Marc Andreessen Praises An App Called Slack: ‘I Have Never Seen’ A Business App Go Viral Like This

February 13, 2014 Leave a comment

Marc Andreessen Praises An App Called Slack: ‘I Have Never Seen’ A Business App Go Viral Like This

JULIE BORT

FEB. 10, 2014, 3:41 PM 12,563 12

A new business app created by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield is creating a ton of buzz in Silicon Valley right now.

It’s called Slack.

Like many other business apps, this one is all about collaboration, meaning it lets teams of coworkers chat, send private messages, or share files and pictures.

But it’s going viral right now because it also lets them search. They can easily find snippets of conversations and files, and, more importantly, they can use it to search through a bunch of other popular cloud apps that the team might use together like Google Drive, Dropbox, GitHub, Twitter, Asana, and others.

Investor Marc Andreessen tweeted an image that shows Slack going from about 4,000 daily users in January to somewhere in the 15,000-user neighborhood today. The app, which works on phones and browsers, officially launched in August.

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Twitter/@pmarca

Andreessen has good reason to praise Slack. He and his VC firm Andreessen Horowitz helped fund Butterfield’s company, Tiny Speck, which has raised $17.2 million in three rounds so far, according to Crunchbase.

And Tiny Speck’s first app failed. It was an online game called Glitch. Butterfield shut down Glitch in 2012 and laid off most of Tiny Speck’s 30 employees, TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden reported at the time.

Slack is a reboot for the company.

To be sure, 15,000 users isn’t bad considering that the company doesn’t even have a Facebook page yet, just a Twitter account. It really hasn’t done much marketing beyond posting the love tweets it gets from users like this one:

But Slack also faces stiff competition. There are a ton of collaboration apps already out there, each with their own schtick: Yammer, Chatter, Work.com, Basecamp, Tibbr, Tomfoolery, and the list goes on. Even diamond billionaire Fred Mouawad launched a similar app last year called TaskWorld.

Plus, viral popularity doesn’t always translate into commercial success. For instance, 37Signals, which makes a popular chat app called Campfire and a popular project management app, Basecamp, said last week it was dropping Campfire and its other apps to concentrate on Basecamp, its one real commercial success.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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