If you use Slack at work, you've probably noticed that the number of channels you're invited to continues to grow.
David Sachs, one quarter of the popular “All In” podcast and a noted serial entrepreneur whose past companies include Yammer — an employee chat startup that was sold to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion — says They can solve this problem. Toward that end, he teamed up with Evan Owen, formerly VP of engineering at Zinc, a collaboration app that ServiceMax acquired in 2019.
The two have created Glue, an employee chat app that they say will cure what they call “slack channel fatigue.” Glow, which came out of Stealth on Tuesday, is designed around topic-based threads and uses GenAI.
Kraft Ventures, the VC firm that Sacks founded, incubated and funded the company through several seed rounds. Glue was born in 2021 when Sacks and Owen, then an entrepreneur living in Kraft, decided they each had a lot of ideas about how to improve messaging in the workplace. , and space was left for an update.
“Our view was that there was still a lot of room for innovation,” said Sachs, who is Glow's co-founder and chairman. “If you talk to people about Slack, even though it's a good product, they feel like the channels are really noisy, and there's a lot to keep up with.”
On Slack, conversations happen in specific channels. This means that anyone who wants to chat with a group, even for a short message, needs to join that channel. However, since most people subscribe to channels they rarely use, it can feel like everyone in the company is on every single channel, which can be overwhelming.
Glue organizes all communication into threads. An individual or team can start a thread, and other teams and even Glue's AI bot can be invited to join.
In many ways, Glue's interface looks like Slack, but everything a user sees on their screen is tailored specifically for them.
“You can create a thread for a specific short task,” said Owen, Glo co-founder and CEO. “It's a one-time conversation, and when you're done with it, it can be over.”
An employee can save conversations, and if they're mentioned again, the chat will pop up again, he said.
While organizing work messages into threads instead of channels may seem like a throwback solution to reduce communication clutter, Sacks said he believes it's something Slack and its primary alternative, Microsoft Thames, cannot easily replicate.
“To copy what we've done, they would have to completely rebuild the way the entire product works,” he said.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because Yammer (which has more or less evolved into a product called Microsoft Viva, although Microsoft Teams lets employees chat in addition to team video calling allows), was a thread-based chat. as well as. Yammer looks similar to Facebook.
But Glue allowed Sacks and Owen to recreate thread-based chats in the age of AI. So, like most startups now, Glue is incorporating AI into its products.
“We've made AI a virtual employee on your team that can pop into a chat at any time,” Sacks said.
Sachs believes that the AI within a company's internal communications platform can be very powerful.
“Sometimes you'll start a conversation with your co-workers and then realize you need AI to jump in and answer a question. So, you want your AI chat to be in that place. Just like your human chat,” he said. “It doesn't make sense to send users somewhere else to chat with AI and then have their same human chats on another app.”
While Glue AI's role will evolve as core LLMs improve, Sacks said there are already some things the bot can do with a certain level of accuracy. Glue AI can suggest topic names for each thread, summarize intermittent conversations, and detect specific information about employees based on their chat history, such as What is their role in the company?
Of course, AI embedded in a corporate chat app isn't unique to Glue. Slack also has an integrated AI, and of course Microsoft has embedded its CoPilot AI into many of its apps, including Microsoft Teams.
Craft Ventures has been using the glue internally for a year, and starting Tuesday the product will be offered to other companies.
After a three-month trial period, Glue will charge $7 per employee a month, which Sacks said is slightly lower than Slack's prices for the basic package.
Owen added that it's a “killer deal” because Slack charges between $15 and $18 to add SlackGPT, the AI chatbot that Slack owner Salesforce announced a year ago.
Glow at Craft Ventures isn't the first startup sack. Over the past few years, Kraft launched Callen, a social podcasting app that was later sold to Rumble for less than the company's funding, Axios reported. Last year, the venture firm launched SaaSGrid, a startup that tracks SaaS metrics.
Sacks hinted that Glow could be ready to raise its first external funding soon after the app's unveiling.
“We want to launch and show people how great the product is,” Sachs said. “If you have a great product in the AI space, you can raise a Series A now.”
As for what valuation craft the company hopes to attract, he said, “You don't really know where the valuation is going to land until you have a process.”
He's been teasing the arrival of his new AI company on “All In,” which he hosts with fellow investors Jason Kalakanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg, claiming to invest in “Besties.” [in this]” he said, referring to his All-In co-hosts.
Given that he's pitching Glo as an AI company, and that his friends might want a piece, it's clear he's hoping for a high price.