Slack, the fastest growing chat app, straddles the line between being a dream come true or a person’s worst nightmare, but one thing no one can question is that it takes the gold for taking diversity seriously.
At TechCrunch’s annual tech awards show, Slack brought this point home by having four of its star female entrepreneurs — who also happen to be WOC — accept the award for fastest rising startup on the behalf of the company.
Megan Anctil, Erica Baker, Kiné Camara and Duretti Hirpa took to the stage to make a big point.
“We’re engineers,” said Camara. She continued, “ There are many things that are major keys to the success of Slack, not least of which are diversity and inclusion. The idea that diversity of companies improve the culture and bottom line may be somewhat controversial, but all we know is we’ve got 9% of women of color in engineering at Slack, four of whom are up here tonight in formation. And we’re the fastest-growing enterprise software startup of all time, so…”
The challenge for other startups to do the same was more than implied. Slack is an example of how actively pursuing diversity in a company can lead to fruitful results. Between the months of September and December 2015 alone, Slack was able to increase the number of female engineers from 18% to 24%.
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