Julia Chatterley of First Move spoke with Butterfield on Thursday.
Butterfield: Yesterday’s announcement made it easier for people to send direct messages outside of the shared channels. There was much confusion. There was a casual mistake on our part about how the communication system worked and that was confused with the ability to send the messages yourself. It’s a double opt-in on both sides, and people have full control over who can message them. So it’s actually quite a big step up from things like text messages, WhatsApp, email and so on.
Butterfield: Absolutely. To be clear, you can’t completely get rid of email, and we don’t intend to do that because it serves many purposes, but that’s the downfall in internal communications. But there are many – probably thousands of organizations that don’t use email for internal communication. But of course they still have to use it to get receipts from online purchases and reset passwords and receive calendar invites and other things.
Emails remain incredibly vulnerable when hacked. Is this another argument for perhaps a system like Slack as an alternative?
Butterfield: We are a pretty big target. We have an incredible security team and a lot of running programs that, you know, are working to prevent that. We work with governments in 20 different countries and major financial services and clients and are often chosen for increasing security. Email has the virtue of being a system that anyone can use, but it is a much more difficult system to control. There are problems with phishing and spam, and I think email is useful and will probably be used for tens of thousands of years at this point. In that open and decentralized way, but where you have control and the choice to communicate, that’s the internal case, people are much better off choosing a tool like Slack.
The huge percentage of companies within some of the largest indexes in the world are using your services and paying for them. How high can these percentages get? What is the ambition?
Butterfield: I think we can achieve 100%. I mean – I’m not sure we’re for the US. Maybe 70% of the Fortune 100, but it’s not just used by 156,000 companies around the world, and obviously, you know, 500 in this index and 100 in this index, and 156,000 is a much larger number. That includes all kinds of businesses. It includes people who run a small shop of, you know, plumbers, repairers, but also the largest credit card issuer in the US, and the largest contract. And you are right when you point to the international growth, because we had sales growth this year. Fantastic result, but if you look at France, for example, it is 49%. If you look at Japan it was 76%, and if you look at customer growth, it was the leading indicator of sales in the future, much larger numbers. Australia: 93%, UK 94% and Germany 94%.