This article was published on August 10, 2016

Meet the CTO busy killing email


Meet the CTO busy killing email

If you’ve ever wondered what sort of technical wizardry would be behind the downfall of the world’s most pervasive medium, Cal Henderson is the right man to ask.

Cal is the Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Slack – a team collaboration tool that has been dubbed by almost every major publication as ‘the email killer’. And in November he’ll be one of the tech innovators revealing his secret to success at Momentum – our new event for New York.

Slack makes work communication so much easier – and more fun.

While email is still putting up a fight, Slack has completely transformed the way entire companies work (including here at TNW), earning it a $3.8 billion valuation in the process.

The software originally built momentum with startups, and is now being used by everyone from Airbnb and Buzzfeed, to Harvard University and Samsung.

But Cal’s story runs deeper than his most recent runaway success: he was the Chief Software Architect behind photo-sharing application Flickr, he helped lay the framework for scaling websites with his 2006 best-selling book Building Scaleable Web Sites, and he built Slack while working on a Massively Multiplayer Online Game – perhaps an indication of why he thinks communicating with colleagues shouldn’t be all work and no play.

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Catch him at Momentum

At Momentum on November 16th, Cal Henderson will be joined by a meticulously selected group of world-class speakers, including Mattermark Co-founder and CEO Danielle Morrill, and Buffer Co-founder and COO Leo Widrich. There are some pretty good stories behind why we selected each of them – read them on our speaker page.


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