Meet the SA-born chaps who built a Slack for developers

Chat rooms used to be popular hangouts for cyber dating, gaming and a whole bunch of things. Today, they’ve undergone a professional makeover. They’ve become billion dollar communication tools catered for the modern workplace, which is fast-paced, knows no borders and encourages collaboration.

“It’s weird that you end up taking a conference call at home and do Amazon shopping at work. Tech today enables you to do anything from anywhere,” says Mike Bartlett (pictured top right), one of the founders of a chat collaboration tool, called Gitter. He’s talking to me over Skype from his flat in London. I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Cape Town.