Quick drink/snack with friends on the way home ends up being my last time in a restaurant. Practice questions get weirder and more off the wall. WHO officially announces it’s a pandemic (?) and, with another 5% drop in the major indices, we’re also officially in a bear market. Wednesday: Prep sessions for media interviews & earnings call. At the same time, more layoffs and businesses closing. Japan & Korea, already way up, increased another 34% & 33% W-o-W respectively. In Italy, new “returning teams” (important internal metric) were up more than 120%. Markets bounce back that morning, but there’s a lot of noise. 1,597 days after hitting 1M *simultaneously connected* users in Oct ‘15 (see ) we pass ten million. Driver from the airport tells me business is down by half, he’s behind on rent and his brother just got laid off from his hotel job, along with 50% of the staff. We regroup, revise the script and adjust guidance as the CEO/CFO/IR/Comms crew heads to NYC. Suddenly the macro environment seems dizzyingly uncertain. Everyone learns that the markets have circuit breakers built in. Monday: Trading halts six minutes after markets open on a 7% drop in the S&P 500. By the time we communicated to employees on Sat afternoon, there were 400 cases in the US. “Strongly encouraged” all employees to work from home. All this seems a different universe now.įriday: Made the call. The exec team debated what global office closures would look like, backchanneled to other leaders, and began preliminary planning. That evening policy discussions intensified. (The employee had no symptoms and was self-quarantining. Decided to close HQ the next day and do a deep clean over the weekend. Thursday (cont.): An SF-based employee informs us that they’d been contacted by the CDC about a potential SARS-CoV-2 exposure. Got feedback on our prepared remarks and guidance for next week’s earnings call felt confident! Didn’t know it, but for most, our last meeting in the office. Debated and approved plan for this fiscal year- hiring, budgets, targets, forecasts, etc. We launch a set of resources for teams that are faced with the prospect of a sudden shift to remote work, began offering free 1:1 live consultations and created new webinar programs in response to growing demand. We noticed upticks in new teams signing up for Slack, especially in Japan, Korea and Italy. A few other companies had also started or were considering starting WFH programs amid growing uncertainty. Tuesday: Announced “optional WFH” at all other offices globally. I get an email from the CTO of one of the world’s biggest asset managers telling me (a) they’re signing the contract to go wall-to-wall on Slack and (b) this was one of the last big purchases before tightening up due to coronavirus concerns. Over the weekend we shut down the Tokyo & Osaka offices, put travel restrictions in place and cancelled our annual Global Sales Offsite, a long-planned 800-person event. Monday: Fewer than 100 COVID cases reported in US, but uncertainty increasing. But I’m also a CEO and these tweets are about work: the company, money, markets, customers, earnings, guidance, etc. I worry about my family and am deeply concerned about the millions whose jobs and health are at risk. The last few weeks have been Here’s what it’s been like. My day job (also: night job) is CEO of Slack, a publicly traded company with investors to whom I am a fiduciary, 110k+ paying customers of all sizes, and thousands of employees I care about very, very much. Here is the unedited text of those tweets (some of the numbers highlighted have since been updated here.) Yesterday, Slack’s CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield shared a series of tweets chronicling the past few weeks inside Slack and the increase the company has seen in user engagement during the rapid global shift to remote work.
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