When Slack Technologies (NASDAQ: WORK) sold for nearly $28 billion this week, my first thought wasn’t about Slack, but rather about the company we use at Nugget to do what everyone else does on Slack: Basecamp. I thought about how much the Chicago-based company could sell for, if it wanted to. And I thought about a book their founders recently wrote, called It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work.
If you’ve never heard of Basecamp, allow me to briefly explain. (If you have, I apologize in advance for the same preachy evangelizing that you’ve likely heard before.) Basecamp is, in just about every way, everything Slack isn’t. It doesn’t encourage chatting. It focuses on projects and assignments more than chat rooms and direct messages (those these features are available when you need them). There is no “online” indicator that any other user is able to see. Maybe most unexpected of all among SaaS standards, to avoid living by the whims and demands of their 10 largest customers, they charge one flat cost to all companies — regardless of whether they have five users or 5,000. In other words, it is an unconventional company run by unconventional people. It is primarily owned by its founders, which allows it to be operated in ways that don’t exactly follow the core tenets of shareholder capitalism.
The overarching philosophy (or at least one of them) of Basecamp, is that mild barriers to communication (like creating a couple more clicks on the path to chatting) can be a good thing. That a bit more friction might provoke a bit more thought, and that a bit more thought could lead to a lot less wasted time. This logic, by the way, extends beyond internal company messaging — it’s the same reason we don’t provide Customer Support by phone at Nugget. We all, or at least most of us, are a better version of ourselves when we take some time to get composed.
Obviously, the founders of Slack disagree. For many, Slack made work suck less. It made it easier, more delightful, and more seamless to communicate with colleagues. But that goodwill didn’t extend to its many skeptics, who argued that, whether it felt fun or not, it probably made our work worse.
It also probably played a role in the slow creep of workplace self-surveillance. A friend who works at a popular DTC brand recently stayed with us. How is her remote “presence” monitored by her manager, you might ask? She’s expected to be “Available” on Slack all day long. The green dot, the one that indicates she can be reached by anyone at any time, is the tell-tale sign. Who needs read receipts when you can institute an environment in which, by policy, everything, at any time of day, is expected to be read more or less immediately?
If this all feels like we’re trending towards an always-on, Black Mirror/Wall-E future a bit too fast for comfort, you’re not alone. But in places like Silicon Valley or Wall Street, that constant drone of inefficient distraction has a different name: Users. A lot of them. And all that usage means a lot of companies forking over big amounts of money to use a particular brand of software for internal comms. Hey, at least all this chatting and meming at work makes business sense for somebody (hint: WORK).
Following the sale to Salesforce, much will be made over the coming weeks and years about how Slack was the cute little guy who fought valiantly, but ultimately lost in its noble quest to go up against the big dogs. They will be framed, ad nauseum, as a different breed of company than the super-corporations of the era: Salesforce, Microsoft, Facebook. But in their “battle” against the tech giants, with whom they did differ in material ways, they were aligned on something much more important and encompassing: a shared embrace of the ubiquity and inevitability of our all-connected future.
Using some quick napkin math based past reported revenue numbers and growth history (their revenue in 2015 was reportedly $25M, and they’ve since doubled the user base), I’d loosely estimate Basecamp’s revenue to be in the ballpark of $50-100M — one-eighth to one-quarter of the $400M that Slack brought in last year. One might reasonably argue, then, that it may be worth at least one-eighth to one-quarter of the purchase price of Slack: a range of nearly $3.5-7 billion. It would be hard to fault Basecamp’s founders to accept such a sum, but based on their behaviors and philosophy, it’s not a decision they would take lightly. New owners would likely mean a sharper focus on profits, more concern with the short-term, and a heightened incentive to keep us all tuned in, all the time.
Like the founders of Basecamp wrote, it doesn’t have to be crazy at work. And the cultural norms promoted, encouraged and enabled by WORK probably aren’t helping. In Slack’s “revolution” against the titans of its day, it passed up on the opportunity to do something far more revolutionary: stand up to our obsession with clicks, views, taps, likes, and ultimately, money.
For now, you can find the Nugget team on Basecamp. Just don’t expect to know exactly what hours we’re on or off.