Work is broken—or at least, that’s what Silicon Valley seems to think.
The startup Slack, which has developed a type of anti-e-mail system, just raised $43 million in funding at a valuation of $220 million from investors that include Social+Capital Partnership, Accel Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz. It’s not the first New Work startup to raise a bunch of money, and it’s not going to be the last. The death of e-mail appears to be the technology industry’s growing obsession.
Slack did not start out as Slack. It started out in 2009 as Tiny Speck, a company meant to develop a massively multiplayer online game called Glitch. The company’s co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, had tried to build an MMO before in 2002, but the game never arrived and the project morphed into Flickr, the photo-sharing site eventually bought by Yahoo (YHOO). The same thing basically happened again with Tiny Speck: When the game failed to materialize, the company’s founders decided the internal tools they had built for internal employee communication might be useful to other companies. Tiny Speck gave way to Slack.
“Be Less Busy,” the company’s tagline, is blasted across its homepage over an image of someone leaning back in his chair reading a magazine. It’s over the top enough to make Slack seem like the office equivalent of a fad diet: Sign up for our service. Get rid of work instantly! forever! Apparently, though, Slack really has become all the rage. A Wall of Love page on its website is filled with people—mostly workers at other technology startups—celebrating the product for reducing their amount of e-mail and raising their productivity.
The Slack interface is nice enough. It’s colorful and looks modern in the sense that it’s more like a tweaked version of Facebook than a tweaked version of Lotus Notus. And no doubt, many people really have improved their productivity with the help of the software.
What’s bothersome about Slack, Asana, and the myriad other New Work services is their Silicon Valley bias. Most of these applications were built by people who have never worked at a traditional company. They were also built, by and large, by software developers who took the tools they liked to use to manage coding projects and tried to refine them for a general-purpose audience. So the software ends up looking slick and modern while delivering a distinctly geeky user experience.
This strategy can work. The Bloomberg terminal, produced by the same company that owns this publication, is more or less a 30-year-old “New Work” service in disguise. It lets people in the finance community message each other and has applications specific to their jobs and shortcut commands to get work done quickly. Instead of living inside e-mail, people on Wall Street live inside the terminal—and pay around $20,000 per year for the privilege.
My guess is that if this wave of New Work startups are to have a major impact beyond their peers in Silicon Valley, they will need to do a much better job of tuning their services for specific industries. The idea is to create that environment in which people can spend the majority of their time and really focus instead of hopping between e-mail, productivity software, and other applications.
Here’s hoping one of these startups gets the New Work experience right. We should all be able to work less and read magazines more.
