When you use Slack at work, you’ve possible observed that the variety of channels you’re invited to proliferates incessantly.
David Sacks, one quarter of the favored “All In” podcast and a famend serial entrepreneur whose previous firms embrace Yammer – an worker chat startup that bought to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012 – says he can resolve this downside. Towards that finish, he teamed up with Evan Owen, previously the VP of engineering at a collaboration app, Zinc, that ServiceMax acquired in 2019.
The 2 of them have created Glue, an worker chat app that they are saying will repair what they name “Slack channel fatigue.” Glue, which emerged from stealth on Tuesday, is designed round topic-based threads and makes use of GenAI.
Craft Ventures, the VC agency that Sacks based, incubated and funded the corporate by way of a number of seed rounds. Glue was born in 2021 when Sacks and Owen, then an entrepreneur-in-residence at Craft, determined they every had many concepts about enhancing office messaging, and the area was due for an replace.
“Our view was that there’s nonetheless a variety of room for innovation,” stated Sacks, who’s Glue’s co-founder and chairman. “When you discuss to folks about Slack, despite the fact that it’s a superb product, they really feel like channels are actually noisy, and it’s quite a bit to maintain up with.”
On Slack, discussions occur in particular channels. This implies anybody who desires to speak with a gaggle, even for a brief message, wants to hitch that channel. Nonetheless, since most individuals keep subscribed to channels they not often use, it might probably really feel like everybody within the firm is on each single channel, which could be overwhelming.
Glue arranges all communication into threads. A person or a crew can begin a thread, and different groups and even Glue’s AI bot could be invited to hitch it.
In some ways, Glue’s interface seems much like Slack’s, however all the things a person sees on their display screen is meant particularly for them.
“You may create a thread for a selected brief process,” stated Owen, Glue’s co-founder and CEO. “It’s an ephemeral dialog, and if you’re completed with it, it might probably go away.”
An worker can archive the dialog, and if they’re talked about once more, the chat will pop up once more, he stated.
Whereas organizing work messaging in threads as an alternative of channels could really feel like a throw-back resolution to lowering communication litter, Sacks stated he’s positive that that is one thing Slack and its most important various, Microsoft Groups, can’t simply replicate.
“In an effort to copy what we’ve completed, they must utterly re-architect the best way the entire product works,” he stated.
If this sounds vaguely acquainted, that might be as a result of Yammer (which has roughly morphed right into a product known as Microsoft Viva, though Microsoft Groups additionally permits staff to speak, along with to do crew video calls), was a thread-based chat as effectively. Yammer seemed much like Fb.
However Glue gave Sacks and Owen an opportunity to recreate thread-based chats within the age of AI. So, like most startups now, Glue is incorporating AI into its product.
“We made AI right into a digital worker in your crew who can enter the chat at any time,” Sacks stated.
Sacks believes that AI inside an organization’s inside communication platform could be very highly effective.
“Generally you’ll begin a chat together with your coworkers after which understand you want AI to leap in and reply a query. So, you need your AI chat to be in the identical place as your human chat,” he stated. “It doesn’t make sense to ship customers out some place else to speak with the AI after which have their form of human chats on another app.”
Whereas Glue AI’s position will evolve as underlying LLMs enhance, Sacks stated there are already some issues the bot can do with a sure degree of precision. Glue AI can counsel matter names for every thread, summarize conversations throughout a span of time, and work out sure details about staff primarily based on their chat historical past, corresponding to what’s their position inside the firm.
Glue AI could be powered by ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude AI. Customers can toggle between the 2 fashions, or the system will robotically select the better-performing LLM for them.
After all, AI embedded into the company chat app isn’t distinctive to Glue. Slack additionally has an built-in AI, and naturally Microsoft has embedded its CoPilot AI into a lot of its apps together with Microsoft Groups.
Craft Ventures has been utilizing Glue internally for a 12 months, and beginning Tuesday the product will likely be provided to different firms.
After a three-month trial interval, Glue will cost $7 per worker a month, which Sacks stated is barely lower than Slack’s pricing for a primary bundle.
Owen added that it’s a “killer deal” as a result of Slack expenses between $15 to $18 to incorporate SlackGPT, the AI chatbot that Slack’s proprietor Salesforce introduced a 12 months in the past.
Glue is just not the primary startup Sacks incubated in Craft Ventures. In the previous few years, Craft began Callin, a social podcasting app that later bought to Rumble for less than the company raised in funding, Axios reported. Final 12 months, the enterprise agency launched SaaSGrid, a startup that keeps track of SaaS metrics.
Sacks hinted that Glue could also be prepared to lift its first exterior funding shortly after unveiling of the app.
“We need to launch and present folks how superior the product is,” Sacks stated. “You probably have a terrific product within the AI area, you may elevate a Sequence An immediate.”
As for what valuation Craft hopes the corporate will entice, he stated, “You by no means actually know the place the valuation goes to land till you might have a course of.”
He’s been teasing the approaching of his new AI firm on “All In,” which he co-hosts with fellow buyers Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg, “Besties have been clamoring to take a position [in this],” he stated, referring to his All In co-hosts.
Provided that he’s positioning Glue as an AI firm, and possibly his besties do need a piece, it’s clear he’s hoping for a excessive valuation.