About

Have you heard the joke: "Two backend engineers and a UI engineer walk into a bar..."

We're a team of deeply experienced engineers who have shipped products to billions of users. Our team includes engineers who worked on MSN Messenger, Facebook Groups, Facebook Workplace, the Hack programming language, and Facebook's developer APIs. When it comes to scalability, reliability, and usability, we've earned our stripes working on some of the most used platforms in human history.

For Slashwork, we're bringing our deep understanding of how people interact and what is actually important for getting the key information to the right people.

We've also been outside of Meta long enough to look back with clarity and honesty. Social media platforms are designed to get and keep your attention. They have to sell ads. Slashwork does not. We don't have to build the stickiest, most addictive platform possible. We get to focus on building the most useful tool for work communication without any compromises. Our product is built to serve users who pay for it, not monetize their attention.

We raised funds for Slashwork in quite a non-traditional way. Josh, Dave, and Jackson had an existing friendship with Julien Codorniou of 20VC. We chatted about the possibility of working on something new for months before we ever committed to starting Slashwork.

Julien brought his wealth of knowledge from having been the global head of sales for the Workplace product by Meta. As we began to dig in to the space, we were struck by how beloved Workplace was to its users. By the incredible amount of adoption it got. How the resellers surveyed the alternatives to Workplace after its shutdown and mostly decided nothing was on par. We started to feel really excited. What could a 2026 successor to Workplace look like?

There's no investor other than Julien that we would have considered to lead our round, even with some bigger checks being waved our way. With the 20VC media engine helmed by Harry Stebbings and with Julien bringing his experience in executing the go-to-market side of a business like this, we've got a real shot at winning the game.

The next investor we spoke with was AJ Tennant. We're not trying to compete with Slack, but were very keen to learn about Slack's evolution from a small tech-centric comms tool into the behemoth that it became. AJ was there and helped shaped their commercial trajectory. He gives us a GTM super power that far exceeds what we as a founding team of 3 engineers would have otherwise.

We raised a $3.5m round led by 20VC, with participation from a group of senior technology operators and founders spanning Facebook, Slack, Intercom, Dropbox, Microsoft and beyond. Massively important to us was to find investors who get the premise and who round out our abilities. We're super grateful to have such a powerhouse set of folks onboard.

Our Angel investors include Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners (Sheryl Sandberg’s VC, Facebook), Cal Henderson (Slack co-founder), Carolyn Everson (Permira, Disney, Facebook), David Fischer (Facebook), Des Traynor (Intercom co-founder), Will Shu (Deliveroo), Soleio (Dropbox, Facebook, Figma), Philip Su (Facebook, Microsoft, OpenAI), Blaise DiPersia (Facebook), Olivia Calvert (Deel), and others.