Julia Chatterley of First Move spoke to Butterfield on Thursday.
Butterfield: Yesterday’s announcement makes it easier to send direct messages outside of shared channels. There was a lot of confusion. There was an unforced error on our part about how the communication system worked and which was confused with the ability to send messages alone. It is a dual option on both sides, and people have complete control over who can send them messages. So it’s actually a pretty big step from things like texting, WhatsApp, email and so on.
Butterfield: Absolute. To be clear, you can’t get rid of email completely and we don’t intend to do this because it serves several purposes, but this is the downfall of internal communication. But there are many – probably thousands of organizations that do not use e-mail for internal communication. But, of course, you have to use it to receive receipts from online purchases and to reset passwords and to receive calendar invitations and other things.
Emails remain incredibly vulnerable if they are hacked. Is this another argument for a system like Slack as an alternative?
Butterfield: Well, we’re a pretty big target. We have an incredible security team and many active programs that, you know, work to prevent this. We work with governments in 20 different countries and with large financial services firms and clients, and we are often elected on the basis of increasing security. Email has the virtue of being a system that anyone can use, but it is a much harder system to control. There are problems with phishing and spam and I think email is useful and will probably continue to be used for tens of thousands of years at this time. In this open and decentralized way, but where you have control and you can communicate, this is the internal case, people choose a tool like Slack much better.
The high percentage of companies in some of the largest indexes in the world use your services and pay for them. How high can these percentages be? What is the ambition?
Butterfield: I think we can reach 100%. I mean, I’m not sure we’re for the United States. Maybe 70% of the Fortune 100, but it’s not just used by 156,000 companies around the world, and obviously there are, you know, 500 in this index and 100 in this index, and 156,000 is a much larger number. This includes all kinds of business. It includes people who operate a small retail store of plumbers, repairers, but also the largest credit card issuer in the US and the largest contract. And you are right to draw attention to international growth, because we have had revenue growth this year. Fantastic result, but if you look at France, for example, it is 49%. If we look at Japan, it was 76% and, in terms of customer growth, was the main indicator of revenue in the future, much higher numbers. Australia: 93%, Great Britain was 94%, and Germany was 94%.