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If you use Slack at workplace , you ’ve likely noticed that the number of channels you ’re receive to proliferates incessantly .
David Sacks , one - stern of the democratic All In podcast and a renowned nonparallel entrepreneur whose past company let in Yammer — an employee chat startup that deal to Microsoft for $ 1.2 billion in 2012 — says he can clear this trouble . Toward that last , he team up with Evan Owen , formerly the VP of engineering at a collaboration app , Zinc , that ServiceMax acquire in 2019 .
The two of them have make Glue , an employee chat app that they say will ready what they call “ slack water channel tiredness . ” Glue , which emerged from stealth on Tuesday , is design around issue - based yarn and habituate GenAI .
Craft Ventures , the VC business firm that Sacks founded , incubated and fund the company through multiple cum stave . Glue was born in 2021 when Sacks and Owen , then an entrepreneur - in - residence at Craft , decide they each had many idea about meliorate work messaging , and the infinite was due for an update .
“ Our purview was that there ’s still a wad of room for innovation , ” said Sacks , who is Glue ’s co - founder and chairman . “ If you talk to people about Slack , even though it ’s a good product , they find like channels are really noisy , and it ’s a slew to keep up with . ”
Glue arranges all communicating into yarn . An individual or a squad can start up a ribbon , and other teams and even Glue ’s AI bot can be invited to join it .
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In many agency , Glue ’s interface look like to Slack ’s , but everything a substance abuser sees on their screen is intended specifically for them .
“ you could create a thread for a specific short task , ” said Owen , Glue ’s Centennial State - founder and CEO . “ 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 are advert again , the chat will pop up again , he pronounce .
While organizing work messaging in threads instead of channels may feel like a discombobulate - back solution to trim back communication clutter , Sacks tell he is trusted that this is something Slack and its main option , Microsoft Teams , ca n’t easy double .
“ In guild to copy what we ’ve done , they would have to completely re - architect the way the whole product works , ” he articulate .
If this go mistily intimate , that could be because Yammer ( which has more or less morph into a product called Microsoft Viva , although Microsoft Teams also allows employees to chat , in add-on to do squad video yell ) , was a thread - free-base chat as well . Yammer search interchangeable to Facebook .
But Glue gave Sacks and Owen a chance to recreate thread - based schmoose in the geezerhood of AI . So , like most startup now , Glue is incorporating AI into its product .
“ We made AI into a practical employee on your team who can enter the confabulation at any time , ” Sacks read .
Sacks believes that AI inside a caller ’s internal communicating chopine can be very potent .
“ Sometimes you ’ll start a chat with your co - worker and then realize you call for AI to rise in and suffice a question . So , you want your AI New World chat to be in the same place as your human chat , ” he say . “ It does n’t make sense to send users out somewhere else to chat with the AI and then have their kind of human Old World chat on some other app . ”
While Glue AI ’s function will evolve as implicit in Master of Laws improve , carrier bag said there are already some thing the bot can do with a sure level of precision . Glue AI can evoke topic name for each yarn , summarize conversations across a span of clip and figure out sure information about employees ground on their chat account , such as what is their role within the company .
Glue AI can be power by ChatGPT or Anthropic ’s Claude AI . Users can toggle between the two good example , or the organization will automatically prefer the well - performing LLM for them .
Of of course , AI embedded into the corporal chat app is n’t alone to Glue . Slack also has an incorporate AI , and of course Microsoft has embedded its CoPilot AI into many of its apps , admit Microsoft Teams .
Craft Ventures has been using Glue internally for a year , and starting Tuesday the product will be offered to other companies .
After a three - calendar month trial period , Glue will charge $ 7 per employee per month , which Sacks said is slimly less than Slack ’s pricing for a canonic package .
Owen added that it ’s a “ killer deal ” because mire charges between $ 15 to $ 18 to include SlackGPT , the AI chatbot that Slack ’s proprietor Salesforceannounced a year ago .
Glue is not the first inauguration sack hatch in Craft Ventures . In the last few year , Craft startedCallin , a societal podcasting appthat afterwards sold to Rumble forless than the company raise in financial support , Axios cover . ( The final sale damage was higher , a germ intimate with the deal subsequently tell TechCrunch . ) Last year , the venture business firm launched SaaSGrid , a inauguration that save cart track of SaaS metric .
sac hinted that Glue may be quick to raise its first external funding shortly after entry of the app .
“ We want to launch and show masses how awesome the product is , ” Sacks order . “ If you have a great product in the AI space , you could put forward a Series A the right way away . ”
As for what valuation Craft hop the company will attract , he said , “ You never really know where the valuation is going to land until you have a summons . ”
He ’s been teasing the coming of his new AI caller on All In , which he co - hosts with fellow investors Jason Calacanis , Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg , “ Besties have been clamoring to invest [ in this ] , ” he read , referring to his All In co - hosts .
Given that he ’s positioning Glue as an AI company , and maybe his besties do want a composition , it ’s open he ’s hoping for a high rating .
