That's a good one, Okay.
I would say my favorite science fiction novel is not
a super well known one. Um, it's a bit called
The Golden Age by John C. Wright. I think it
was from like two thousand one something like that, and
it just presents a view of the future that is
(32:48):
really quite different to how we live now. I think
a lot of my I love science fation. I read
a huge amount of it, and I think a lot
of it isn't too different to how the world is
and doesn't think big enough in terms of how society
everything about how the science interacts changes as technology advances,
so I think it still holds up and as people
to give it a read. Cal, thank you so much
(33:09):
for joining us. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you
so much for having me. It's been great. It really
is remarkable how technology enabled many organizations to adjust to
an entirely new approach to getting work done, and as
Cal pointed out, the future of work promises to include
at least some of the elements we've become accustomed to
(33:31):
during the pandemic. Knowing that there are companies that take
this notion as a starting point is actually really exciting.
I expect we're going to see some incredible innovation when
it comes to how we work and remain productive, and
how we derive value and satisfaction from our work, whether
we are headed into a crowded office or setting up
(33:53):
a temporary workstation on a beach somewhere. As broadband access grows,
reaching into communities and reads that previously had limited access
to such things, the constraints on how we do work disappear,
and this opens up new opportunities for us, creating new
ways to do business, encouraging new forms of innovation. It
(34:14):
starts to sound like one of those optimistic takes on
science fiction, only it's becoming reality. And it's only possible
because we have this amazing convergence of technologies like cloud computing,
the Internet of Things, and wireless five G connectivity. Make
sure to come back to the Restless Ones to hear
more conversations with pioneers in tech and leadership. I'm Jonathan
(34:37):
Strickland at T Mobile. For business, unconventional thinking means we
see things differently so you can focus on what matters most.
That's why we've built America's largest, fastest five G network
while remaining a partner who delivers exceptional customer support and
five G included in every plan so you get it all.
(34:58):
Unconventional thinking is better for business. Fastest five G based
on average overall combined five G speeds according to Open
Signal Awards USA five G User Experience Report October one.
See five D device coverage and access details at T
mobile dot com
The ability to use your smartphone, use your laptop from
anywhere is huge and just cuts down one of those
otherwise hard constraints on how people work. Increasing requirements for
bandwidth and latency and a video and studies that show
that video latency has a huge effect on kind of
your interaction with co workers, That milliseconds make a difference
(00:22):
in being able to read people's body language in a
nonverbal communication. And you know, increasingly the Internet feels like
a true utility in the sense of peril water and
that just like nothing works when it's not there. Welcome
to the restless ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I've spent more
than a decade really learning about technology, what makes it tick,
(00:45):
and then describing and explaining that to my audience. But
it's the conversations with the world's most unconventional thinkers, the
leaders at the intersection of technology and business that fascinate
me the most. In partnership with T Mobile for Business,
I explore the unique set of challenges that c t
o s and c I o s and other tech
(01:06):
executives face from advancements in cloud and edge computing, software
as a service, Internet of things, and of course five
g we are often left wondering how the leading minds
in business continue to thrive. Let's find out. Our guest
(01:29):
today is Cal Henderson, chief Technology officer of Slack. Chances
are you're familiar with Slack. The collaborative platform has proven
to be a popular tool even before the days of
the pandemic. Once the business world was forced to pivot
in the wake of COVID nineteen, Slack's role in how
many of us do our work became undeniable. I sat
(01:53):
down with Cal to talk about his background in software development,
how he navigated the transition from pro grammar to a
leadership role, and how he sees technology playing a part
in how we do our work in the future. Cal,
just to start off with, I want to thank you
for joining us on the Restless Ones and welcome to
the program. Thank you for having me excited to be here.
(02:17):
I'm very excited to have a chance to speak with you.
So can you tell us when and how you first
started to get interested in the world of technology. Yeah,
it was from a really young age. I grew up
in the UK um kind of in the countryside as well,
and when I was really young. I have a slightly
(02:37):
older cousin who got one of the first kind of
home computers, one of those things you plugged into your TV,
and it came with a basic interpret city, right, little
programs in basic and I saw this and I was like,
this is so cool. This is now my obsession. And
then a few years later I was like, in fact,
this is what I'm gonna do for the rest of
my life. I don't know that there are jobs doing this,
but this would be cool if there was a job.
And so from like a really young age, like when
(02:59):
a seven or something like that, I was obsessed with programming.
And at the time, obviously technology computers were very different
because it's the pre Internet era, UM, and so it
was about like making local applications, and in the like
nineties graduated to making like Windows apps. But then when
the Internet and when the Web came around, UM, that
was like opened up a whole kind of set of
(03:21):
possibilities because I could make something and I love just
like making software for for people, and so it was
it was like a hobby and a passion. I guess
it still is. And I just knew I wanted to
make software, and it's just like the making of stuff.
It's such a you know, kind of interesting medium. I
just love making software that other people use, especially things
that a lot of people use every day and you know,
(03:43):
makes their lives a bit better. Software is just software,
but it's a tool and has become increasingly important in
everybody's lives and everything everybody does, and that's just such
a cool thing to be part of it. I mean,
you're extremely humble, but I would argue that obviously software
is such an intrinsic part of almost every aspect of
our lives today, whether you are conscious of it or not,
(04:07):
it's present in some regard. Uh, And of course the
hardware that underlies it is equally as important. That you
really got into a field that was just starting to explode,
as I would imagine that by the time you were
first programming in basic, that was probably around the same
time that a lot of people weren't really familiar with
(04:30):
computers on a personal level at all. They had heard
of them and they thought that's a thing that does math.
So you kind of got in right at that perfect moment,
I guess so. I think if I were older, I
think that would have been more of a struggle because
I was there or that threshold of kind of the
explosion of the web, the explosion of personal computers, and
then quite a bit later, you know, the the kind
(04:52):
of mobile shift, which I think has been the really
big shift there and how people think about technology. M
But yeah, it was just well time, you know, I
started my career, like, you know, a decade before Facebook
existed and kind of you know, before the dot com
boom of the of two thousand, which was just such
an exciting time for this thing that was a passion
(05:13):
of mine to turn into something you could make money from.
Like that wasn't my intention. Did it as a passion
because I love making stuff and it's kind of incredible
now the influence that it has on society and how
important it is in everything. But that wasn't the case
twenty five years ago. M M. Well, what what was
your first you know, professional gig in the world of
(05:35):
programming and software development. There was an advertising agency in
the UK and I made some websites for for brands
at that company, and it's like, this is really cool.
I got into static websites. But then it was what
if we had a community around a brand and had
of for like a forum where people could post messages
and that idea of the web as a medium where
(05:55):
people could talk to each other on it as well.
You know, it's had like email and Usenet and I
and things before that, but the web as a platform
for interacting with other people was really exciting to me,
and I think that's what got me on the path
kind of to wearing them today, of building things that
allowed people to interact. And I think you know that
ultimately the changes that you know have been bought about
(06:15):
in society by the Internet, by the advancement of technology.
There's a lot of like information like available to you
now that's hugely different. And I think the really big
impact has been in and still is with the Internet
in connecting people in ways that you weren't able to before.
You know, the collapsing of geographic borders and geographic distance
and the you know, the world. The world is a
(06:36):
lot more accessible and people are a lot more connected
to each other than ever before. Well, and I also
love that with your story we see the transition from
what we used to call the web one point oh
model to the web two point oh. I'm curious, what
would you say was your first sort of leadership role
in in tech. Yeah, I definitely, you know, I got
(06:59):
into technology as I like creating stuff, not because I
wanted to be like a manager of people or a
leader or anything like that. That kind of fell into that.
So with the previous company, we've made website called earth
Flicker that was kind of at the very beginning of
web two dotto, which was photo sharing website and the
you know, we were very we started as a very
(07:19):
small company. We saw this as an a niche incredibly
at the time because Flicker launched in two thousand four.
It was novel the idea of putting allowing people to
put photos on a web page so other people could
see them, which sounds crazy because that wasn't even twenty
years ago, but we were just the first people that
really allowed you to do that. You know, prior to that,
(07:40):
there had been the introduction of a digital cameras, the
very first cell phones with cameras in them. But people
are starting to carry cameras around with them and take
a lot of photos. But really the only thing you
could do was upload them to have them printed at
a Walgreens or like have them put on a mouse
pad or on a mug. And so it's like there's
that shift of people were starting to take a lot
more photos, but there's nothing to do with them, and
(08:01):
we just thought, let's put them on a web page.
And we've got really lucky with the timing. I think
it was more and more people were starting to get
on the internet. More and more people were starting to
take photos and not have anything to do with them,
and suddenly it started blowing up and it was, you know,
at the time, a big phenomenon. And we sold that
in two thousand five to Yahoo, and as the company grew,
(08:24):
I was the head of engineering and so it became
the leader there on the engineering side, kind of by accident. Well,
what were some of the lessons you learned? I mean,
to make that transition from like purely a creative standpoint
to a leadership one, it was incredibly difficult, and I
think the reason being that all of my career and
kind of pre career up to that point, I identified
(08:47):
as a programmer, as a software engineer, and that's how like,
that's what I loved doing, and also how I was
kind of deriving my sense of self worth and the
transition to being in a leadership role certainly as today
where I'm not writing code anymore, not professionally, and I'm
further and further away from you know that the thing
which I enjoyed doing is really difficult to make that
(09:10):
shift away from how you see yourself providing value and
what it is you do and what valuable use of
time is. But the realization that is just much higher
leverage to not do that that, however good a programmer
I was, and I'm not saying I was a great
programmer by any stretch of the imagination, Like five people
are always going to be better, and ten people and
(09:31):
a hundred people and a thousand people are always going
to have better leverage. So you know that switch in
mindset to you know, I make things too, I'm a
multiplier on other people making things. I think is the
is the big shift, And as the team evolved over years,
that was kind of a gradual process. I'm pretty happy
with it today. I'm pretty at peace with me you
place in the world. But I think that was a
(09:52):
big shift, and that was the difficult for me. Yeah,
I imagine that's the sort of thing that you realize
more upon reflection than you do while you're actually going
through it. I think that's both true and there's an
aspect of like like having to come to terms with
it at the time, as well of like, I shouldn't
be spending my time this way because it's not actually valuable.
(10:12):
And I think that's still a lesson at any scale
that you need to keep reminding yourself is what is
a valuable use of time versus what feels like you
could be doing right now. And I think that's often
a challenge for leaders at any scale to separate the
strategic from the tactical, because as organizations get larger, there's
a never ending stream of things you could be doing
(10:34):
that feel urgent and feel simple and straightforward and are
probably rewarding to do as well. They're like immediate gratification.
You get this thing done. It's done. So being able
to take a step back and think, how should I
be spending the balance of my time today, this week,
this month, What is the time that's going into our
next six months or next year, the next three or
five years versus tasks I can complete today. And I
(10:56):
think that in some ways, growing as a leader is
that instant cycle of understanding that you need to be
more strategic and less tactical and keep that balance correct
so I think it's a mental shift to understand that
while that feels rewarding, that isn't the thing that's going
to make you the most successful over the long term. Well,
(11:17):
this is this is fascinating, and we've we've kind of
bled into obviously your time at Slack. I'm curious to
hear more about when you first started working on the
thing that would become Slack and the genesis of those
ideas and how it kind of coalesced and all the
way up into the early era of Slack. Can you
(11:37):
talk a little bit about that. Yeah, So we left
Flicker in two thousand nine, so quite a while ago. Now,
with the intention of making video games. When I say
video games, lots of people think of like, you know,
Call of Duty, shooting people, competitive violent games very much,
not that we're trying to make a web based, massively
(11:58):
multiplayer game around kind of exploration and community and cooperation.
The fact that it's kind of hard for me to
describe it, I think is one of the challenges. The
game was called Glitch, and it had hundreds of excited players.
Unfortunately at a time when we needed thousands or tens
of thousands for the scale of investment, and ultimately the
game didn't work out and we were hounded down. But
(12:19):
during the four years of building the game, we were
split between San Francisco, Vancouver, and New York, and we
built a set of tools to be able to work together.
And we built it on top of I r C
Internet Relay Chat, which is kind of a multi user
chat that's been around since the eighties, never very widely
used and it's long long past it's heyday. Even then
(12:41):
in the in the mid two thousands, and it was
very capable, but very difficult for normal humans to use.
It's like super nerdy doesn't have the ability to see
messages when you weren't online. You can't search for things,
there's a record of what happened in the past. It's
very hard to share files. And so we start of
building all of these tools and modifications on top of
(13:03):
C to allow us to to communicate and work better.
And it was all things built for expediency. So, you know,
the smartphone had come out semi recently. There was no
ir C client for for the iPhone at the time.
We're like, okay, let's make a web page so that
we can at least see the messages from the phone
while we're at lunch in case something happens while we're
at lunch, and much of the building kind of just
happened like that of functionality that we needed to operate,
(13:25):
and by the time we shut the game down, kind
of the whole business was just running on top of
this system. So every bit of business process. So if
a illustrator design something, then they'd upload the file to
pass it off to the animators and it would go
through an approval process and then be integrated into the
game asset management system, and that would all happen through
this messaging platform. And the same for like every time
(13:47):
somebody new signed up for the game or bought something,
that would all flow in and if we needed to
reboot a server, that would happen out of this system too.
It just became kind of the central nervous system of
the company, if you like. We also realized that we
really loved working this way and we would want to
continue to work this way whatever we were doing, and
so maybe the system that we built could be useful
to other companies like us, and at the time, we're
(14:10):
thinking other kind of tech oriented small companies, maybe up
to about fifty people and this would be a good
solution for them, and that's where Slack was born. That's
a fascinating story. It reminds me about a couple of
other companies that kind of started off as offshoots of
something else and then took a life of their own
(14:30):
and ended up eclipsing the company that spawned it. Yeah, exactly.
And we started building Slack at the beginning of a year,
and after a couple of months, we started using it
does selves internally, like we switched over from our previous
system onto this system. Then we enlisted kind of our
first set of alpha testers, who were companies in San
(14:52):
Francisco in the Bay Area that we're friends with. Basically,
it's like went out to our friends and said, please
use this tool for your team, which at first was
a super hard proposition because for Star, you're not just
asking somebody to give it a go. You're asking somebody
to convince their team to give it a go, because
you can't use like by yourself, you need to use
it with a team of people. And secondly, we're coming
off the back of failing to make games, so we're saying, well,
(15:15):
we just failed at what we did, but try this
thing and get your whole company to use it, and
you know, risk your company's productivity on this thing that
we are trying to convince you is going to be successful.
And so I think that was a kind of hard proposition,
a tough sell. But we did eventually enlist some of
our friendly companies to use it, and that was such
an important, you know, kind of part of the development
(15:37):
of it. We went from us using it ourselves with
our idiosyncratic way of working that we're built up over
several years, to just like other normal people who who
hadn't been doing it for several years, trying to use it.
And we learned so much in that period, you know,
that really refined and shape the product over the next
few months as we got that feedback from my alpha testers.
I think that was incredibly important. And also the way
(15:59):
we tried to build Flicker, in the way we've tried
to build everything is with a lot of kind of
real time understanding it ourselves and how we use it,
but also a lot of kind of real time customer feedback,
spending up a huge man time talking talking to customers,
watching customers and how they use things and understand what's
what works for them and what doesn't. And I think
that that customer feedback loop is so important in you know,
(16:20):
kind of consumer ish products, and I think one of
the things that's really made that possible at scale in
the last decade um they think a lot of people
kind of skip over is Twitter. And the reason for that.
In the kind of pre Twitter era, if you used
some product and it was not like terrible but annoyingly bad,
(16:43):
there was some problem with it, it's just like, yeah,
this sucks. It's possible. You might have told your friends
or your partner about that over a drink, and and
that's as far as it would go. It's not like,
you know, you had a poor experience. Normal people don't
write to customer support and say I had a poor
but not terrible experience, and here's what I think. But
for whatever reason, Twitter broke down that barrier, and now
(17:06):
if people have a slightly annoying experience, they will get
on the internet and broadcast it, which on the one
hand is like, well that's a bit much, but on
the other hand, it's fantastic. It is free user feedback
at a level where you get user feedback even if
they're not super angry. Or super happy, you know that
big kind of area in the middle where people are
like a bit happy or a bit annoyed. We can
(17:27):
get thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of bits
to use a feedback completely for free, and that drove
a lot of a kind of early design its eration
still does today. We look at every one of those
and put that into the product development process and it's
it's amazing. It's you know, it's a free, free source
of constant user feedback. It's amazing. At T Mobile for business,
(17:51):
unconventional thinking means we see things differently, so you can
focus on what matters most. Where some see another small town,
we see businesses in need of connectivity. So we built
the largest five G network to cover cities, towns, and
the most interstate miles in between. Where some see a
caller in a queue, we see an opportunity for our
experts to provide solutions without transfers. Where some see another
(18:14):
virtual meeting, we see five G enabling wireless real time
translations almost anywhere you do business. Our unique approach built
America's largest, fastest five G network and also delivers exceptional
customer support and five G included in every plan, so
you get it all without trade offs. Unconventional thinking is
better for business. T Mobile for Business fastest five G
(18:37):
based on average overall combined five G speeds according to
Open Signal Awards USA five G User Experience Report October.
See five G device coverage and access details at to
mobile dot com. So you're getting user feedback, you're refining
(18:57):
the product, your learning what are the most common use cases,
things that might not have even applied in your in
your more idiosyncratic approach. At what point in the process
was it clear that you had really hit on something.
I think, on the one hand, I could say at
(19:18):
the point at which we we switched to our kind
of open beta, we allowed anybody to sign up and
start using Slack, and we kind of overnight had I
think it was something like eight thousand people sign up
to try it for their companies. It's like, whoa, that's okay,
we have something here. There's a buzz around it. But
at the same time, that was, you know, especially compared
to years later, it was a very small scale. So
(19:40):
it's like, okay, we think there's a product here, we
think this can turn into a business. But then over
the kind of next few years, it was a constant,
steady increment. Because it was slow and constant, there wasn't
that cliff moment of like, Wow, this is getting really
big or this is going to be really successful. It
was just getting a bit more successful every day, and
so we didn't really feel it. I think, you know,
(20:01):
when you then go back and look at the stats
at how it changed from kind of over the course
of six months or over a year, it looks stark,
But at the time we're in it, we were just
in it and it and it was growing around us.
And I think, you know, much like the success we
had with Flicker was is very attributable to being timing
it right with a lot of kind of extrinsic factors
(20:22):
that were just happening in the world. I think the
same thing happened with Slack. It has been the combination
of the kind of rise of consumer messaging. You know,
people made the switch from you don't email your friends anymore,
use WhatsApp or use eye message, and also the rise
of mobile being an actually important part of people's working lives.
It seems crazy, but back when we started Slack, people
(20:44):
didn't really use phones for work very much. You know,
there was like the the pre smartphone BlackBerry crowd with
their email, but that wasn't that many people. But now,
you know, phone is really essential part of your kind
of work, you know, software experience, and the shift to
the cloud, which I think is also one of those
things that just feels like it's been there forever now.
But the idea that you know, companies you would use
(21:07):
software hosted in the cloud is relatively new thing, especially
at the scale that it's at today. And I think
all of those things came together for something like Slack
to be inevitable just at the time we did it.
You know, if we've done it earlier, it would have
been too early. If we've done it later, somebody else
would have done it. So I think we've really lucked
into the timing, the kind of confluence of all of
(21:27):
those factors happening around the same time. Well, apart from Glitch,
I'm definitely sensing an ongoing theme of being at the
right place at the right time for some of these
I wanted to get more insight into what Cal's job
actually entails, as well as learn more about Slack's evolution
over the last few years. Yeah, so as a CTO.
(21:50):
I run our engineering organization, which is you know, a good,
good chunk of the company. Together with our chief product officer,
we make up the kind of R and D side
of the business um and I'd say like the primary
responsibility is Slack as a service that has to keep
running seven th six to five days a year. It's
a piece of infrastructure and people just expect it to
(22:11):
work when you you know, when your company organization runs
on Slack. If Slack is not working, then work stops,
especially in the you know, last year and a half,
as more and more companies are fully distributed, people are
working from home. It's a utility to people. So a
lot of the responsibility in general at Slack is around
we have to keep that working, keep that going the
whole time. But then on top of that, how do
(22:33):
we evolve that service to be able to offer it
to more and more people, whether that's in kind of
regulated industries with special compliance requirements. You know, building software
for small companies is very different from building software for
large banks or for healthcare providers or things of that nature.
And so it's a lot about how can we evolve
the product, add new features and capabilities while still you know,
(22:55):
maintaining reliability, security, compliance, all that kind of stuff. I think,
you know, the evolution over the last couple of years,
you know, with the pandemic. Seconds tool was obviously used
by a lot of companies, like in the office prior
to the pandemic, but I think this gave us a
really unique opportunity to be able to try and convince
(23:15):
more organizations that there are different ways to work that
you know, you we can build a set of tools
that allows you to you know, work in a distributed
manner without just duplicating how people worked when they're in
the office. I think big trend that we saw and
that we did ourselves was that at the beginning of
the pandemic, we wanted just take all of the ways
in which we worked in an office and lift them
(23:37):
up and put them on the internet, you know, And
that's you know, the massive success of zoom um has
been how can we take those meetings and just do
the same meetings go over the internet. And I think
that was good because it allowed companies to continue to operate.
But I think as the pandemic progress, what we're looking
at was how can we build processes and tools and
capabilities that allow people to approach work differently and make
(24:00):
the most of being in this distribute environment. So two
of the things which we launched recently things like huddles
in Slack, which is kind of always on voice chat
to allow you to transition from kind of messaging to
talking live back to messaging, have that all be searchable
in the same way, and many of our customers are
finding that's a really good alternative to scheduled meetings, So
(24:22):
we're seeing a lot of that. And then more recently
we launched a set of capabilities we call clips for
being able to record video or audio messages really easily
and then share those in the context of channels as well,
so that you know, can replace some kinds of stands
up and stand up and status meetings by having everybody
record little videos or easily doing kind of design presentations
(24:44):
within your team, things like that. So I think the
you know, it is still really a kind of fertile
ground for what are the tools that we need right
now and what are the tools that organization is going
to need over the next couple of years, because it
is just operating in such a different environment now and
that's going to change again as as companies are able
to open their offices back up mm hmm. And I
(25:05):
know that there are a lot of companies out there
that have sort of, at least for the foreseeable future,
planned out almost a hybrid approach to work. And to
your point, I don't think any of that would have
been possible, maybe even as recently as five years ago,
without the developments we've seen in the cloud space, in
the fact that we're seeing connectivity extend wirelessly which enables
(25:31):
all of the mobility. Uh, all of these pieces needed
to come into place for this to be possible, or
I think we would be in pretty dire straits when
it comes to our response to life during the pandemic. Yeah,
I think that's absolutely true. I think it was a
surprise to many organizations that it was possible for people
(25:52):
to kind of really overnight switch to everybody being remote
and business just continued. And I think that it's the
technology has come a long way really recently and enabled
it to be possible. And I think now people see
that it's possible, see the advantages, and a huge number
of people, the vast majority, really enjoy the flexibility that
(26:15):
they've been able to have over the last year and
a half. So while we will see a whole bunch
of returns of the office, and some organizations, you know,
like large banks, have said everybody's going to be back
in the office every day, it's going to be exactly
back to how it was. I think that's going to
be the kind of margin case because so many people
have seen it's possible for them to be productive, so
of course they're going to continue to work as they will,
(26:37):
and the office is still going to exist for the
majority of companies, it's going to be just such a
different experience. It's no longer going to be the place
where most people go every day to sit at an
individual desk and do individual work. It's going to be
a place where you go to do collaborative work, to
meet people, and that you don't go into every day.
I was curious to find out what cal thought about
(26:58):
emerging technologies, and I was surprised to discover that this
lover of speculative fiction has a pretty grounded approach toward futurism.
I came across a great story about uh some some
folks who essentially hacked a system to utilize Slack as
a user interface or back end to some Internet of
(27:21):
Things applications. Specifically, they had it so that they could
use a command in Slack to UH to turn on
a light outside of a meeting room to let people
know that the meeting room was in use. And as
someone who podcasts, I mean, we have the same sort
of kind of set up here. The thought of having
that so that I don't have to get up and
(27:42):
turn on a physical switch that appeals to me. But
beyond that, it just it opens up this idea of
of the creative and the hacker and the finding ways
to utilize systems to do things that perhaps even the
creators of those systems had not originally intended. Do you
kind of feel an affinity for that sort of hacker
(28:04):
ethos the idea of this is really cool what it does.
Let's see what happens if we try to make it
do this other thing. Absolutely, I think that's kind of
a key part of what we wanted to design into
Slack from the beginning, honestly, is the idea that there's
more and more software tools, more and more automation that
we use in our lives. You know, the kind of
(28:25):
the average number of like bits of SASS used by
you know, medium sized enterprise company is now like a
couple of thousand, which is sounds crazy, but there's more
and more bits of software for more and more kind
of niche roles. And that's both off the shelf software
but also you know, any any company at scale, what
is it? Mark and recent said every company is a
software company at a certain scale because you have to
(28:47):
build tools for what you're doing. UM, you know, specific
to to what you're doing, specific to the challenges you
have as an organization. And so I think one of
the really important things is, you know, Slack is orientered
around having a very open platform that anybody can be
all done. That is, whatever piece of software you're using
or whatever you're building, you can get data inter Slack,
and you can get data outer Slack, and you know,
(29:07):
command things like this. UM we've seen lots of really
interesting things from our customers. Who ever, a customer in
Japan who added kind of toilet door sensors to all
of their bathrooms so that they could know in Slack
if the bathroom was free, because it was on a
different floor and they didn't want to have to walk
all the way down there to know if the door
was locked. UM, and you know or you know, we
(29:29):
have customers who do things more related to their business
out in the fields, you know, so like vehicle fleet
that they manage can report in through Slack and things
like that, and Slack as an open platform on which
people can build things which we could never have imagined
and also things which didn't exist when we built Slack. Right,
there's new new technologies being developed constantly, and I think
that the you know, technologies products that are successful over
(29:52):
the next five to ten years are going to be
ones which allow you to work with other bits of
software and so, you know, in this phase of technology cycle,
it's how can you tie more things together and how
can you bring information and data into one place to
how you synthesize it all well. And I think that
philosophy also taps into something that is really important in
the open source world, which is that you can have
(30:15):
the smartest people in your organization all working together to
create stuff, but that collective intelligence is still a drop
in the ocean when you open it up to everyone
and you get all these ideas that you could not
have possibly come up with with the group of people
you've assembled, as well as the fact that you know
you've enabled someone else to succeed in whatever it was
(30:38):
they were doing. And I really like that that ethos.
One of the things that's our favorite topic to talk
about here on the Restless Ones is the rollout and
implementation of five G technologies. What role do you see
five G playing in the future of of work? I
think the kind of general availability of ubiquitous connection to
(30:59):
the Internet has changed how people think about location of
where they were. One of the factors that's played into
how things have gone over the last year and a
half is just the ability for it to happen. The
ability to you know, use your smartphone, use your laptop
from anywhere is huge and just cuts down one of
those otherwise hard constraints on how people work. Increasing requirements
(31:21):
for bandwidth and latency, you know, video and studies that
show that video latency has a huge effect on kind
of your interaction with co workers, That milliseconds make a
difference in being able to read people's body language in
a nonverbal communication, and so it is kind of default assumption.
It is the substrate that other things are built on
that just needs to to work all the time. And
(31:42):
you know, increasingly the Internet feels like a true utility
in the sense of parrel water and that just like
nothing works when it's not there. The idea of having
sort of a like a fiber level connection potentially without
having to actually have the fiber that is such a
freeing experience. Especially in a world where remote and mobile work,
(32:07):
We're going to see more solutions geared towards that future
hybrid work space. I think that are is going to
be increasingly reliant upon things like like high speed wireless
connections because that's what reality is requiring. I couldn't let
Cal go without asking him one more thing, what is
(32:28):
your favorite science fiction novel? Oh? That's a good one, Okay.
I would say my favorite science fiction novel is not
a super well known one. Um, it's a bit called
The Golden Age by John C. Wright. I think it
was from like two thousand one something like that, and
it just presents a view of the future that is
(32:48):
really quite different to how we live now. I think
a lot of my I love science fation. I read
a huge amount of it, and I think a lot
of it isn't too different to how the world is
and doesn't think big enough in terms of how society
everything about how the science interacts changes as technology advances,
so I think it still holds up and as people
to give it a read. Cal, thank you so much
(33:09):
for joining us. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you
so much for having me. It's been great. It really
is remarkable how technology enabled many organizations to adjust to
an entirely new approach to getting work done, and as
Cal pointed out, the future of work promises to include
at least some of the elements we've become accustomed to
(33:31):
during the pandemic. Knowing that there are companies that take
this notion as a starting point is actually really exciting.
I expect we're going to see some incredible innovation when
it comes to how we work and remain productive, and
how we derive value and satisfaction from our work, whether
we are headed into a crowded office or setting up
(33:53):
a temporary workstation on a beach somewhere. As broadband access grows,
reaching into communities and reads that previously had limited access
to such things, the constraints on how we do work disappear,
and this opens up new opportunities for us, creating new
ways to do business, encouraging new forms of innovation. It
(34:14):
starts to sound like one of those optimistic takes on
science fiction, only it's becoming reality. And it's only possible
because we have this amazing convergence of technologies like cloud computing,
the Internet of Things, and wireless five G connectivity. Make
sure to come back to the Restless Ones to hear
more conversations with pioneers in tech and leadership. I'm Jonathan
(34:37):
Strickland at T Mobile. For business, unconventional thinking means we
see things differently so you can focus on what matters most.
That's why we've built America's largest, fastest five G network
while remaining a partner who delivers exceptional customer support and
five G included in every plan so you get it all.
(34:58):
Unconventional thinking is better for business. Fastest five G based
on average overall combined five G speeds according to Open
Signal Awards USA five G User Experience Report October one.
See five D device coverage and access details at T
mobile dot com
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