x.com/8teAPi/status/2110124977811026220
1 correction found
This is the story of Slack, Asana, Hortonworks etc.
These companies did not all come from the same kind of spinout. Slack, in particular, was not founded by a team leaving an employer to commercialize an internal tool; it was a pivot by Tiny Speck, the same company that built the tool.
Full reasoning
The post groups Slack, Asana, and Hortonworks as the same story: a team makes an internal tool, leaves, gets outside funding, and turns it into a product company. That overstates the similarity.
- Slack does not fit that pattern. Slack's own materials say it "began life as an internal tool" inside a games company. Separately, Slack's SEC filing says the company was incorporated in 2009 as Tiny Speck, Inc. and then changed its name to Slack Technologies, Inc. in 2014. In other words, Slack was a pivot/rebrand of the same company, not a new outside-funded startup created by employees who left to commercialize an internal tool.
- Asana and Hortonworks had different origin stories. Asana's founders say they were inspired by an internal tool they built at Facebook and then left Facebook and created Asana. Hortonworks, meanwhile, was a spinout from Yahoo's Hadoop team.
So treating all three as one uniform "story" is inaccurate: at least Slack's origin is materially different from the pattern described here, and the examples are not interchangeable.
4 sources
- Using Slack like a Slack developer | Slack
"You might have heard Slack's origin story: It began life as an internal tool that helped a games development company collaborate better."
- Slack Technologies, Inc. Annual Report (SEC)
"The Company was incorporated in Delaware in 2009 as Tiny Speck, Inc. In 2014, the Company changed its name to Slack Technologies, Inc. and publicly launched its current offering."
- Founders' Letter • Asana, Inc.
"We were inspired to start Asana after seeing the broad adoption and impact of an internal work management tool we built while at Facebook. We left Facebook and created Asana..."
- Cloudera/Hortonworks merger exhibit (SEC)
"Three years later, the core team of developers working inside Yahoo on Hadoop spun out to found Hortonworks."