We’re still not over the Sam Altman town hall; at the town hall he said “tell us what we should build, we’ll probably build it!” and today at Stanford Treehacks he said another thing about how he chooses projects: he thinks of himself as having made a career out of doing things people think are hard, but would be a big deal if it came true.
well okay, Sam: You Should Build Slack. It fits your criteria: it is hard for anyone else without the clout of OpenAI to pull off, it will be very well received by the tech community, and it is an obvious progression of ChatGPT for both your Enterprise -and- your Coding push and build permanent entrenchment in your customers.
Slack rejected developer community and went upmarket in 2019, then Salesforce bought it for $27.7B in 2021, and ever since then Slack has been on a slow rachet up in prices and has struggled to introduce compelling new AI features (Slack AI is occasionally useful but impossible to discover/learn/personalize) while facing constant outages. NPS feels low, and yet every organization in tech uses it.
Everything could be better. Developers routinely complain about Slack’s API costs and permissions (even 3rd or 4th Uber investor and famed vibe coder Jason Calacanis complained on the latest All In podcast). Founders routinely complain about the pricing. Slack users complain about channel fatigue and find the Recap tooling and notifications spam woefully inadequate. Huddles could offer far better realtime multimodal AI features.
Slack Connect is great though, definitely just clone that.
Sure, ChatGPT launched group chats 3 months ago and probably the usage isn’t great outside of OpenAI. It’d be a mistake to think that repeated half hearted attempts in consumer social AI means that you can’t build a successful business social network if you took it as seriously as you do everything else. Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success (after a rocky start).
In the desktop wars, Anthropic has pursued a far more cohesive strategy than OpenAI: one app for Chat, Cowork, and Claude Code, with optional control of the browser via Claude in Chrome.
By contrast, OpenAI has shipped the org chart to every user’s desktop: get our chat app here, get our browser app here, get our coding app there. Log in fresh every single time. Even doing a unification at some point probably still leaves you behind; you need to lead, not be a slow follower of what Anthropic already did.
“OpenAI Slack” is your chance to retake the initiative. Of course you’re going to be good at chat AI. Of course you care about the multiagent UX of the future. Why not build your own version of the existing multiagent UX we all know to work between humans? Heck, forgot you even hired Slack CEO Denise Dresser in Dec. Great!
Oh another thing: I bet OpenAI employees would have 10,000 ideas to improve Slack if you owned your own Slack. After all, you guys use this thing more than email. The feedback dogfood loop on this one will be the craziest thing since Claude Code.
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