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Plug and Play launches an accelerator to develop technologies addressing plastic waste

Published October 23, 2019

The Plug and Play network of accelerator programs is partnering with the nonprofit organization Alliance to End Plastic Waste to create an accelerator focused on developing technologies to reduce, remove or replace plastics in the industrial ecosystem.

Like Techstars, Plug and Play operates a number of industry-focused accelerator programs around the world, and for this program, targeting solutions that will lower the impact of plastic waste on the environment, the accelerator will operate two programs annually in three different regions — Silicon Valley, Paris and Singapore.

For its part, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste will work with the companies that support the organization, which include some of the largest chemical companies and manufacturers of plastic waste, to select focus areas and source specific startups working on solutions.

Representative members of the organization include: BASF, Berry Global, Braskem, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC, Dow, ExxonMobil, Formosa Plastics Corporation USA, Gemini Corporation, Geocycle, Grupo Phoenix, Henkel, LyondellBasell, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, Mitsui Chemicals, PepsiCo, PolyOne, Pregis, Procter & Gamble, Sealed Air Corporation, Shell, Sinopec, SKC co., ltd., Storopack, SUEZ, Sumitomo Chemical, TOMRA and Total.

Industrial companies don’t have the best history when it comes to reinventing their entire business models with new technologies, but at least there’s some effort being put toward these initiatives.

Each program will run for 12 weeks and accept 10 startups. In true accelerator fashion there will be a demo day where AEPW and Plug and Play would have the opportunity to invest in participating companies.

“I believe when we bring together all the stakeholders—large corporations, entrepreneurs, startups, and universities—you can create real change,” said said Saeed Amidi, founder and chief executive of Plug and Play, in a statement. “By devoting resources and attention to this global issue of plastic waste, we can make a difference in the environment. Through this platform I commit to spend more of my time on sustainability-focused initiatives and will invest in 20 startups in this space per year.”

Applications are now open for the first program, which will run from February through May 2020.

Huawei’s foldable Mate X is launching in China next month

Published October 23, 2019

Huawei was understandably cautious in the lead up to the Mate X. Watching Samsung’s Galaxy problems unfolding in what seemed like slow motion caused the company to rethink its strategy. Shortly after the Fold went back to the drawing board, Huawei announced it would be doing the same in order to dot all of its I’s and cross its Xs.

After a well-received debut way back in February at Mobile World Congress, the Mate X is finally ready to come to market. The device is set to arrive on November 15, several months after its planned summer release.

It will be hitting the company’s native China with the almost unthinkably lofty starting price of 16,999 yuan (~$2,400). Of course, in addition to being Huawei’s first crack at foldables, the device also sports 5G, a fact that is apparently central to the roll out.

Huawei says it’s looking to bring it to other markets down the road, depending on 5G availability. Though for…reasons, the device will likely not be available in certain markets. Among other things I wouldn’t get my hopes up about its arrival here in the U.S. On a related note, the device will also be running a Google app-less version of Android, like the Mate 30.

That could certainly be a big deal breaker for international buyers. Though, having played with the device at MWC and again in China, I can say that the hardware is certainly the best foldable we’ve seen to date. The price tag, on the other hand…

Drift CEO shares insights from 20+ years of startup experience

Published October 22, 2019

Why do serial entrepreneurs keep jumping back in? What things might you learn the third, fourth, or fifth time around?

To find out, Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon spoke to Drift CEO and founder David Cancel at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. Cancel has spent more than 20 years founding SaaS companies, with exits including Compete (acquired by TNS), Lookery (Acknowledge), Ghostery (Evidon), and Performable (Hubspot.)

In their thirty-minute conversation, they cover everything from finding your first customers, to what he’s seen change over the last two decades in the industry, to why he’s willing to cut a check to employees who want to leave. Rather watch them talk for yourself? We’ve embedded a video of their chat at the end of this article.

To find what people really want, ask for money — any money.

One thing Cancel says he’s learned over the years: when you’re just getting started, you need to charge for your product right off the bat because you never know how someone really feels about a product until you ask for money.

“If you’re creating a paid-for product, you have to start charging from day one,” he says.

He outlines an experiment he calls the ‘dollar test,’ where if someone seems interested in a product before it’s even available, he’ll promise them lifetime access if they’ll hand over whatever’s in their pocket — be it a dollar, ten, twenty, whatever.

“What it teaches the entrepreneur is that most of the people who will tell you that they love this thing will not give you a dollar,” actionable information that can save time, money and stress. The dollar test “shortcuts things; most people will end up spending so much time coming back to you because you keep telling [them] you love it, because you’re a nice person and you don’t want to hurt [their] feelings.”

Cancel also uses this approach after a product launches, using it to gauge which new feature requests customers find most important.

“They’d say ‘I love your product, but it doesn’t do X, Y, or Z. My company is special, we need X, Y, or Z feature.’”

“Let’s say they were paying us $5,000 a month. I’d say, ‘it’s only going to be $20 more a month, then we’re going to build it for you and you’ll be the first ones to have it.’”

“What would happen, almost every single time, is there would be this awkward pause. They’d say ‘I have to go talk to my manager, I need to go talk to someone, I’ll get right back to you,’” he said, adding “Almost every single time that person continued to be a customer and never asked for that feature again.”

“When it’s free to ask for anything,” says David, “people will just keep asking.”

Letting people go isn’t always a bad thing

If someone asks David for a recommendation on an engineer, he’s willing to recommend his own employees.

His reasoning is twofold; on one side, it means he knows his teams are made up of people who want to be there; on the other, it means employees know he’s looking out for them.

“I want people on the team who want to be on the team. If people ask me, ‘hey, do you know a really great engineer who does X, Y, Z?’” I say ‘Eric does, and Eric’s on my team.’ I’m like, you should talk to him. And if Eric wants to go, he should go, because we only want people who actually [want] to be there. Then that person knows that I’m looking out for the best interests of them, for them — and even if they go, we may end up working together again later.”

Similarly, if an employee says they want to leave and start their own company, David says he’s often the first to write a check:

“We would attract, in the early days, people who wanted to learn how to start their own company. One of the things I would say, and I still say to everyone: Look, if you come on board, and work with us for some days, if you want to leave at any point and start a company, myself and my co-founder Elias will be the first checks in whatever you want to start, no questions asked.”

“And so we have done that for companies in Boston, companies in San Francisco, companies all over the place. And we continue to do that.”

For finding customers and employees, he turns to LinkedIn

Thanks to recruiter spam and “work anniversary” notifications, LinkedIn tends to be the butt of a lot of jokes — but Cancel says, used right, it’s still quite valuable.

“We built a lot of marketing within LinkedIn, which I think is a place that I would advise people to go spend time on now. You can find your buyers, you can find the people that you recruit.”

LabGenius raises $10M to use AI for protein drug discovery

Published October 22, 2019

LabGenius, a London-based startup applying AI and “robotic automation” to protein drug discovery, has raised $10 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Inovia Capital, Air Street Capital and existing investors. Also investing is Recursion Pharmaceuticals’ founder and CEO Chris Gibson, as well as Inovia Capital General Partner Patrick Pichette, who was formerly Google’s CFO.

Lux Capital’s Zavain Dar and Obvious Ventures’ Nan Li will join the LabGenius board of directors. Notably, the U.K. company’s early investors include Nathan Benaich, Torsten Reil, EF’s Matt Clifford, and Philipp Moehring, to name just a few.

“LabGenius is a full-stack protein engineering company: we combine artificial intelligence (AI), robotic automation and synthetic biology to evolve next-generation protein therapeutics,” founder and CEO Dr. James Field tells me.

“My central thesis, the thing that’s really the driving force behind the company, is the conviction that we’re entering an age in which humans will no longer be the sole agents of innovation. Instead, new knowledge, technologies and sophisticated real-world products will be invented by smart robotic platforms called empirical computation engines. An empirical computation engine is an artificial system capable of recursively and intelligently searching a solution space.”

LabGenius’ flagship technology is called “EVA,” which Field describes as a “machine learning-driven, robotic platform” capable of evolving new proteins. “As a smart robotic platform, EVA is capable of designing, conducting and critically learning from its own experiments,” he says.

The goal: to discover and develop new protein therapeutics that are currently hard for humans alone to find.

LabGenius 8485

“For decades, scientists, engineers and technologists have dreamt of building ‘robot scientists’ capable of autonomously discovering new knowledge, technologies and sophisticated real-world products,” explains Field.

“For protein engineers, that dream has now entered the realm of possibility. The rapid pace of technological development across the fields of synthetic biology, robotic automation and ML has given us access to all the essential ingredients required to create a smart robotic platform capable of intelligently discovering novel therapeutic proteins.”

To that end, Field frames the development of EVA as a “long-term, ambitious undertaking” that he says will enable the startup to address previously unsolvable protein engineering challenges and in doing so, develop urgently needed therapeutics.

“My ultimate goal for LabGenius is to establish a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company powered by the world’s most advanced protein engineering platform,” he adds. “Quite honestly, this is a gargantuan undertaking and, while we’ve already established one of the world’s most technically sophisticated protein engineering operations, we’re only just scratching the surface of what’s possible.”

More broadly, there is a tension that many deep tech companies face, which is determining how best to develop technology that’s tightly aligned to real-world commercial needs (before running out of capital!). “For LabGenius, we’ve achieved this in a highly intentional way by undertaking a series of commercial projects of increasing complexity from the company’s earliest days,” Field says.

One on-going project is with Tillotts Pharma AG to identify and develop new drug candidates for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

“Our business model is pretty simple,” says the LabGenius founder. “We use EVA to discover and characterise new drug molecules and then partner with pharma companies who can take these molecules to market. For example in a typical partner-financed early discovery program, we’ll take a project from concept to early pre-clinical stage. Typical deal structures include a blend of R&D payments, milestones & royalties.”

Meanwhile, LabGenius will use the capital to scale its team, expand the scope of its discovery platform and initiate an “internal asset development program.” The next goal is to evolve novel antibody fragments capable of treating conditions that cannot be addressed using conventional antibody formats.

Electric vehicle charging software EV Connect raises $12 million

Published October 22, 2019

EV Connect, the Los Angeles-based company that sells software to manage electric vehicle charging, has raised $12 million in a Series B round led by investors Mitsui & Co. and Ecosystem Integrity Fund.

The company has raised $25 million to date.

EV Connect’s cloud-based platform has an open standard architecture that is designed to be hardware agnostic. In other words, EV Connect aims to provide a variety of hardware vendors a way to monitor, manage and maintain charging stations.

The end goal is to push the industry away from a closed and fragmented system to a more open one, according to EV Connect CEO and founder Jordan Ramer.

EV Connect has a two-tiered approach. The company provides and manages 1,000 electric vehicle charging sites through its EV Connect network. EV Connect has a smartphone app to give drivers of electric vehicles real-time access to charging station status.

Its also sells a cloud-based software platform that businesses can customize. Clients include Yahoo!, Marriott, Hilton, Western Digital, Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority and New York Power Authority.

As part of the round, Mitsui and EV Connect have agreed to develop new business models around EV charging infrastructure. EV Connect plans to work with Mitsui on various applications of EV charging to lower the cost of charging and maximize its utilization, including fleet and energy management solutions, Ramer elaborated to TechCrunch in an emailed response.

“We strongly believe that EV Connect’s infrastructure management technology accelerates the electric vehicle revolution in the energy and power industry where Mitsui has many assets and access to partners,” Kazumasa Nakai, the COO of Mitsui’s infrastructure projects business unit, said in a statement. “Our unique engineering capabilities, in conjunction with EV Connect’s cloud-based EV infrastructure, will enable us to develop new business models to solve the challenges EV infrastructure currently pose for energy management companies.”

In latest $10B JEDI contract twist, Defense secretary recuses himself

Published October 22, 2019

The JEDI drama never stops. The $10 billion, decade-long cloud contract has produced a series of twists and turns since the project was announced in 2018. These include everything from court challenges to the president getting involved to accusations of bias and conflict of interest. It has had all this and more. Today, in the latest plot twist, the Secretary of Defense Mark Esper recused himself from the selection process because one of his kids works at a company that was involved earlier in the process.

Several reports name his son, Luke Esper, who has worked at IBM since February. The RFP closed in April and Esper is a Digital Strategy Consultant, according to his LinkedIn page (which is no longer available), but given the persistent controversy around this deal, his dad apparently wanted to remove even a hint of impropriety in the selection and review process.

Chief Pentagon Spokesperson Jonathan Rath Hoffman issued an official DoD Cloud update earlier today:

As you all know, soon after becoming Secretary of Defense in July, Secretary Esper initiated a review of the Department’s cloud computing plans and to the JEDI procurement program. As part of this review process he attended informational briefings to ensure he had a full understanding of the JEDI program and the universe of options available to DoD to meet its cloud computing needs. Although not legally required to, he has removed himself from participating in any decision making following the information meetings, due to his adult son’s employment with one of the original contract applicants. Out of an abundance of caution to avoid any concerns regarding his impartiality, Secretary Esper has delegated decision making concerning the JEDI Cloud program to Deputy Secretary Norquist. The JEDI procurement will continue to move to selection through the normal acquisition process run by career acquisition professionals.

Perhaps the biggest beef around this contract, which was supposed to be decided in August, has been the winner-take-all nature of the deal. Only one company will eventually walk away a winner, and there was a persistent belief in some quarters that the deal was designed specifically with Amazon in mind. Oracle’s co-CEO Safra Catz took that concern directly to the president in 2018.

The DoD has repeatedly denied there was any vendor in mind when it created the RFP, and internal Pentagon reviews, courts and a government watchdog agency repeatedly found the procurement process was fair, but the complaints continue. The president got involved in August when he named his then newly appointed defense secretary to look into the JEDI contract procurement process. Now Espers is withdrawing from leading that investigation, and it will be up to others, including his deputy secretary, to finally bring this project over the finish line.

Last April, the DoD named Microsoft and Amazon as the two finalists. It’s worth pointing out that both are leaders in Infrastructure as a Service market share with around 16% and 33%, respectively.

It’s also worth noting that while $10 billion feels like a lot of money, it’s spread out over a 10-year period with lots of possible out clauses built into the deal. To put this deal size into perspective, a September report from Synergy Research found that worldwide combined infrastructure and software service spending in the cloud had already reached $150 billion, a number that is only expected to continue to rise over the next several years as more companies and government agencies like the DoD move more of their workloads to the cloud.

For complete TechCrunch JEDI coverage, see the Pentagon JEDI Contract.

Much to Oracle’s chagrin, Pentagon names Microsoft and Amazon as $10B JEDI cloud contract finalists

Former SAP CEO Bill McDermott taking over as ServiceNow CEO

Published October 22, 2019

When Bill McDermott announced he was stepping down as CEO at SAP a couple of weeks ago, it certainly felt like a curious move — but he landed on his feet pretty quickly. ServiceNow announced he would be taking over as CEO there. The transition will take place at year-end.

If you’re wondering what happened to the current ServiceNow CEO, John Donahoe, well he landed a job as CEO at Nike. The CEO carousel goes round and round (and painted ponies go up and down).

Jeff Miller, lead independent director on the ServiceNow board of directors, was “thrilled” to have McDermott fill the void left by Donahoe’s departure. “His global experience and proven track record will provide for a smooth transition and continued strong leadership. Bill will further enhance ServiceNow’s momentum and reputation as a digital workflows leader committed to customer success, and as a preferred strategic partner enabling enterprise digital transformation,” Miller said in a statement.

Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein replaced McDermott as co-CEOs at SAP, and during the announcement, McDermott indicated he would stay until the end of the year to help with the transition. After that, no vacation for McDermott, who will apparently start at ServiceNow after his obligations at SAP end.

As Frederic Lardinois wrote regarding McDermott’s resignation:

I last spoke to McDermott about a month ago, during a fireside chat at our TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event. At the time, I didn’t come away with the impression that this was a CEO on his way out (though McDermott reminded me that if he had already made his decision a month ago, he probably wouldn’t have given it away).

ServiceNow is a much different company than SAP. SAP was founded in 1972 and was a traditional on-premises software company. ServiceNow was founded in 2004 and was born as a SaaS company. While McDermott was part of a transition from a traditional, on-premises enterprise software company to the cloud, working at ServiceNow he will be leading a much smaller organization. Published estimates have SAP at around 100,000 employees, while ServiceNow now has around 10,000.

It’s worth noting that the company made the announcement after the market closed and it announced its latest quarterly earnings. Wall Street did not appear to the like news, as the stock was down $13.34, or 5.84%, in early after-hours trading.

SAP’s Bill McDermott on stepping down as CEO

Snapchat beats in Q3, adding 7M users & revenue up 50%

Published October 22, 2019

The Snap-back continues. Snapchat blew past earnings expectations for a big beat in Q3, as it added 7 million daily active users this quarter to hit 210 million, up 13% year-over-year. Snap also beat on revenue, notching $446 million, which is up a whopping 50% year-over-year, at a loss of $0.04 EPS. That flew past Bloomberg’s consensus of Wall Street estimates that expected $437.9 million in revenue and a $0.05 EPS loss.

Snap has managed to continue cutting losses as it edges toward profitability. Net loss improved to $227 million from $255 million last quarter, with the loss decreasing $98 million versus Q3 2018.

CEO Evan Spiegel made his case in his prepared remarks for why Snapchat’s share price should be higher: “We are a high-growth business, with strong operating leverage, a clear path to profitability, a distinct vision for the future and the ability to invest over the long term.”

Snapchat’s share price had closed down 4% at $14, and had fallen roughly 4.6% in after-hours trading as of 1:50 pm Pacific, to $13.35, despite the earnings beat. It remains below its $17 IPO price but has performed exceedingly well this year, rising from a low of $4.99 in December.

That’s partially because of the high cost of Snapchat’s growth relative average revenue per user. While it notes that it saw user growth in all regions, 5 million of the 7 million new users came from the Rest of World, with just 1 million coming from the North America and Europe regions. That’s in part thanks to better than expected growth and retention on its re-engineered Android app that’s been a hit in India. But since Snapchat serves so much high-definition video content but it earns just $1.01 average revenue in the Rest of World, it has to hope it can keep growing ARPU so it becomes profitable globally.

Some other top-line stats from Snapchat’s earnings:

Operating cash flow improved by $56 million to a loss of $76 million in Q3 2019, compared to the prior year.
Free Cash Flow improved by $75 million to $84 million in Q3 2019, compared to the prior year.
Cash and marketable securities on hand reached $2.3 billion.

Interestingly, Spiegel noted that “We benefited from year-over-year growth in user activity in Q3 including growth in Snapchatters posting and viewing Stories.” Snapchat hadn’t indicated Stories was growing in at least the past two years, as it was attacked by clones, including Instagram Stories that led Snapchat to start shrinking in user count a year ago before it recovered.

Since Stories viewership is critical to total ad view on Snapchat, we may see analysts insisting to hear more about that metric in the future. Snap also said users opened the app 30 times per day, up from 25 times per day as of July 2018, showing it’s still highly sticky and being used for rapid-fire visual communication.

The other major piece of Snapchat’s ad properties is Discover, where total time spent watching grew 40% year-over-year. And rather than being driving by just a few hits, more than 100 Discover channels saw over 10 million viewers per month in Q3. With Instagram’s IGTV a flop, Discover remains Snapchat’s best differentiated revenue driver, and one it needs to keep investing in and promoting. With Instagram trying to compete more heavily on chat with its new close friends-only Threads app, Snapchat can’t rely on ephemeral messaging to keep it special.

TikTok buys ads on Snapchat that could steal its users

Surprisingly, Spiegel said that “We definitely see TikTok as a friend” when asked about why it allowed the competitor to continue buying ads on Snapchat. The two apps are different, with Snapchat focused on messaging and biographical social media while TikTok is about storyboarded, premeditated social entertainment. But this could be a dangerous friendship for Snapchat, as TikTok may be taking time away that users might spend watching Snapchat Discover, and its growth could box Snapchat out of the social entertainment space.

Looking forward, in Q4 Snap is estimating 214 to 215 million daily active users and $540 million to $560 million in revenue. It’s expecting between break even and positive $20 million for adjusted EBITDA. That revenue guidance was below estimates for the holiday Q4, contributing to the share price fall.

Snap has a ways to go before reaching profitability. That milestone would let it more freely invest in long-term projects, specifically its Spectacles camera-glasses. Spiegel has said he doesn’t expect augmented reality glasses to be a mainstream consumer product for 10 years. That means Snap will have to survive and spend for a long time if it wants a chance to battle Apple, Facebook, Magic Leap and more for that market.

Databricks announces $400M round on $6.2B valuation as analytics platform continues to grow

Published October 22, 2019

Databricks is a SaaS business built on top of a bunch of open-source tools, and apparently it’s been going pretty well on the business side of things. In fact, the company claims to be one of the fastest growing enterprise cloud companies ever. Today the company announced a massive $400 million Series F funding round on a hefty $6.2 billion valuation. Today’s funding brings the total raised to almost a $900 million.

Andreessen Horowitz’s Late Stage Venture Fund led the round with new investors BlackRock, Inc., T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Tiger Global Management also participating. The institutional investors are particularly interesting here because as a late-stage startup, Databricks likely has its eye on a future IPO, and having those investors on board already could give them a head start.

CEO Ali Ghodsi was coy when it came to the IPO, but it sure sounded like that’s a direction he wants to go. “We are one of the fastest growing cloud enterprise software companies on record, which means we have a lot of access to capital as this fundraise shows. The revenue is growing gangbusters, and the brand is also really well known. So an IPO is not something that we’re optimizing for, but it’s something that’s definitely going to happen down the line in the not-too-distant future,” Ghodsi told TechCrunch.

The company announced as of Q3 it’s on a $200 million run rate, and it has a platform that consists of four products, all built on foundational open source: Delta Lake, an open-source data lake product; MLflow, an open-source project that helps data teams operationalize machine learning; Koalas, which creates a single machine framework for Spark and Pandos, greatly simplifying working with the two tools; and, finally, Spark, the open-source analytics engine.

You can download the open-source version of all of these tools for free, but they are not easy to use or manage. The way that Databricks makes money is by offering each of these tools in the form of Software as a Service. They handle all of the management headaches associated with using these tools and they charge you a subscription price.

It’s a model that seems to be working, as the company is growing like crazy. It raised $250 million just last February on a $2.75 billion valuation. Apparently the investors saw room for a lot more growth in the intervening six months, as today’s $6.2 billion valuation shows.

Databricks raises $250M at a $2.75B valuation for its analytics platform

Slack announces new features to help ease app integration pain

Published October 22, 2019

As Slack has grown in popularity, one of the company’s key differentiators has been the ability to integrate with other enterprise tools. But as customers use Slack as a central work hub, it has created its own set of problems. In particular, users have trouble understanding which apps they have access to and how to make best use of them. Slack announced several ways to ease those issues at its Spec developer conference today.

Andy Pflaum, director of Slack platform, points out there are 1,800 app integrations available out of the box in Slack, and developers have created 500,000 additional custom apps. That’s obviously far too many for any user to keep track of, so Slack has created a home page for apps. Called App Launcher, it acts a bit like the Mac Launchpad — a centralized place where you can see your installed apps.

Slack App Launcher (Image: Slack)

You access App Launcher from the Slack sidebar by clicking Apps. It opens App Launcher with the apps that make sense for you. When you select an app, Pflaum says it takes you to that app’s home screen where it will be ready to enter or display relevant information.

For example, if you selected Google Calendar, you would see your daily schedule along with meeting requests, which you can accept or reject. You also can launch meeting software directly from this page. All of this happens within Slack, without having to change focus. App Home will be available in beta in the next few months, according to Pflaum.

Another way Slack is helping ease the app burden is with a new concept called Actions from Anywhere. The company actually launched Actions last year, enabling users to take an action from a message like attaching a Slack message to a pull request in Jira, as an example. Pflaum said that people liked these actions so much they were requesting the ability to take actions from anywhere in Slack.

“At Spec, we are previewing this new kind of action — Actions from Anywhere — which gives users the ability to take an action from anywhere they are in Slack,” Pflaum said. To really take advantage of this capability, the company is adding a feature to select the five most recent actions from a quick-access menu. These actions fill in automatically based on your most recent activities, and could be a real time-saver for people working inside Slack all day.

Finally, the company is enabling developers to open an external window inside Slack, what they call Modal windows, which open when users have to fill out a form, take a survey, enter expenses or provide additional information outside the flow of Slack itself.

All of these and other announcements at Spec are part of the maturation process of Slack as it moves to solve some of the pain points of growing so quickly. When you grow past the point of understanding what a complex piece of software can do, it’s up to the vendor to provide ways to surface all of the benefits and features, and that’s what Slack is attempting to do with these new tools.