If you utilize Slack at work, you have probably noticed that the variety of channels you are invited to continues to grow.
David Sacks, one quarter of the popular All In podcast and a renowned serial entrepreneur whose past includes Yammer, an worker chat startup that was sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012, says he can solve this problem. To do this, he partnered with Evan Owen, previously vice chairman of engineering at collaboration app Zinc, which ServiceMax acquired in 2019.
The two created Glue, a chat app for employees that they say will solve what they call “Slack channel fatigue.” Glue, which emerged from hiding on Tuesday, is designed around thematic threads and uses GenAI.
Craft Ventures, the VC firm founded by Sacks, incubated and funded the company in multiple seed rounds. Glue was born in 2021 when Sacks and Owen, then entrepreneurs-in-residence at Craft, decided that they had a lot of ideas for improving workplace communication and the space needed an update.
“We think there is still a lot of room for innovation,” said Sacks, co-founder and CEO of Glue. “If you talk to people about Slack, even though it’s a good product, they feel like the channels are really noisy and you have to keep up with it.”
On Slack, discussions happen in specific channels. This implies that anyone who desires to check with the group, even via a short message, must join this channel. However, since most individuals subscribe to channels they rarely use, it might look like everyone in your company is using every channel, which might be overwhelming.
Glue organizes all communication into threads. A thread might be began by an individual or team, and other teams or even the AI Glue bot might be invited to hitch.
In many ways, Glue’s interface looks much like Slack’s, but every little thing the user sees on the screen is designed specifically for them.
“You can create a thread for a specific, short task,” said Owen, co-founder and CEO of Glue. “It’s a fleeting conversation, and when you’re done with it, it can go away.”
The worker can archive the conversation and if it is mentioned again, the chat will reappear, he said.
While organizing work messages into threads as an alternative of channels may look like a throwaway solution to reducing communication clutter, Sacks said he’s confident it’s something Slack and its major alternative, Microsoft Teams, cannot easily replicate.
“To copy what we did, they would have to completely redesign how the entire product works,” he said.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because Yammer (which has evolved more or less into a product called Microsoft Viva, although Microsoft Teams also allows employees to speak, in addition to conducting team video calls) was a threaded chat because Well. Yammer looked much like Facebook.
But Glue gave Sacks and Owen a likelihood to recreate threaded chats in the age of artificial intelligence. So, like most startups, Glue uses artificial intelligence in its product.
“We made artificial intelligence a virtual employee of your team who can enter the chat at any time,” Sacks said.
Sacks believes that the artificial intelligence found in a company’s internal communications platform could have enormous potential.
“Sometimes you start a conversation with your colleagues and then realize you need AI to step in and answer the question. So you want your AI chat to be in the same place as your human chat,” he said. “There is no point in sending users somewhere else to talk to AI and then having similar conversations with people in another app.”
While Glue AI’s role will evolve as core LLMs improve, Sacks said there are already some things the bot can do with some level of precision. Glue AI can suggest topic names for each thread, summarize conversations over time, and learn specific information about employees based on their conversation history, reminiscent of what their role is in the company.
Glue AI might be powered by ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude AI. Users can switch between the two models or the system will routinely select the higher performing LLM for them.
Of course, the AI built into a corporate chat app is not unique to Glue. Slack also has integrated AI, and after all Microsoft has built its CoPilot AI into many of its apps, including Microsoft Teams.
Craft Ventures has been using the adhesive internally for a 12 months, and starting Tuesday, the product will likely be offered to other corporations.
After a three-month trial period, Glue will charge $7 per 30 days per worker, which Sacks says is barely lower than the price of Slack’s basic package.
Owen added that it’s a “killer deal” because Slack charges $15 to $18 to enable SlackGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that Slack’s owner Salesforce announced a 12 months ago.
Glue is not the first startup Sacks has incubated at Craft Ventures. Over the past few years, Craft founded Callin, a social podcasting app that was later sold to Rumble for lower than the amount the company raised in funding, Axios reports. Last 12 months, the enterprise firm launched SaaSGrid, a startup that tracks SaaS metrics.
Sacks suggested that Glue may very well be ready to lift its first outside funding soon after the app is unveiled.
“We want to launch and show people how amazing this product is,” Sacks said. “If you have a great product in the AI space, you can raise a Series A right away.”
As for the valuation Craft hopes to acquire for the company, he said, “You never really know where the valuation is going until a process is developed.”
On All In, which he co-hosts with fellow investors Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg, he teases the arrival of his latest artificial intelligence company. [in this]he said, referring to his All In co-hosts.
Considering he’s positioning Glue as an artificial intelligence company and perhaps his friends actually need a piece, it’s clear he’s hoping for a high valuation.