Slack growth surges amid COVID-19 outbreak
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield revealed on Twitter that the company's user growth is soaring amid the COVID-19 outbreak, as more businesses rely upon remote services to connect their employees. Yahoo! Finance's Dan Roberts joins The Final Round to discuss.
Video Transcript
JEN ROGERS: Well, let's start with Dan Roberts right now. So, Dan, today has been a day where we got some clarity on the labor market. I think we all knew it was bad, and then we got a number.
On the upside, we've all been talking about what's happening in the virtual-work area. Zoom going up and also the stay-at-home trade. But on the work side, Slack. We actually have some numbers now about how well Slack is doing, right?
DAN ROBERTS: Yeah, exactly right, Jen. And Slack, by the way, that ticker WORK [INAUDIBLE] today 25% in the last five trading days. The news today, Stewart Butterfield, the CEO, coming out and giving some new numbers that yesterday Slack, at one point, had 12 and 1/2 million concurrent users. Now previously the highest number that Slack had shared was 12 million daily active users.
So with this new number, there are a couple of things we can unpack. First of all, that obviously Slack is gaining during this time, but we knew that. That's what we assumed. But that [INAUDIBLE] is likely right now at an all-time high, which is what you'd hope and what you would think. If the number was 12 and 1/2 million concurrents yesterday, then the total number of users obviously probably quite a few million higher than that.
The company also shared that it had 6,000 new paid accounts sign up in the last period, which was a huge jump, a 20% jump over the last period it had measured. So obviously still a fraction of the overall users. People who are using it free are the clients and the accounts who are paying to use it, you know, enterprise accounts.
But I think it also shows us that, you know, Slack isn't necessarily running scared from Microsoft Teams. To put the numbers in perspective, Microsoft Teams, of course, still much bigger. That has 44 million daily active users, whereas Slack right now obviously at least 12 and 1/2 million, if not higher. But, you know, there is competition there, but I remember for a while the narrative on Slack became Slack needs to really be concerned that Microsoft Teams is going to totally overtake it.
Interestingly, the final note on Slack-- the company had already announced it's doing a revamp, redesign. Even while sharing these encouraging numbers, Stewart Butterfield in a note said, hey, if you're new to Slack right now-- because I imagine there are a lot of people starting to use it during this time who weren't using it before. He said, we're sorry that it's not as good as it can be, kind of acknowledging that they're working on a redesign and there's still some glitches and flaws. Well, the pressure's on because with all these people using Slack, the pressure is higher than it ever has been to not only have it work well and be fluid but make sure there's no outages.
I was just saying to someone yesterday, boy, Slack better not have a big outage during this time. I mean, we can even kind of peel back the curtain here at Yahoo Finance. We use Slack. We rely on it. We're sending each other notes in Slack right now about the live show that we're on. So if Slack were to have a big outage, that would be a real problem.
JEN ROGERS: Yes, that would definitely be an issue for Slack, but I think that that would be an issue also for any of these names that we've come to rely on so much in the last two weeks. I think that's actually a headwind or a risk for Zoom, right, or even for Teams.
Just to make sure I understand, is Slack getting market share going against Teams or they're both just growing?
DAN ROBERTS: I'm not sure. You know, it's kind of hard to tell that. I suspect that both are just growing. You know, there are workplaces and teams-- a couple that I know of anecdotally, you know, friends I have who were working at places that, to my shock, weren't using anything like this yet. They weren't using an internal chat system. They were using G Chat. So I suspect that the runway is still pretty long for both and that both are reaping new customers.
But Stewart Butterfield in his note also said, look, if we're doing our job and if Slack gets good enough, then you'll never go back to email. That's their real ambition is that people will use Slack instead of email. I don't about you, but at least in my experience, you still need both. You still need email too.
JEN ROGERS: Dan Roberts on the work-from-home beat right now.
