Slack’s New Acquisition Adds Voice Chat to Its Collaboration Tools

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Soon, it will be a lot easier to do voice and video calls within the Slack online collaboration service, aka the “Trojan horse for bigger ideas.”

That’s because Slack, with just under 100 employees, is acquiring Screenhero—a much smaller desktop collaboration company that graduated from the Y Combinator startup incubator just two years ago.

Screenhero’s software lets two people simultaneously share a desktop and—with the click of a button—have voice chats too. That makes it a natural for Slack, which doesn’t have either of these features built in.

The move is part of the continued and rapid evolution of online collaboration tools. For years, businesses got by with comparative software from Microsoft. But now, so many startups, from Slack to Quip to Evernote, are working to change that, offering a new breed of online tool that are far more powerful—and far easier to use.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield liked Screenhero so much that he offered to buy the company immediately after meeting Screenhero’s chief executive, Jahanzeb “J” Sherwani. “The very first thing I said to him was: ‘We’d like to buy you,'” Butterfield says, remembering their meeting over drinks back in July. “It’s my favorite negotiating tactic to be disarmingly direct.”

Butterfield says he was impressed by what Screenhero’s small team had built in such a short time, and he felt that the product was simpatico with Slack. About half of Screenhero’s users were already on Slack, he says.

Soon all of them will be. Slack plans to integrate Screenhero into its core product, and eventually add a video chat feature too. That means that down the line, Screenhero will be discontinued as a stand-alone product. But for Slack users, when they click on their contact’s icon, they’ll be able to share a screen or do voice or video chat, or even set up a group chat. And it will all be archived, Butterfield says.

Typically, screen-sharing apps allow only one person to take control of the computer being shared at a time, but Screenhero is different. Two people can enter text and move things around simultaneously. That’s made it particularly attractive for designers and developers who work in close collaboration. “The idea was this gave you a really immersive screensharing experience where it felt like your team was in the same room,” says Sherwani.

Screenhero is Slack’s second acquisition. Last fall, the company acquired Spaces, a maker of collaborative online documents.