In 2012, Ali Rayl found herself at a crossroads, but she did know one thing.
“I was pretty much done with enterprise software,” she told HR Brew. “Nobody cares about what we’re building. The person that we’re selling to isn’t the person that’s going to use it…[it] just isn’t fun.”
She was working as a quality assurance engineer at Tiny Speck, a Vancouver-based company that made video games, but the business was about to shut down. When Tiny Speck’s leadership, which included Slack co-founder and former CEO Stewart Butterfield, asked her to stay with them in their new venture, Rayl said she “took a moment” when she heard that the product would be a communications tool for the workplace.
She ended up staying because she liked working with the people there.
“I’ll work with them on anything. So, that’s why I decided to stick around. It wasn’t that it was a messaging product. It was that I liked the people I was working with,” she explained.
She joined Slack and took on the task of handling customer service for the new company. A little over 10 years and 200,000 paying customers later, Slack has created one of the most popular and widely-used workplace tools in the world, which in 2021 was acquired for $27.7 billion by Salesforce.
The product’s success was perhaps a testament to a company culture that seemed different from the rest of Silicon Valley, and created a gentler, dare we say enjoyable, enterprise software that was easier to adopt than the MS-DOS-style applications that most people at work had been using.
Who is Ali Rayl? As someone who has “been a nerd for a really long time,” Rayl had lots of experience using digital communications systems. Her father worked for the phone company, which gave her the opportunity to tinker with modems and log in to bulletin board systems (BBS) at a young age.
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In college, she said she spent a lot of time working in the computer lab and messing around on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which was the platform that Tiny Speck happened to use for its internal communications.
As one of the company’s earliest employees and someone with fingerprints all over the organization’s culture, Rayl is known as a Slack legend, winning a lifetime achievement award at the company in 2015 and credited with numerous developments to the product and service strategy that are still in place today. In 2021, Insider named her one of 16 “power players” in the Slack merger with Salesforce.
Rayl’s legend grew to the point where she herself was also attracting people to Slack and its unique culture. This was the case for Risa Stein, a director of product management who left LinkedIn to join Slack in 2021.
“I was very happy in my job,” she told HR Brew. “I was on a fabulous team doing really interesting work. Ali Rayl is the reason I came to Slack.”.
“Ali’s very unique in that she really talks to you like a human being, there isn’t that weird corporate speak,” Stein said. “She really just talks to you like you are any other person she’s trying to work through a problem with.”—AK
This is part one of HR Brew’s two-part profile of Ali Rayl. Read part two.