David Sacks reveals the AI ​​firm he is teasing referred to as Glu on his All In podcast

If you employ Slack at work, you will have observed that the variety of channels you invite to has been steadily growing.

David Sacks, one-fourth of the favored “All In” podcast and a famend serial entrepreneur whose earlier firms embrace Yammer — an worker chat startup that was bought to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012 — says he sees this downside as Can remedy. Toward this finish, he teamed up with Evan Owen, previously VP of engineering at Zinc, a collaboration app that ServiceMax acquired in 2019.

The duo have created Glue, an worker chat app that they are saying will treatment “Slack channel fatigue.” Glue, which emerged in secret on Tuesday, is designed round topic-based threads and makes use of GenAI.

Craft Ventures, the VC agency that Sachs based, incubated and funded the corporate via a number of seed rounds. Glu was born in 2021 when Sachs and Owen, who was an entrepreneur at Craft on the time, determined they every had a whole lot of concepts about the best way to enhance office messaging, and this area was due for an replace. .

“Our view was that there was still a lot of room for innovation,” mentioned Sachs, Glu’s co-founder and president. “If you talk to people about Slack, even though it’s a great product, they feel like the channels are really noisy, and it’s a lot to maintain.”

On Slack, discussions happen in particular channels. This implies that anybody who needs to speak with a gaggle, even for a brief message, should be a part of that channel. However, since most individuals stay subscribers to channels they hardly ever use, it could really feel like everybody within the firm is on each single channel, which may be overwhelming.

The glue organizes all communication into threads. One individual or a staff can begin a thread, and different groups and even Glu’s AI bot may be invited to affix.

In some ways, Glu’s interface appears just like Slack, however all the things a consumer sees on their display is tailor-made particularly to them.

“You can create a thread for a specific little task,” mentioned Owen, co-founder and CEO of Glu. “This is a short-term conversation, and when you’re done with it, it can be over.”

An worker can archive the dialog, he mentioned, and if they’re talked about once more, the chat will pop up once more.

While organizing work messages into threads as an alternative of channels may appear to be a throw-back answer to lowering communication muddle, Sachs mentioned he is certain it is one thing that Slack and its fundamental various, Microsoft Teams, can do. ,Can’t repeat simply.

“To copy what we’ve done, they would have to completely reengineer the way the entire product works,” he mentioned.

If this sounds vaguely acquainted, which may be as a result of Yammer (which has kind of morphed right into a product referred to as Microsoft Viva, though Microsoft Teams permits workers to speak along with making staff video calls), There was additionally a thread-based chat. Yammer regarded just like Facebook.

But Glu gave Sachs and Owen an opportunity to reinvent thread-based chat within the age of AI. So, like most startups now, Glu is incorporating AI into its product.

“We’ve turned the AI ​​in your team into a virtual employee who can enter the chat at any time,” Sachs mentioned.

Sachs believes that AI may be very highly effective inside an organization’s inside communications platform.

“Sometimes you’ll start a conversation with your coworkers and then realize you need AI to answer a question. So, you want your AI chat to be in the same place as your human chat,” he mentioned. “It doesn’t make sense to send users somewhere else to chat with an AI and then have a human-like chat with them on another app.”

While the function of Glu AI will evolve because the underlying LLM is improved, Sachs mentioned there are already some issues the bot can do with a sure stage of accuracy. Glu AI can counsel subject names for every thread, summarize conversations over time, and extract sure details about workers primarily based on their chat historical past, corresponding to what their function is throughout the firm. Is.

Glu AI may be powered by ChatGPIT or Anthropic’s Cloud AI. Users can toggle between the 2 fashions, or the system will routinely choose the higher performing LLM for them.

Of course, AI embedded in company chat apps is not distinctive to Glue. Slack additionally has an built-in AI, and naturally Microsoft has embedded its CoPilot AI into lots of its apps, together with Microsoft Teams.

Craft Ventures has been utilizing the glue internally for a yr, and beginning Tuesday the product might be provided to different firms.

After a three-month trial interval, Glu will cost $7 per worker monthly, which Sachs mentioned is barely decrease than Slack’s worth for the essential bundle.

Owen mentioned it is a “killer deal” as a result of Slack costs between $15 and $18 to incorporate Slack GPT, an AI chatbot from Slack proprietor Salesforce. was introduced a yr in the past,

Sacks is not the primary startup incubated at Glue Craft Ventures. Craft began in the previous few years Colin, a social podcasting app which was later bought to Rumble For lower than the funding raised by the corporate, Axios reported. Last yr, the enterprise agency launched SaaSGrid, a startup Monitor SaaS metrics,

Sachs indicated that Glu could possibly be prepared to boost its first exterior funding quickly after the app’s unveiling.

“We want to launch and show people how great the product is,” Sachs mentioned. “If you have a great product in the AI ​​field, you can raise a Series A immediately.”

As far as what valuation Kraft hopes the corporate will appeal to, he mentioned, “You never really know where the valuation will land until you have a process.”

He’s hinting on the arrival of his new AI firm on “All In,” which he co-hosts with fellow buyers Jason Calakanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg, saying, “Besties (to spend money on) Pushing,” he mentioned. To your All In co-hosts.

Given that he is positioning Glu as an AI firm, and maybe his finest pal additionally needs a chunk, it is clear he is hoping for a excessive valuation.