How has the uptake in India been, and are there any numbers you can share with us with respect to your market share?
Loop: We’re just over eight years old. We’ve had a presence in India for four years, and we’ve had people focus now on developing the relationships, not only with the customers that joined us on their own, with no presence in India but also with those who have come on board lately. So it’s early days. It’s been a tool that’s always been loved by the technology audience, engineers in particular, and engineers are plentiful in India. I think that’s a big contributing factor to the high overall adoption numbers or usage numbers we’ve had for years in this market. It’s also always been adopted by fast-growth organizations. North of 70% of the unicorns is using Slack. For instance, RazorPay was a day-one born on Slack company. So we’re currently focused on those two audiences.
How about traditional enterprises, which are on the path of digital transformation? What are the challenges you see there, and how do you address them?
Sharma: What we are now noticing is that there is a huge need for every organization to start thinking about digital transformation. But there’s also a lot of clutter in what digital transformation looks like. The value that Slack adds is that you shouldn’t be jumping between (multiple) tools but be able to join that.
If you sync your calendar into Slack, you should be able to jump into a meeting from Slack itself. People are using north of 50 applications today. And our own research last year showed that knowledge workers are spending an hour a day just jumping between the tools they use.
What is Slack’s vision for the future of work, and where do you see it heading in 3-5 years?
Loop: The last two years have been fraught with challenge and change, but I think a few things that we can be confident are forever changed, and we’re actively learning, testing, and partnering with our customers today to help them through this. One is that flexibility is demanded by employees and will be required by employers. In October last year, we did a survey of 2,000 knowledge workers, and they said 80% of them said they would look for alternatives if they’re not allowed flexibility on when and where they work. Second is that investments in digital infrastructure and a digital headquarters are required. Two years ago, when the pandemic hit, no company said everyone gets on email, and we’ll survive and thrive just using that. They all turned to platforms like Slack in order to survive, and you know, in the last two years, in almost all cases, we saw productivity actually increase.
