Your dead startup's Slack archive might be worth more than the startup itself. SimpleClosure, which handles wind-downs for failed companies, has brokered roughly 100 deals over the past year selling internal communications to AI companies, according to reporting by Fast Company and Forbes. Payouts range from $10,000 to $100,000. Defunct companies like Cielo24 have secured deals worth hundreds of thousands.
Web scraping is getting legally complicated. **[AI scrapers](AI scrapers)** are hunting for private datasets to train their models. Licensed corporate data now commands a premium, and NDAs keep the specific buyers confidential.
But there's a real privacy problem here. Internal Slack chats and emails contain personally identifiable information and sensitive discussions, even after anonymization attempts. Marc Rotenberg from the Center for AI and Digital Policy called employee privacy a major concern, noting that this data involves real, identifiable people. Hacker News commenters also questioned whether bulk exporting Slack messages violates the platform's Terms of Service. Workers already cite data privacy as a top reason they resist AI tools at work. When they find out their Slack archives were sold off, that trust is gone for good.
The data quality is questionable too. Most startup Slack is water cooler chatter and lunch plans, not the structured knowledge AI companies claim to need. The HN thread was full of former startup employees joking that their archives were 90% emoji reactions and "per my last email" memes. But noisy data apparently beats no data when you're racing to build better models.