On Twitter, Slack CEO discussed some of the dramatic changes Slack has seen over the last few weeks, like quickly adding 9K net new customers; stock up 10%+
thread by Slack CEO about the last 2 weeks: tough choices re: corona & staff, earnings call, stock market crash, usage surge. We glorify entrepreneurship, but it's no cakewalk https://twitter.com/... Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : There is a lot here to take in relative to crisis management and just being a human leader. (Disclosures - https://t.co/...) https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Stewart Butterfield's Twitter thread lands three days after his Q&A with Stewart Butterfield on COVID-19 laid out how Slack was handling the remote-work surge, competition with Microsoft and Zoom, and a product redesign. The market context matters: when Slack last reported strong fundamentals in September 2019 — $145M revenue, up 58% YoY — the stock still fell double digits, so a 10%+ rally on a CEO thread marks a real reversal in how investors are reading the company.
The 9K net new customers in roughly two weeks is the headline number, but the related coverage frames what comes after: subsequent quarters show the pandemic surge settling into flat revenue growth through the pandemic, making this moment the peak of the crisis-adoption story rather than a permanent step-change.
First-order effects
- Slack adds 9K net new customers in about two weeks as platform usage surges with the shift to remote work, directly expanding its paid base beyond the 100K+ reported in September 2019.
- Investors bid Slack's stock up more than 10%, breaking the company's pattern of selling off even on strong earnings reports.
Second-order effects
- Rivals named in Butterfield's own Q&A — Microsoft and Zoom — face pressure to match Slack's crisis-era onboarding speed, since the sudden influx of remote teams is a one-time land-grab for default collaboration tools.
- A usage spike this sharp forces Slack to scale infrastructure ahead of revenue recognition, tightening the margin math between customer additions and the cost of serving them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern in the later coverage holds — growth flattening even as the customer base keeps growing — the structural lesson is that crisis-driven signups only become durable revenue if conversion and retention outlast the emergency, which is exactly the gap Slack's subsequent quarters expose.
- Butterfield's framing of 'being a human leader' alongside hard staffing choices points toward crisis communication itself becoming part of how enterprise software companies are valued by both employees and markets.
The trend: Enterprise collaboration tools are discovering that crisis-driven adoption spikes set records quickly but convert into sustained growth only if customers stick after the disruption ends.