Slack

SpaceX

Slack

Slack uses a freemium model. The free tier gives you access to your most recent 90 days of messages and 10 app integrations.

That's enough to get hooked. Then Slack charges per user per month — $8.75/month for Pro, $15/month for Business+, and custom pricing for Enterprise Grid.

The beauty of the model is that one person signs up, invites their team, the team gets addicted, and suddenly the company is paying for 500 seats. It's a virus that charges rent.

SpaceX

SpaceX makes money three ways. First, launch services — companies and governments pay SpaceX to put their satellites into orbit.

A Falcon 9 launch costs about $67 million, which undercut the competition by 75% when it debuted. Second, Starlink — SpaceX's own satellite internet constellation, which is now generating over $6 billion in annual revenue from 4+ million subscribers.

Third, government contracts — NASA pays SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and the DoD pays for national security launches.

The secret sauce is reusability. Before SpaceX, every rocket was used once and thrown into the ocean.

SpaceX figured out how to land the first stage booster back on Earth and fly it again. A single Falcon 9 booster has flown over 20 times.

That's like the difference between throwing away an airplane after every flight versus keeping it for decades.

Slack

Stewart Butterfield had already done this exact thing once before. In 2002, he was building a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending.

The game flopped but one of its features — a photo-sharing tool — became Flickr, which Yahoo bought for $35 million in 2005.

So in 2009, Butterfield did it again. He started a company called Tiny Speck to build another game called Glitch — a quirky, non-violent MMO where players collaborated instead of fighting.

The game was beautiful, weird, and a complete commercial failure. It shut down in November 2012 after never finding a big enough audience.

But the internal communication tool the Glitch team had built for themselves was something special. They had created a searchable, organized messaging system because email was driving them insane.

Every conversation was in channels. Everything was searchable.

Files were shared inline. It was everything email should have been but wasn't.

Butterfield looked at this internal tool and thought: this is the actual product. In August 2013, Slack launched in preview.

Within 24 hours, 8,000 companies had signed up. Within two weeks, it was 15,000.

The growth was so fast that Butterfield said it felt like "trying to drink from a fire hose."

SpaceX

In 2001, Elon Musk had just sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion and was sitting on roughly $180 million after taxes. Most people would buy an island.

Musk decided to buy rockets. His original idea was even weirder — he wanted to send a small greenhouse to Mars called "Mars Oasis" to reignite public interest in space exploration.

He flew to Russia three times to buy refurbished ICBMs. The Russians kept raising the price and at one point literally spat on him.

On the flight home from that last failed Russia trip, Musk opened a spreadsheet and started calculating the raw material costs of building a rocket from scratch. He realized the materials were only about 3% of the typical price of a rocket.

The rest was markup, inefficiency, and monopoly pricing by companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. He decided to build his own.

SpaceX was founded in June 2002 in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Musk put in $100 million of his own money.

He hired Tom Mueller, a legendary rocket propulsion engineer who had been building rocket engines in his garage as a hobby. The first rocket, Falcon 1, was supposed to be the cheapest orbital rocket ever built.

It took six years and three spectacular explosions before it finally worked.

Slack

Slack grew almost entirely bottom-up. Nobody sold Slack to companies.

Employees adopted it on their own and then convinced their bosses to pay for it. One developer would start using the free version, invite their team, and within weeks the whole department was hooked.

IT departments would discover that half the company was already on Slack before anyone asked for approval.

The integrations strategy was genius. Slack made it dead simple for other software tools to plug into Slack.

Instead of checking Jira for bug reports, Salesforce for deals, and GitHub for code changes, everything pushed notifications into Slack. Slack became the operating system of work — the one app you kept open all day.

Word of mouth was the main growth driver. Slack didn't spend heavily on advertising early on.

They spent on making the product feel delightful. The loading messages were funny.

The emoji reactions were addictive. The search actually worked.

People genuinely liked using it, which is almost unheard of for enterprise software.

SpaceX

SpaceX's growth strategy was simple: be cheaper than everyone, then be better than everyone, then be the only option.

They started by undercutting the launch market. The United Launch Alliance (Boeing + Lockheed Martin joint venture) was charging $300-400 million per launch.

SpaceX offered $67 million. Government agencies and commercial satellite companies started lining up.

Reusability was the real game-changer. Landing a rocket booster looked like science fiction when SpaceX first attempted it in 2013.

They failed over and over — spectacular ocean landings, explosions on drone ships, near-misses. But in December 2015, a Falcon 9 first stage landed back at Cape Canaveral.

It was the first time an orbital-class rocket had ever landed after a mission. Now they do it routinely — it's almost boring.

Starlink created a completely new revenue stream. Instead of just launching other people's satellites, SpaceX launched thousands of its own.

By 2024, Starlink had over 4 million subscribers and was generating billions in revenue. It turned SpaceX from a launch company into a telecom company.

Slack

Microsoft Teams was the existential threat. When Microsoft bundled Teams for free with Office 365 in 2017, Slack knew it was in trouble.

Microsoft had 300 million Office users who could start using Teams without paying anything extra. Slack even took out a full-page newspaper ad welcoming Microsoft to the chat market — a bravado move that masked genuine fear.

By 2020, Teams had overtaken Slack in daily active users purely on distribution.

The pandemic was a double-edged sword. Remote work exploded demand for Slack, but it also exploded demand for Teams, Zoom, and every other collaboration tool.

Slack's growth accelerated but so did everyone else's. The window where Slack was the obvious default was closing.

Revenue growth started slowing. After years of 50%+ annual growth, Slack's growth rate dropped to the low 30s by 2020.

Wall Street punished the stock, which dropped from its IPO price. The writing was on the wall — Slack couldn't outrun Microsoft alone.

In December 2020, Salesforce announced it was acquiring Slack for $27.7 billion. Butterfield stayed on as CEO until 2023, then left.

SpaceX

The early days nearly killed the company. SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches all failed.

The first one in 2006 crashed 25 seconds after liftoff due to a corroded fuel line nut. The second in 2007 reached space but the second stage shut down early.

The third in 2008 failed because the first and second stages collided during separation. Musk had enough money for one more attempt.

If flight four failed, SpaceX was dead.

Flight four worked. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit.

Musk has said he was so stressed during that period he was throwing up regularly.

The financial pressure was existential. Musk was simultaneously funding Tesla, which was also on the brink of bankruptcy in 2008.

He had to split his last $40 million between the two companies. He borrowed money for rent.

But right at the end of 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. That contract saved the company.

Starship development has been its own saga. The rocket has exploded multiple times during testing.

Each failure costs hundreds of millions. But SpaceX treats failures as data — they move faster by blowing things up and iterating than competitors do by being cautious.

Slack

Slack is the core messaging platform — channels for teams, direct messages, threads for focused discussion, and huddles for quick voice/video calls. Slack Connect lets you message people at other companies directly through Slack instead of email.

Slack Canvas is a built-in document editor for notes and wikis right inside channels. Workflow Builder lets non-technical users automate repetitive tasks without writing code.

The App Directory has 2,600+ integrations — connect Google Drive, Salesforce, Jira, GitHub, or basically any tool your company uses.

SpaceX

Falcon 9 is the workhorse — the most-launched rocket in the world. It carries satellites to orbit and astronauts to the ISS, and the first stage lands itself for reuse.

Falcon Heavy is three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together — the most powerful operational rocket in the world until Starship came along. Dragon is the spacecraft that carries astronauts and cargo to the ISS.

It's the only American vehicle currently flying humans to space. Starlink is the satellite internet service — over 6,000 satellites in orbit delivering broadband to 100+ countries.

Starship is the big one — the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, designed to carry 100+ people to Mars. It's still in testing but has already completed a full flight.

Slack

Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, GV (Google Ventures), SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group

SpaceX

Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Google, Fidelity Investments, Valor Equity Partners, Baillie Gifford, a]6z (Andreessen Horowitz), NASA (as customer/partner)