There’s now a marketplace for your internal communications
A startup called SimpleClosure helps other startups wind down. One of the things they sell in the process is the company's internal data. Slack conversations, email threads, meeting notes, sold to AI companies looking for authentic organizational data to train on.
About 100 deals have been processed so far. Payouts range from tens of thousands to well into six figures. One former founder sold what she described as a decade of internal records for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The employees whose messages are in those archives were not asked.
This isn't really about startups
The legal question of whether a company owns its employees' internal communications, and whether it can sell them, is largely untested. SimpleClosure says the data gets anonymized before sale. Researchers and lawyers aren't convinced that's sufficient coverage, especially for messages that touched on health issues, immigration status, personal conflicts, or sensitive business decisions.
What buyers are getting is something you can't find in public internet data: an unfiltered view of how real organizations actually operate. That's what gives it value.
The product is called Asset Hub. It's a real marketplace. It's open for business.
The bigger question isn't about closing companies
Any organization running Slack or Teams right now is sitting on a data asset its employees have never thought of as one.
If the company gets acquired, that archive likely transfers with the business. If it merges, same thing. If it shuts down, the apparently emerging normal is finding a buyer for the data before the lights go off.
Jenni put it directly when we discussed this on this week's episode of Frequency: just because you can doesn't mean you should. The monetary value of that data is now documented. The question of when the obligation to tell employees kicks in is wide open.
What communicators should be thinking about
Most employees have never considered that their Slack messages, their casual back-channels, their honest conversations with colleagues, are a company asset with a market value. The moment they find out, and more of them will, the question they'll ask is why nobody told them.
A policy probably exists somewhere in most organizations. Data retention, acceptable use, something buried in the employee handbook. But a policy in onboarding paperwork is not a communication. It's a legal hedge.
The organizations that come out of this well are the ones that get ahead of it. Not in legalese, not defensively, but plainly. Here's what we keep. Here's how long. Here's what happens to it if circumstances change.
That conversation is worth having before it becomes a crisis communication.
Also in this episode: The Equilibrious "Shifting Ground" report found that 88% of veteran IC practitioners said their personal wellbeing was affected by overlapping crises, with burnout running well ahead of workload as the cause. The real driver is the gap between what organizations say they want from comms and what leadership actually allows.
A Korbyt and Reworked survey of 1,175 US employees surfaced a contradiction that should make any communicator uncomfortable: half said message volume felt about right, while 44% reported feeling overwhelmed. The most trusted sender in the organization is still the direct manager, not senior leadership.
And Golin's CEO Impact Index found that Fortune 500 CEOs collectively lost nearly 3 trillion earned media impressions in 2025 by pulling back from traditional media. The silence didn't protect them. It just left room for other narratives to fill the space.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
The Frequency Podcast
Real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience.
Chuck Gose and Jenni Field skip the buzzwords and get straight to what matters. New episodes every week.
Listen & Subscribe