Glue AI Image credit: Glue
If you use Slack for work, you may have noticed that the number of channels you're invited to is constantly increasing.
He is one-quarter of the popular podcast “All In” and is a well-known serial entrepreneur whose past companies include Yammer, an employee chat startup that he sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012. David Sacks, a well-known serial entrepreneur, says he can solve this problem. To that end, he teamed up with Evan Owen, the former vice president of engineering at collaboration app Zinc, which his ServiceMax acquired in 2019.
The two created Glue, an employee chat app that solves so-called “Slack channel fatigue.” Glue, which emerged from stealth on Tuesday, is designed around topic-based threads and is powered by GenAI.
Craft Ventures, the VC firm founded by Sachs, nurtured and funded the company through multiple seed rounds. Glue was born in his 2021 year. Sacks and Owen, Craft's entrepreneurs-in-residence at the time, decided they each had a lot of ideas for improving workplace messaging, and it was time for the space to be updated.
David Sachs Image Credit: David Sachs / Glue
“Our view was that there was still a lot of room for innovation,” said Sachs, co-founder and chairman of Glue. “When I tell people about Slack, even though it's a good product, the channels are so loud that it's hard to keep up.”
In Slack, discussions take place in specific channels. This means that anyone who wants to chat with the group, even with a short message, must join that channel. However, most people keep subscribing to channels they rarely use, which can make it feel like everyone in your company is on every channel, which can be overwhelming.
Glue organizes all communication into threads. Individuals or teams can start threads and invite other teams and even Glue's AI bots to join them.
Glue's interface is similar in many ways to Slack's, but everything you see on your screen is private to you.
“You can create threads for specific short tasks,” said Owen, co-founder and CEO of Glue. “It's a temporary conversation that can disappear once it's over.”
Employees can archive conversations and the chat will pop up again if it's mentioned again, he said.
Organizing work messages in threads rather than channels may seem like a throwback solution to reduce communication clutter, but it's not the case with Slack or its main alternative, Microsoft Teams. Sachs said he believes it's something that can't be easily replicated.
“To emulate what we've done would require a complete reengineering of how the entire product works,” he said.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, Yammer (which has more or less morphed into a product called Microsoft Viva, but Microsoft Teams also lets employees chat in addition to team video calls) Maybe it was because it was a thread-based chat. In the same way. Yammer was like Facebook.
But Glue gave Sacks and Owen the opportunity to recreate thread-based chat in the age of AI. So like most startups today, Glue is incorporating his AI into its products.
Evan Owen Image credit: Evan Owen / Glue
“We turned the AI into a virtual employee of the team who is always available to chat,” Sachs says.
Sachs believes that AI within a company's internal communications platforms could become very powerful.
“Sometimes you start chatting with a colleague and then realize you need the AI to step in and answer your questions. So you want the AI chat to be in the same place as the human chat,” he says. I did. “It doesn’t make sense to send a user off to another location to chat with an AI and then have a human-like chat in another app.”
Glue AI's role will evolve as the underlying LLM improves, but Sacks said there are already some things the bot can do with some level of accuracy. Glue AI can suggest topic names for each thread, summarize conversations over time, and learn specific information about employees (such as their role within the company) based on their chat history.
Of course, AI built into enterprise chat apps isn't unique to Glue. Slack also has integrated AI, and of course Microsoft has embedded his CoPilot AI into many of its apps, including Microsoft Teams.
Craft Ventures has been using Glue internally for a year and plans to offer the product to other companies starting Tuesday.
After a three-month trial period, Glue charges $7 per employee per month, slightly less than the price of Slack's basic package, Sachs said.
Owen added that this is a “killer deal” because Slack costs $15 to $18 when you include SlackGPT, an AI chatbot that Slack owner Salesforce announced a year ago. Ta.
Glue isn't the first startup Sacks has incubated at Craft Ventures. In recent years, Kraft launched social podcasting app Callin, which was later sold to Rumble for less money than the company raised, Axios reported. Last year, the venture launched SaaSGrid, a startup that tracks SaaS metrics.
Sachs hinted that Glue could be ready to raise its first external funding shortly after the app's launch.
“We want to launch the product and show people how great this product is,” Sachs said. “If you have a great product in the AI space, you can raise a Series A quickly.”
As for what kind of valuation Kraft hopes to bring to the company, he said, “We don't really know where the valuation will land until we have a process in place.”
He continues to tease the arrival of his new AI company on “All In,” which he co-hosts with fellow investors Jason Karakanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg. [in this]” he said, referring to his All In co-host.
Given that he's positioning Glue as an AI company, and that his closest friends probably want a piece of it, it's clear he expects high praise.