Cal Henderson, chief technology officer at Slack
Cal Henderson is worth $750m (£569m) and has helped create two internet companies that became worldwide names, but one thing still eludes him – his multi-decade quest to create a successful video game has been a failure.
In 2003, Henderson moved from London to Vancouver to work on Game Neverending, an online universe in which players had to work together to accomplish tasks. Investors were unimpressed, but a side project used to share in-game pictures worked well enough that the company focused on that. Two years later, Yahoo paid $25m for Flickr – a huge amount in the years that followed the dotcom bubble.
Henderson and Stewart Butterfield, Game Neverending’s inventor, later left Yahoo and in 2009 they tried again, creating a similar game called Glitch. It was not any more successful, but the game’s chat system mutated into the office communication tool Slack, which was this month sold to Salesforce for $28bn in one of the biggest software deals ever.
Henderson, Slack’s Bedfordshire-born chief technology officer, still tinkers with creating games in his spare time. The company even has an internal channel – “Games we won’t finish” – to discuss their next ideas.
Slack Technolegies co-founders Stewart Butterfield, left, and Cal Henderson pose for photos on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor before their company's IPO, Thursday, June 20, 2019.
Credit: AP Photo/Richard Drew
But he says a third attempt to make it big in video games is unlikely. “There are no plans to try to do it as a business, I think our passion outweighs our abilities there. We spent four years on [Glitch] and it took us three years to get to the point where it was fun. We don’t know how to build games.”
Selling Slack to Salesforce, the $200bn online software behemoth run by the outspoken Marc Benioff, makes Henderson, 39, one of Britain’s most successful exports to Silicon Valley. But unlike the highly polished tech bros that swarm in northern California these days, Henderson is unashamedly nerdy in the traditional sense.
He is rarely seen out of a programmer’s uniform of shorts and short-sleeved shirts. His personal website, coded from scratch, contains musings on jigsaw puzzles, alternative London Underground maps and links to World of Warcraft blogs.
Henderson listens to audiobooks at triple speed to maximise productivity. Slack itself was also designed to make workers more productive, and its ancestry lies in the internet’s early days.
Inspired by internet relay chat, the now prehistoric protocol for real-time online communication, it serves to replace email by letting staff chat to one another through a service closer to text messaging.
Today some 142,000 organisations with millions of employees between them use Slack to replace meetings, memos and water cooler chat. Its growth has been accelerated by the pandemic, as office workers scattered to their kitchen tables.
The Pandemic has facilitated a working from home boom which has been to Slack's advantage
Credit: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg
Its short time as a public company has been tumultuous, however. After floating at a valuation of just under $20bn in June last year, shares had wavered before Salesforce’s interest emerged, with the work-from-home boom offset by increasing competition from Microsoft’s rival service, Teams.
One could be forgiven for thinking that both Henderson and Butterfield, Slack’s chief executive, are happier making software than the rigours of running a company, particularly a listed one, and the company’s technology chief admits that going public has had its downsides.
“Something that we saw as we became public was that we just became a lot more trusted. It’s like, ‘They’re going to be around for a while, they’re a public company, they’re serious.’
“[But] having a public stock price that moves up and down with the market is a distraction for people as well. People feel bad when the stock goes down 5pc and feel nothing when it goes up 5pc. [There are] a lot of emotions tied to it. Especially this year with the market just going crazy.”
Selling will alleviate that, particularly for Henderson and Butterfield, whose Slack stakes are now worth around $750m and $1.8bn respectively.
But Salesforce’s purchase has been met with dismay by some. Since Microsoft launched Teams in 2017, Slack has been growing in the $1.6 trillion company’s shadow. By including Teams with Office 365, the software suite that includes Word and Excel, Microsoft effectively gave its product away, a difficult proposition for Slack to match.
This month’s sale has been seen as both a chance for Salesforce to compete more forcefully with Microsoft, but also as evidence that it is impossible for independent companies to compete with the tech giants. “I don’t entirely agree with that,” Henderson says. “While we’re being acquired here, we’re being acquired for $30bn.
“We’re not being acquired because we didn’t see any way to continue growth, we’re being acquired because we think we can accelerate that growth, and that together we’re worth more than the sum of parts would have been otherwise. We could have definitely continued as a successful growing public company.”
Would the deal have happened if Microsoft had never launched Teams? “Maybe. Yeah, probably. Who knows what else would have changed in the world, [but] I think so. This acquisition isn’t because of Teams.”
Henderson has seen acquisitions go wrong. As one of the eight Flickr employees brought into Yahoo in 2005, he saw start-up culture quickly become consumed by bureaucracy and division. But he insists a repeat will not happen. “[With Yahoo], they just didn’t care. It was irrelevant to them. We are a multibillion- dollar public company … this is a really significant acquisition for Salesforce.”
Henderson is often seen in shorts and a short sleeved shirt rather than a suit.
Credit: KIM WHITE
To that end, Henderson will remain chief technology officer, and Butterfield chief executive. Slack staff will still be able to work from home.
“Some organisations will just go back to how they worked. But I think that’s going to be the minority. Many organisations have seen that it is possible, and it’s still possible to be productive. So why would we need to go back to the way we were working?”
Slack itself is working on features to replicate some of the experiences of the office, such as always-on audio channels, which will let workers chat without the formality of arranging a phone call.
Cal Henderson CV
Henderson himself says he expects to go into Slack’s San Francisco office two or three days a week and is determined not to make it a daily routine, in part because it will encourage company ladder climbers to do the same.
“One of the concerns that I had as we shifted to allowing anybody at Slack to work remotely was what that would mean for career prospects. If you have this [work from home] policy but to be a leader of the company, you have to be in a specific office, then it’s not going to work, you’re going to be treating all of your employees as second class citizens.”
Henderson says Slack has deliberately hired executives based outside of Silicon Valley to prevent this happening.
Many tech executives have taken the remote work boom as an opportunity to escape California’s high taxes and property prices – Elon Musk’s escape to Texas being the latest. Henderson says he, for one, is staying put: logging into an office from the other side of the world is one thing, moving children out of school is another.
Perhaps the time saved on the commute will give him some more time to work on that video game.
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