• • Slide: 6 / of 6. Caption: Caption: The front entrance to the new Slack office. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED • Author: Mat Honan. • Date of Publication: 08.07.14.

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08.07.14 • Time of Publication: 6:30 am. 6:30 am The Most Fascinating Profile You’ll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup Ariel Zambelich/WIRED Stewart is hungry. He’s munching on potatoes smothered in chicken fat drippings, sitting by a long metal table that once served as a gurney in the morgue at the Treasure Island Naval Base. It’s a prominent piece of furniture in what will be the kitchen area for Stewart’s new startup. All told, the space is big enough for 75 or so employees, most of whom have yet to be hired. They will theoretically work in this great glass transept at the eastern edge of a massive new building just off of San Francisco’s Third Street.

He’s been here for less than a week. Stewart (Butterfield) is well known in certain circles as the founder of the ur-photo-sharing service, Flickr. When he and his two partners sold it to Yahoo for, Stewart says, “somewhere between $22 million and $25 million” in 2004, it kicked off the Web 2.0 era and signaled the end of the dotcom bust.

Flickr was a treasure chest of innovation, but Stewart never even intended to make the damn thing. He’d set out, instead, to make a game called Game Neverending. It was a financial failure. Flickr was merely based on a set of features broken out of the game, but it took over the company and his life. You may have heard the regrettably trendy term pivot, where a startup abruptly shifts to a new strategy and suddenly thrives.

This was one of the original pivots. Everybody does it now. History has circled back on Stewart. After a few years at Yahoo, he quit and went back to work on his neverending game. This time he called it Glitch, it looked amazing and had a vividly imagined story line, but was conceptually similar to Game Neverending.

Years passed. The game failed. Then (again!) he broke out something he and his team had created by accident while making the game.

They are now turning it into its own product and hiring a bunch of people to work on it here, just off Third Street. On first blush, it sounds boring. Worse, it’s a bit hard to explain because you haven’t used anything like it before. It’s a communications application, based on the system they created while building Glitch. It’s called Slack. Sylenth1 Vtx Crack there.

To get you in the door, it has a supercharged group chat function, a modern take on the AOL rooms of yore. It runs on your desktop, the web, your phone, and stays in sync as you switch from one to the other. Instead of one big room, it lets you set up channels for various groups and teams, or even for specific functions (like, say, monitoring the @ replies to your company’s Twitter feed).

And naturally, there’s private one-to-one messaging as well. Slack’s chat function is a trojan horse for bigger ideas. It wants to oversee all your other business software. Yet Slack’s well-designed chat function is a trojan horse for bigger ideas.

Its ambition is to become the hub at the center of all your other business software. It ties in to many of the applications you use at work: Dropbox, Google Apps, GitHub, Heroku, and Zendesk to name a few. Once they’re all connected, it can keep track of most everything you do with them. Most importantly, it’s got killer search built right in. “Right now, your data ends up a little bit in Twitter, a little bit in Zendesk, a little bit in GitHub,” Stewart says. “Slack is the one mutual platform where all those things come together.

That’s the longer-term thinking.” The morgue table. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED The payoff is that it makes collaborating way easier than whatever you’re doing now. Let’s say you drop a link to a PDF stored in your folder in your company’s Dropbox. People on your team will see this file pop up in Slack, with a summary, and can click on it to read—right there in the app. Your colleagues can review it, make notes about it, and comment on what you ought to do next without ever leaving the application. One of your team members says, “You really did it, bro! This is a massive thought bomb.” Yay!

They adore you. Not only did Slack make sure the document went to all the right people, but it also indexed the full text of the document, as well as the conversation that took place around it, and attached the conversation to the document in its database. Now: Imagine that weeks pass.

Radio Repair Manuals. You, sadly, die unexpectedly. Now that you’re gone, your coworkers need to pull up the document, but they have trouble finding it in your disorganized Dropbox folder. So instead they search Slack for “massive thought bomb” and, presto, there it is, along with all your notes and the feedback you received from your team. That’s Slack. It’s already a press darling, embraced by all the trendy and brave young media properties—Vox Media, Buzzfeed, Medium and Gawker Media are all paying customers.