Welcome to a special edition of IVP's Future of Work Podcast. In this series, IVP investors talk with experts from the fastest-growing companies and discuss the ins-and-outs of the future of work in the ever-changing environment.In our first episode of a three-part series, IVP Partner, Cack Wilhelm, talks with Slack Chief Product Officer, Tamar Yehoshua about the future of work at a time when we are all working remotely. Tamar oversees product strategy and development, design, and research at Slack. Before Slack, Tamar was a Vice President at Google holding product and engineering leadership roles on Google's most important products, including Search, Identity, and Privacy. Previously, she was the Vice President of Advertising Technologies at Amazon's A9.
IVP invested in Slack's Series E in 2015, when the product was used daily by just over 750,000 people. When they listed publicly in 2019, their influence in business messaging was undeniable, with over 10 million daily active users who turn to Slack as the place to communicate, collaborate, and get work done.
Some key takeaways from our discussion with Tamar:
THE FUTURE OF WORK IS TRANSFORMING BUSINESSES The idea of sharing information with purpose and aligned with a project in a very open way makes people feel more empowered.
Communication tools are fundamental to the future of work, and Tamar has a front-row seat into how people are trying to change how they work. With the explosion of SaaS apps, there is a new requirement for tools to manage the workflow. The teams that communicate effectively are much more successful and much more productive.
THE TOOLS FOR THIS NEW NORMAL OF WORKING REMOTELY I think with everybody working from home, some people love it, some people hate it, but it's changing how they communicate and I see it at Slack within Slack.
From large customers and knowledge workers to new customers and non-knowledge workers, everybody is looking for ways to work more effectively from home. To support them, Slack provides guidance from written guidebooks to offering free consultations to help people better work from home. We are all forced to learn how to work remotely and communicate via new channels, and we will never go back to exactly how it was before.
DISRUPTING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT We really rely heavily on user testing and user input.
Product management has always used lots of data. Bringing customers to the product development process sooner is possible today because there are new tools that allow us to do that in a way that we have not seen before. This process helps shorten the time to market and improve customer delight.
COVID-19 HELP Slack is helping team's Covid-19 efforts and supporting all nonprofits and other organizations carrying out critical relief efforts during this time with free access to a Slack paid plan for three months. Learn more at https://slack.com/resources/using-slack/covid-help
More from the full conversation in the transcript is below.
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TRANSCRIPT Narrator: Welcome to IVP's Future of Work Podcast. In this series, we talk with experts from the fastest-growing companies and discuss the ins-and-outs of the future of work in the ever-changing environment. If you like what you hear, consider following us on SoundCloud or subscribing to our podcast on iTunes. Thanks, and enjoy the show.
Cack Wilhelm: Welcome to a special edition podcast on the future of work. I'm very excited to talk with three notable experts and share their experiences with all of you. The future of work is especially relevant right now, as everyone transitions to a new shelter-in-place environment as a result of this difficult COVID-19 situation. Those putting their own health at risk on the front lines are doing the true hard work, for which we are all grateful.
Tamar, I'll cover your background quickly, so you graduated with degrees in mathematics and computer science and that led you first to engineering leadership positions before moving then to product management. In product management, you had tenure at three companies that, my guess is, our audience has heard of: Amazon, Intel, and Google. If a full-time job wasn't enough, you've added public boards to your load, including IVP portfolio company Yext and ServiceNow. Now, today, you find yourself as chief product officer at Slack. And from here, I'd like to hear you explain Slack and the product you provide in your words.
Tamar Yehoshua: Yes, so Slack is a channel based messaging platform, moving people from email, which are used for collaboration, into a warm channel based platform for their messaging so that you can focus your messaging around specific projects as opposed to making it much harder to find what's going on, and also to include the right people who you need for whatever you need it for, and it's much more flexible and agile. And on top of that, it's a platform that can integrate all of the other SaaS apps into it.
Cack Wilhelm: Yeah, super cool. I mean, I think that relates very closely to this whole idea of future of work, which, you know, my definition, I guess is really all of those companies just transforming business. So Slack is a channel based messaging layer within organizations. It seems like that's very fundamental to the future of work. So what are the changes you've witnessed first hand given your position? And within that, I would say you specifically have talked about how successful organizations need this like clarity and alignment. How does Slack play into that?
Tamar Yehoshua: Yeah, we definitely have a front-row seat into how people are trying to change how they work. You hear the term digital transformation a lot and we've heard it for many years now, but it keeps changing what it means as the tools th
