The InterSlack

Over the past 6–8 months, I (like many) have become freakishly enamored by my experience using Slack — the instant familiarity, multi-purpose use, clever 3rd party integrations, even the wit and sass of Slackbot have drawn me in like very few have before. In parallel, the rapid adoption of the tool by our portfolio (>60% teams on it) and the broader community have kept the wheels turning in my head.

A few months ago, I began to notice a critical piece missing from this new equation. I began asking: why can’t this incredible intra-team experience also exist as an incredible inter-team experience?

Enter Slackline

It was Jesse Vincent who really helped crystallize this idea. He first hacked together a way for two Slack instances to join up in a shared channel. A few days later, I met Ernesto and Slackline…

Ernesto Jiménez and Blanca Tortajada have been hacking away for a few months on a simple, yet insanely useful, add-on for teams on Slack to communicate between one another in shared channels called “Slacklines.” My team and I have spun up a number of these shared channels with different groups and for different purposes.

Far and away the most useful channel we’ve created connects our portfolio founders with one another. They ask questions, share learnings, and swap techniques with something that is more alive than an old fashioned email list. We’ve even had candidates sourced and office space found. For us, it serves our purpose tremendously well.

Why? Because it does not require behavior change and works inside an emerging workflow — Slack. High utility, low barrier to participate.

For us, this has been the missing piece. Just as the internet connected disparate networks, Slacklines connect disparate teams. We call it the InterSlack.