David Sacks, a renowned serial entrepreneur and one-fourth owner of the famous “All In” podcast, asserts that he can resolve this issue, among his previous ventures, Yammer was an employee messaging startup that Microsoft acquired for $1.2 billion in 2012
On a collaboration application that ServiceMax purchased in 2019, he collaborated with Evan Owen, a former vice president of engineering at Zinc, for this purpose.
They claim that the employee messaging application Glue, which they co-developed, will alleviate “Slack channel fatigue.” Glue, which emerged from covert mode on Tuesday, employs GenAI and is structured around topic-based threads.
The organization received seed funding and incubation from Craft Ventures, the venture capital firm that Sacks founded. Sacks and Owen, entrepreneur-in-residences at Craft at the time, founded Glue in 2021 after determining that the workplace communications space required an update and that they each had numerous suggestions for improvement.
“Our perspective was that significant potential for further innovation remains,” stated Sacks, co-founder and chairman of Glue. “People claim that even though Slack is a good product, the channels are extremely noisy and difficult to follow.”
In Slack, conversations occur within designated channels. This means that an individual must join that channel to communicate with a group, even for a brief message. However, because most users continue to subscribe to channels they rarely access, it cannot be straightforward to feel as though every employee is present on every single channel.
Everything that is communicated is threaded using Glue. An individual or a group can start a thread and invite other teams or Glue’s AI agents to join.
Although Glue’s interface resembles Slack in many respects, each element a user encounters is tailored exclusively to their needs.
“You can create a thread for a specific, short task,” said Owen, co-founder and chief executive officer of Glue. “The conversation is transient; once it concludes, it can vanish.”
He stated that an employee can archive the conversation so that it will reappear if they are mentioned again.
Although organizing work messaging in threads rather than channels may appear old-fashioned in its aim to minimize communication congestion, Sacks is sure that this is only possible by Microsoft Teams, Slack’s primary competitor.
“To replicate our work, they would be required to undertake a comprehensive re-architecting of the product’s functionality,” he explained.
Should this sound vaguely familiar, it is possible that Yammer, which has since transformed Microsoft Viva (although Microsoft Teams also facilitates team video calls and chats among employees), functioned as a thread-based communication platform. In appearance, Yammer resembled Facebook.
However, Glue enabled Sacks and Owen to recreate thread-based conversations in the era of artificial intelligence. Thus, Glue, similar to most firms today, integrates AI into its products.
Sacks stated, “We transformed AI into a virtual team member who can enter the chat at any time.”
According to Sacks, AI integrated into an organization’s internal communication infrastructure can be highly potent.
“Occasionally, you may initiate a conversation with your colleagues only to realize later that AI is required to respond to a query. “Therefore, you want your AI and human chats to be in the same position,” he explained. “It makes no sense to direct users to another app where they can converse with the AI and then have conversations resembling human conversations.”
Sacks stated that while the function of Glue AI will develop as the underlying LLMs advance, the bot is already capable of performing specific tasks with a degree of accuracy. Glue AI can propose topic names for individual threads, compile conversations over an extended period, and deduce particular employee information, such as their organizational function, from their chat history.
Undoubtedly, Glue is one of many companies that have equipped their corporate messaging applications with AI. Slack also incorporates artificial intelligence, and Microsoft has integrated its CoPilot AI into numerous applications, including Microsoft Teams.
Craft Ventures has been utilizing Glue internally for the past year; the product will be available to other businesses on Tuesday.
Glue will charge $7 per employee per month following a three-month trial period, which Sacks compares to the cost of Slack’s base package.
Owen added that it’s a “killer deal” because SlackGPT, the AI chatbot announced a year ago by Slack’s owner Salesforce, costs between $15 and $18 to include.
Not before Glue has Sacks established an incubation facility at Craft Ventures. Craft established Callin, a social podcasting application, in recent years. Axios reported that Rumble acquired the app for a price below the funding the company had raised. A year ago, the venture capital firm introduced SaaSGrid, a startup that monitors SaaS metrics.
According to Sacks, the Glue may be prepared to raise its initial external funding shortly after the app’s release.
Sacks stated, “We want to launch and demonstrate to the world how incredible the product is.” “With an outstanding AI product, you can immediately raise Series A funding.”
Regarding the anticipated valuation of the company, Craft stated, “The precise location of the valuation is uncertain until a systematic approach is implemented.”
On “All In,” which he co-hosts with fellow investors Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg, he has been previewing the launch of his new AI company. “Besties have been clamoring to invest [in this],” he said, referring to his All-In co-hosts.
Glue’s positioning as an AI company and the possibility that some of his closest friends are interested in investing indicates that he is undoubtedly anticipating a high valuation.