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I watched Slack eat our lunch, but I loved working here. May the best product win!

HipChat was Slack before Slack 💪 —the first team messaging service. Acquired by Atlassian in 2012. Then acquired by Slack in 2018.It's funny, we had early conversations with Salesforce about them acquiring HipChat in 2011. However, they said their intranet product Chatter was their bet in the space. I told them that these were two completely different products. They disagreed. Then, in 2021, It all came full circle when Salesforce acquired Slack, which had acquired HipChat from Atlassian, and it all worked out in the end. ✌️

Plaxo was a pretty toxic brand when we were acquired, but the HipCal guys and I helped turn it around with an entirely new product called Plaxo Pulse. Pulse was one of the first social feeds with activity from other services around the web. For context, this was when Facebook was still exclusive to college students. Plaxo Pulse increased new user sign-ups from 1,000 to 25,000 a day. Plaxo was acquired by Comcast in 2008, just weeks before the economy crashed. 🤞

HipCal was the first (and best) online calendar in the "Web 2.0" movement. I believe we were the first online calendar to have shared calendars and SMS notifications for events. For context, the iPhone wouldn't be out for another year or two and Google Calendar wasn't even released until after our acquisition (but they were clearly "inspired" by our design ;)HipCal was rated one of the top websites of 2005 by PC World magazine. Four of my fraternity brothers and I built HipChat in our fraternity house at RPI in Troy, NY. We had no idea what we were doing, what a startup was, or what Silicon Valley was. We were acquired by Plaxo (located in Silicon Valley) in 2006. We all packed up our stuff and moved out here together. We continue to found companies together to this day.