The Unfair Advantage of Slack

The closest to a traumatic failure was Kiko, whose founders kept working on their startup for a whole year before being squashed by Google Calendar. But they ended up happy. They sold their software on eBay for a quarter of a million dollars. After they paid back their angel investors, they had about a year’s salary each.

In this essay from Paul Graham reminisces about a failed startup that ill-advisedly tried to compete with Google. At the time Google had very good engineers, was innovating aggressively with web based technology and had a lot of free PR because anticipation on their next big product move was huge. The world eventually moved on and Google is no longer the data-driven-web-app shop it was. But the lesson here is; when a company is on an obvious product trajectory you should think hard about where they are headed next. Don’t stand in their way. It won’t even matter if your product is better or more fully featured because the giant can seed their user base very aggressively and steal your ideas before you’ve had time to catch up on your user numbers.

In this regard, Slack may be the new Google. Because of Slack’s great API, companies, developers and other hopefuls have built text-based UI’s and teamwork productivity tools using Slack as a hub and comms channel.

But Slack has the unfair advantage of being able to observe this play out without investing too heavily in new features. Eventually some of these companies, like Speak IO may become roadkill in the process as Slack introduces additions to its product that overlap the functionality of companies trying to build on top of Slack. The history of winners is a story of unfair advantages.