When discussing what attracted the fast-growing workplace messaging platform to Denver, Slack Technologies executives on Monday pointed to many of the same factors other tech companies point to when they set up shop in the Mile High City.
The city has a highly educated workforce, a high quality of life and a cost of living that’s reasonable compared to off-the-charts Silicon Valley. Investments in infrastructure over the last 15 years mean that Slack’s office — taking up the sixth and seventh floors of the building at 1681 Chestnut Place near Union Station — is walking distance to local and regional rail and bus lines, providing access to an even deeper pool of talent.
But Ali Rayl, the company’s vice president of customer experience, hit on something else that made Denver stand out for the company, an attribute that worked against the city in its efforts to lure Amazon’s HQ2: its middle-of-the-country geography.
“Denver itself is just perfectly located for us,” Rayl said specifically of her team, tasked with responding to inquiries and help requests from Slack’s more than 10 million active daily users.
Right now, the customer experience staff has large presences in Slack’s Toronto and Vancouver offices, which focus on customers on the East and West coasts, respectively. The company is looking to its Denver office to fill in the gaps.
“Denver is perfectly situated kind of in the middle to help catch up when Chicago and central time zone comes online and also as San Francisco heats up,” said Rayl, a Colorado native. ” I do expect that over time this is going to grow to be the largest or maybe equal to Toronto in terms of importance in North America.”
Slack moved into its space on Chestnut about a month and a half ago, officials said. It first set up shop in Denver in 2018 in the Galvanize co-working space on Platte Street before moving earlier this year into the CommonGrounds co-working space near Coors Field to accommodate its growth. Right now, it employs 85 people in Denver in various capacities — customer services, engineering, finance, legal and other departments — with plans to grow to 150 workers in the next seven months, senior vice president of people Robby Kwok said.
The Denver office is the company’s second-largest by seat count among its 14 locations around the globe, company officials say. The Colorado Economic Development Commission last May agreed to award Slack $10.6 million in incentives in return for creating 550 high-paying jobs in the state, the maximum capacity of its 80,000-square-foot space on Chestnut Place. Kwok indicated the company is focused on its growth for the current fiscal year and didn’t provide a timeline for when it might hit the 550 employee mark. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield, on Monday indicated he feels the company is at the forefront of a major shift away from workplace email and email-based messaging services to channel-based services like Slack’s.
For now, Slack is using just the seventh floor in the building. The space is more button-down than that of some other tech companies around the metro area, devoid of ping pong tables and giant Jenga sets, and painted in mostly white and neutral tones with raw wood accents.
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“We sell a professional business tool, and we want that reflected in the space,” Deano Roberts, the company’s vice president of global workplace and real estate, said on a tour of the facility Monday.
The company has a coffee bar with a barista on site and has some meals brought in for workers, but Roberts said it tries to keep dining-in to a minimum, instead encouraging employees to get outside and eat at area restaurants so they can better get to know the community.
When workers do venture out they’ll be rubbing elbows with tech workers from hundreds of other companies, as the city’s core neighborhoods have emerged as a national hotbed for the industry. Amazon later this year is expected to move hundreds of employees into a 98,000-square-foot space at 1515 Wynkoop St., just a few blocks from the Slack office.
