&quot;We&#x27;re going to take $340M in funding so that we build every conceivable integration and API into the product, blast the hell out of every marketing channel, and ensure that there&#x27;s never a reason to use anything besides Slack.  And if you do, you&#x27;re stupid.&quot;<p>More seriously - network effects exist when there are reasons to choose your product other than what <i>you</i>, as the company running it, have personally built.  People shop on EBay not because it&#x27;s a great site (it isn&#x27;t), but because if you want to find someone selling a rare item, you are far more likely to find it there than anywhere else.  People stay on Facebook (despite oftentimes hating them) because their friends are on Facebook; it has nothing to do with what Facebook does, and everything to do with the behavior of their friends.  People use Whatsapp&#x2F;Line&#x2F;WeChat&#x2F;Hangouts&#x2F;iMessage based on what their friends are using, irrespective of the relative technical merits.  People stay at AirBnB not because it&#x27;s a great site (though IMHO, it is), but because they&#x27;re far more likely to find a nice place at an out-of-the-way location than any other hotel search.<p>The office messaging market - for whatever reason - has started to exhibit these dynamics.  People setup Slack channels not because it&#x27;s a good service, but because their employees encourage them to setup Slack channels.  They write plugins for Slack not because they want to, but because that&#x27;s where the audience is.  They stay on Slack because that&#x27;s where all the plugins are.  Maybe these were intentional moves that Stewart Butterfield carefully planned out, or maybe they were just accidents of history.  From an investor&#x27;s POV, they don&#x27;t care: the fact is that people <i>do</i> ask their employers to setup Slack channels, and they <i>do</i> get on Slack because other groups they&#x27;re part of are using it, and that dynamic will lead to a monopoly that the investor wants to be a part of.