Back when Slack was small enough, its handful of employees had a ritual of ambling down the street to get a cup of coffee every day around 3 p.m. Of course, being Slack, the caffeine run was announced by a bot that posted a coffee emoji into Slack’s Slack.
The San Francisco-based maker of collaboration software has since gotten an espresso machine—or two or three—not to mention gone public. But the seemingly trivial decision to purchase a coffee maker wasn’t taken lightly by its management team, led by co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield.
