Agreed with you on all points here and was thinking the same thing this morning. LinkedIn has a strong culture full of driven, smart people, so I’m sure they’ll weather the storm just fine.

I’m curious if Slack can be the first real contender to take on LinkedIn for #1 though. They have most of the underpinnings they need to build an open messaging network for professionals, which could quickly morph into professional profiles to go along with that messaging functionality. If they get the Slack App on most people’s phones for their company messaging needs, they could easily add some sort of connections feature across groups, which would solve the “I need to contact you quickly but email is too slow and I don’t have your mobile phone number and we’re not friendly enough to use Facebook”, issue when trying to ping a professional contact.

I’m not sold that Facebook @ Work is going to be the big contender here since I assume most people want to keep their personal and work lives separate, but Slack grew up in the professional world so it seems like a good bet they’ll get into the arena with LinkedIn here. What are your thoughts on Slack as a new professional network, Dharmesh Shah?