If you use Slack at work, you’ve probably noticed that the number of channels you’re asked to choose from keeps growing.
David Sacks, one quarter of the popular “All In” podcast and a famous serial entrepreneur whose past companies include Yammer — an employee chat startup that he sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012 — says he can solve this problem. To that end, he teamed up with Evan Owen, former vice president of engineering at a collaboration app, Zinc, which ServiceMax acquired in 2019.
The two have created Glue, an employee chat app they say will fix what they call “Slack Channel Fatigue.” Glue, which emerged from stealth on Tuesday, is designed around theme-based threads and uses GenAI.
Craft Ventures, the VC firm Sacks founded, incubated and funded the company through multiple seed rounds. Glue was born in 2021 when Sacks and Owen, then an entrepreneur at Craft, decided they each had a lot of ideas for improving messaging in the workplace, and the space was about to be updated.
“Our view was that there’s still a lot of room for innovation,” said Sacks, who is Glue’s co-founder and president. “If you talk to people about Slack, even though it’s a good product, they feel like the channels are too noisy and it’s too good to watch.”
In Slack, conversations happen in specific channels. This means that anyone who wants to chat with a group, even for a short message, must subscribe to this channel. However, since most people stay subscribed to channels they rarely use, it can feel like everyone in the company is on every channel, which can be overwhelming.
Glue arranges all communication in threads. An individual or a group can start a thread, and other groups, even Glue’s AI bot, can be invited to join it.
In many ways, Glue’s interface is similar to Slack’s, but what a user sees on their screen is tailored to them.
“You can create a thread for a specific short task,” said Owen, co-founder and CEO of Glue. “It’s an ephemeral conversation, and when you’re done with it, it can go away.”
An employee can archive the conversation, and if they mention it again, the conversation will come up again, he said.
While organizing work messages into threads instead of channels might seem like a solution to reducing communication clutter, Sacks said he’s sure that’s something Slack and its main alternative, Microsoft Teams, can’t do. easy to reproduce.
“To replicate what we’ve done, they’re going to have to completely re-architect the way the entire product works,” he said.
If that sounds vaguely familiar, that could be because Yammer (which has more or less morphed into a product called Microsoft Viva, though Microsoft Teams also lets employees chat in addition to making group video calls), it was a thread based chat as well. Yammer looked like Facebook.
But Glue gave Sacks and Owen a chance to recreate thread-based conversations in the age of artificial intelligence. So, like most startups now, Glue is incorporating AI into its product.
“We’ve made artificial intelligence into a virtual employee on your team who can jump into the conversation at any time,” Sachs said.
Sacks believes that artificial intelligence within a company’s internal communication platform can be very powerful.
“Sometimes you’ll start a conversation with your colleagues and then realize you need AI to come in and answer a question. So you want your AI conversation to be in the same place as your human conversation,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to send users somewhere else to chat with AI and then have their human conversations in some other app.”
While Glue AI’s role will evolve as LLM subjects improve, Sacks said there are already some things the bot can do with a certain level of accuracy. Glue AI can suggest topic names for each thread, summarize conversations over a period of time, and find certain information about employees based on their conversation history, such as what their role is in the company.
Glue AI can be powered by ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude AI. Users can switch between the two models or the system will automatically select the LLM that performs best for them.
Of course, the AI built into the enterprise chat app isn’t unique to Glue. Slack also has built-in AI, and of course Microsoft has integrated CoPilot AI into many of its apps, including Microsoft Teams.
Craft Ventures has been using the glue internally for a year, and starting Tuesday the product will be offered to other companies.
After a three-month trial, Glue will charge $7 per employee per month, which Sacks said is slightly less than Slack’s pricing for a basic package.
Owen added that it’s a “killer deal” because Slack charges between $15 and $18 to include SlackGPT, the AI chatbot that Slack owner Salesforce announced a year ago.
Glue isn’t the first startup Sacks has incubated at Craft Ventures. In recent years, Craft launched Callin, a social podcast app that was later sold to Rumble for less than what the company raised in financing, said Axios. Last year, the venture capital firm launched SaaSGrid, a startup that tracks SaaS metrics.
Sacks hinted that Glue may be ready to raise its first outside funding shortly after the app’s launch.
“We want to launch and show people how awesome the product is,” Sacks said. “If you have a great product in the AI space, you can raise a Series A immediately.”
As for the valuation Craft hopes the company will attract, he said, “You never really know where the valuation is going to go until you start a process.”
He teases the arrival of his new AI company on “All In,” which he co-hosts with fellow investors Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg. [in this],” he said, referring to the All In co-hosts.
Since he’s positioning Glue as an AI company, and perhaps his besties want a piece, it’s clear he’s hoping for a high valuation.
