Overview

Gender

female

Investor Type

Investment Partner,Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

April Underwood is the Founder and CEO of Nearby. She's also Slack’s former head of platform who just launched its App Directory and Slack Fund, has leveled up to become the startup’s VP of Product. Underwood joined Slack in June after nearly five years at Twitter where she was a Director of Product.

Putting the head of platform in charge of the entire product shows Slack’s commitment to making outside developers core to the workplace chat app‘s experience. With Underwood’s guidance, Slack’s product could seamlessly expand to handle the niche needs of any business.

Underwood previously interned at Apple and 3M, and has done stints at Deloitte, Intel, Travelocity, and WeatherBill. She managed content acquisition and monetization for Google’s core products as a Senior Partner Technology manager from 2007 to 2009. This year she co-launched the #Angels fund as a founding partner.

At Twitter Underwood had a prolific run from 2010 to 2015. She was a product manager on the first versions of the Tweet and Follow buttons, and worked on Twitter’s firehose and location feature. She built the Ads API and much of the advertiser experience, and ran all of Twitter’s search partnerships with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Oh, and she forged Twitter’s biz dev team as its Director.

Essentially, in an era when Twitter was otherwise notoriously stubborn about shipping, Underwood got things done.

Now she’ll have a massive amount of user engagement to sculpt with Slack. The company has 2 million active users, and Butterfield says “people spend on average 10 hours a day connected to Slack and a little over 2 hours of active usage.”