Hi, everyone, welcome to disrupt. We are thrilled to have with us today Brett Taylor and Stewart Butterfield, especially because Salesforce is in the middle of a very big event of its own in San Francisco. Today we are going to be kicking the tires, so to speak on this $28 billion deal that Salesforce struck by slack back in December, a deal that closed the summer when the DOJ antitrust division dropped its probe. That's the great news. At the same time shale, her shareholders are still trying to figure out exactly what to make of this deal. Salesforce, his shares are trading around where they were a year ago. So we're going to talk a little bit about that as well. Guys, thank you again, so much for joining us. I know that you go way back. I'm wondering if we could just start at the beginning of this deal. Specifically Stewart, tell me a little bit about maybe who reached out to him?
Well, there's a little bit of back and forth. And I reached out to Brett about something totally different. In the spring, maybe a couple months into the pandemic, something like that. And if I recall correctly, and then correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he ghosted me on that one. We reconnected.
We agreed never to talk about this.
And, and we reconnected a couple months later, with the usual, maybe some of the people in the audience have been through this. But the usual kind of circumspect, indirect way that these things often happen. This is Brett, but I think this like a more typical Corp dev approach is, if you would be interested in having a conversation about how our companies could work more closely together, we would also be interested in having that conversation. So thankfully, Brett's a little bit more, more direct than that. But really, the conversation was not so much about deal acquisition, valuation or anything like that are much more about technology and vision and what we could do for customers. That's great.
And I'm sure there was some trust there. You both were sort of rising entrepreneurs or at around the same time, so I'm sure that helped. Whereas if you were dealing with somebody who you had no background with, that would be very different, I assume.
Definitely. I mean, actually, I think Stuart and I met each other. When Stuart was on in flicker, and I was running my social network I started friendfeed years ago. So we've known each other for well over a decade now.
