Rapid Response: Why Salesforce Bought Slack, w/Salesforce's Bret Taylor

Since this pandemic has started, our employees, on average, have 1.7 hours more meetings every single day. Totally unsustainable. People are burning out sitting in front of Zoom screens all day long.

In June [2020], when we polled our employees, 23% of the employees wanted to return to the office—only 23%! So, at that point in June [2020], we were like 'Oh my gosh, no one even wants to come back to the office.' Now [in late 2020], when we poll our employees, it's 72%.

I do think that 2020 and any year of significant disruption—maybe it's the financial crisis of 2008, maybe it's the pandemic, the economic crisis... it's a time for people and companies who are resilient to adversity to grow.

I think it all changed the day that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007. Now, all of a sudden, you don't have your home computer and your work computer, you have a supercomputer in your pocket.

One of the things that I've observed in this pandemic is just the importance of every single one of our employees and every one of our customers really having a beginner's mind ... Try to go into every day and forget what you think you know so that you can reimagine what your job is in the face of change—in the face of technological change, social change, business model change.

Fast forward to 2020, you can't ignore the fact that the entire economy has gone digital overnight, and the relevance of tools like Slack in a world that is all digital, in a world where people are working from anywhere, in a world that I think won't snap back to the way it was in 2019...

One of the big questions that every single CEO I talk to now [has] is 'Are we all going to go back to the office on the other side of this [COVID-19]?'