Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield joins Yahoo Finance Live to speak on Salesforce's acquisition of the workspace platform and the integrations businesses and customers should look forward to on the app.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Today, Slack is unveiling its vision for the digital headquarters of the future at its annual customer conference called Frontiers. Let's dig into what this vision is with Slack's co-founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield. Stewart, always nice to see you. I have no earnings questions for you anymore. Of course, your business is now part of Salesforce, so we'll put that off to the side. What is your vision of the digital headquarters of the future?

STEWART BUTTERFIELD: Well, awesome question, obviously. So it's digital infrastructure that supports productivity and collaboration. And that is a little bit of a mouthful. But think about it like this. Imagine in a parallel universe, we, in March 2020, were all allowed to keep going to the office, but didn't have access to any software, or even make it narrower, didn't have access to any collaboration software. Every one of these businesses, including us, that did pretty well over the last couple of years would have just disintegrated in 48 hours.

But the amount of thought and effort and conversation that goes into the physical infrastructure, the real estate leases and office buildouts and seating plans and conference room design, all of that, it's like a 10 or even a 50 to 1 ratio of thought and effort by leaders.

But the digital HQ is what's powering these businesses, is what's holding people together. It's what's enabling productivity. And the good news is, it's a lot more malleable. You know, like, you don't have all this Capex and build something out and then have to live with it for a long time. You can evolve really rapidly. And that creates a possibility for a lot of agility and responsiveness on behalf of these businesses that ultimately lets them serve their customers better and be more successful.

BRIAN SOZZI: I get the sense, Stewart, over the next 12 to 18 months, now that you're part of Salesforce, the interface on Slack might look a little different. What are you guys working on there?

STEWART BUTTERFIELD: Well, there's a couple of things. So one track at Frontiers of this year, we're announcing, like, a completely re-engineered version of the platform. And the Slack platform has been hugely successful. There's a million plus active developers. There's just about a million custom integrations created by customers that are in active use.

So it's an incredibly powerful platform. It has a huge amount of activity. And yet, we put all of this friction in front of it, so we're making a lot easier to give people building blocks and to recombine things. And in a world where more and more people are using more and more software all the time, that interoperability and that kind of lightweight fabric for our systems integration is really powerful.

On the other hand, we launched Huddles in July. And it's an audio-only calling alternative because it's not a call. It doesn't start and stop. And people can join and leave at different times. It's already being used by millions and millions of people. It's over a third of our users are active on it weekly. And clips video sharing for asynchronous meeting alternatives and all that stuff is, like, brand new in response to what we learned from ourselves and from customers during the pandemic.

BRIAN SOZZI: How is the integration going?

STEWART BUTTERFIELD: It's good. I mean, you know, it's front-loaded. We closed in July after a really long wait. So we've had kind of one full quarter. And there's a lot of overhead upfront that's financial systems and HR and stuff like that that's a kind of a one-time cost. But it's exciting to start to see the teams on the go-to-market side really figure each other out, work on the enablement, start to partner on larger deals.

Obviously, we have a lot of mutual customers and companies like Target and Lowe's, Conde Nast, everything, UNICEF, IBM, IKEA. And all of them, I think-- I don't want to speak for them, but I think they're very thrilled by this combination because they have investments in both platforms. And they really see the power of combining them. So, yeah, I think next year will be the year that we really kind of start firing on all cylinders. But it's a pretty exciting time right now.

BRIAN SOZZI: So the synergies that you guys talked about when consummating the deal, all that's on track?

STEWART BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, yeah, I would say so. And to be clear, you know, I also say synergies all the time. There's this connotation of, like, private equity, like we're doing this to save costs by having one finance team or something like that. That's definitely not it. I think the synergy is really about the degree of adaptability and agility that customers want out of these investments in software systems because we're really moving from a period-- if you think about the first half of the 20th century, it's standardization.

And then the second half is automation. And now it's really about taking all of these incredible platforms and tools and services and everything else and making something that's really dynamic and responsive. And if you think back to your experiences as a consumer talking to the customer service department and maybe a bank or an airline or a telco, and they say, I'm sorry, Brian, the system won't let me do that, they're telling the truth because that top-down approach to big software had a three-year to five-year cycle and had tens of millions of dollars of cost and moved really slowly.

So being able to take those pieces apart and reassemble them in a way that suits the business and then do that on an ongoing basis to be really dynamic, that's powerful and exciting, and customers love it.

BRIAN SOZZI: Stewart, I know you as a big thinker. Does Slack have a role in the metaverse? I'm putting that-- all these questions to founders of tech companies that I've covered for some time. What's your take on it?

STEWART BUTTERFIELD: Well, I honestly have no idea. I mean, so the people working on it definitely think so and are eager to partner with us. It might just be a failure of imagination on my part. But, like, having my Slack messages and notifications show up in an alternate or virtual reality does not have a huge amount of appeal. But, you know, I could be just not thinking about it correctly.

BRIAN SOZZI: Fair enough. But one thing you do-- you have thought about is your return to work plan. Where do you stand on that? Are you back in a physical headquarters?

STEWART BUTTERFIELD: I'm not, and I don't intend to be on any kind of regular basis. And, you know, again, there's still a little bit of we'll see what happens. But I don't think workers, you know, to whom the balance of power has really shifted over the last couple of years across the board, not just in tech, not just knowledge workers, but obviously, in retail and service and everywhere, I don't think they're going to want to give up this newfound autonomy and flexibility.

You know, I think people still think about two days a week in the office as, like, a reduction, but it's not. It's an increase. We're going to be going from 0 days to two days. And that's asking people to sacrifice a lot. And that doesn't mean-- I don't believe that offices have a future and people don't want to get together. They definitely do. And I absolutely do. And I've actually been to a couple of off-sites in the last few months with extensive testing protocols, and it's really valuable to get people together. But we don't need to be together every day, you know, 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, especially when the metaverse is happening. Stewart, we can just put on our goggles and just connect with each other, or, of course, just connect on Slack. We'll leave it there. Slack's co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield, good luck with the conference today.