If you utilize Slack in your professional environment, you’ve probably observed the constant expansion of the channels you’re invited to join.
David Sacks, a co-host of the widely acclaimed All In podcast and a distinguished serial entrepreneur known for founding Yammer—an employee communication platform acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012—believes he has a solution to this issue. He’s collaborated with Evan Owen, who previously served as VP of Engineering at Zinc, a collaboration app later acquired by ServiceMax in 2019.
Together, they developed Glue, an employee messaging application aimed at addressing what they term “Slack channel fatigue.” Officially launching on Tuesday, Glue is built around topic-focused threads and incorporates Generative AI.
Craft Ventures, Sacks’ venture capital firm, has nurtured and financed the startup through multiple seed funding rounds. The inception of Glue dates back to 2021, when Sacks and Owen, serving as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Craft, recognized a need for innovation in workplace communication and decided to bring their numerous ideas to life.
David Sacks, co-founder and chairman of Glue, sees significant potential for innovation within the workplace communication sector. He acknowledges that while Slack is a strong product, users often find its channels to be excessively noisy and difficult to manage.
Slack organizes discussions into specific channels, requiring users to join these channels for both short and long messages. Over time, employees tend to remain subscribed to channels they rarely use, resulting in a cluttered and overwhelming communication environment.
Glue distinguishes itself by arranging all interactions into threads. This setup allows individuals or teams to initiate threads, inviting other teams or even Glue’s AI bot to participate.
Visually, Glue’s interface bears similarities to Slack’s, yet it customizes the display to show only relevant information for each user.
“You can initiate a thread for a particular short-term task,” noted Stewart Owen, Glue’s co-founder and CEO. “These are ephemeral conversations that disappear once completed.”
Employees can archive these conversations, and they will reappear if the employee is mentioned again, Owen explained.
Although sorting workplace communications into threads instead of channels might seem like a retro approach to minimizing clutter, Sacks is confident that this is a unique solution that Slack and its primary competitor, Microsoft Teams, would struggle to implement easily.
“To replicate our model, they would need to completely overhaul their existing architectures,” Sacks asserted.
This concept might remind some of Yammer—a platform that evolved into Microsoft Viva but was initially a thread-based chat system resembling Facebook.
However, Glue leverages the contemporary possibilities of AI to reimagine thread-based chats. Like many modern startups, Glue integrates AI to enhance its product offerings.
David Sacks announced the introduction of AI as a virtual teammate capable of joining conversations instantaneously within your internal communication platform. Sacks asserts that integrating AI into a company’s communication system can be highly effective.
“Often, you start a discussion with colleagues and then realize you need AI assistance to answer a question. To streamline this process, it’s essential for your AI to be accessible within the same platform as your human interactions,” he explained. “Switching between multiple apps for different types of chats is impractical.”
Although Glue AI’s capabilities will expand with advancements in large language models (LLMs), Sacks noted that the bot already performs several tasks with notable accuracy. These include suggesting thread topics, summarizing lengthy conversations, and identifying employee roles based on chat history.
Glue AI operates using either ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude AI, allowing users to switch between models or rely on the system to select the most efficient one automatically.
It’s important to note that embedding AI in corporate chat apps is not exclusive to Glue. Competitors like Slack and Microsoft have also integrated AI functionalities, such as Slack’s built-in AI and Microsoft’s CoPilot AI across its suite, including Teams.
Having utilized Glue internally for a year, Craft Ventures is now extending the product to other businesses starting Tuesday.
Following a three-month trial, Glue will be available at $7 per employee per month, a price point Sacks mentioned is slightly lower than Slack’s basic package pricing.
Owen emphasized that this is a “killer deal,” citing that SlackGPT, the AI chatbot introduced by Slack’s parent company Salesforce, costs between $15 to $18 per user.
Glue isn’t the first startup incubated by Sacks at Craft Ventures. Previously, Craft launched Callin, a social podcasting app that was later sold to Rumble at a value reportedly lower than its raised funds, though sources told TechCrunch the final sale price was higher. Last year, they also introduced SaaSGrid, a platform for tracking SaaS metrics.
Sacks hinted that Glue might soon seek its first round of external funding post-launch.
“We aim to demonstrate the product’s excellence first,” Sacks stated. “In the AI sector, having a superior product can facilitate immediate Series A funding.”
Regarding the anticipated valuation, he added, “Valuations are unpredictable until the process unfolds.”
Sacks has been generating interest in his new AI venture on the All In podcast, co-hosted with fellow investors Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg. “Our co-hosts are eager to invest,” he noted, signaling a strong hope for a significant valuation.
