15 ms·
Slack raises $200M at $3.8B valuation for business messaging
- minimaxir 11y agoNote: not an April Fools joke.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- logicallee 11y agoI think that's a matter of perspective isn't it? :-)
- gchorba 11y agoI am still looking for more security enabled in it. We can't go over to it yet as a company.
- vox_mollis 11y agoJust run your own ircd, then you can set whatever security policies you want. Edit: downvoters, where am I wrong?
- kzhahou 11y agoI think the downvotes are because ircd != Slack. Setting up your own ircd is a whole other thing vs going to Slack.com and creating a Team. UI features, administration, it's all different. So we could have a whole conversation about whether irc is worth the effort... but now we've drifted far from the comment above, which is about lack of security features in Slack.
- vox_mollis 11y agoWe use Slack at my dayjob, and it's functionally not substantially different from IRC-in-a-browser. This is why I suggested ircd. I guess if OP believes slack IS substantially different from irc, then nevermind, but that should be their call to make.
- dave2000 11y agoI think everyone other than you understands that slack is substantially different to irc.
- blackrose 11y ago#brodoyouevengiphy
- CaptSpify 11y agoHow is it different? I'm genuinely asking, as I've never used slack.
- dave2000 11y agoWhenever I'd had to use irc I have a horrible flashback. I used to have to install really shitty software. Now I can use a browser. Not that this is perfect, but it's one less hassle. Then I have to find the server which is running the channel and remember/google how the fuck you're supposed to connect to it. Then you have to type #join, and then..no, do you pick a nickname first and then join? You have to hope no-ones impersonating you because it seems there's no security model for irc at all - you just have to trust people. You try and talk but no-one replies. Is that because there's no-one there? It looks like there's a lot of people there but they have odd characters in their names and some of the colours are different. Are those offline colours? Do the characters mean they're bots? No, someone tells you you're on silent and have to type something before you can speak. Ok, i'm logging in because i asked a question earlier and now i'm using a different pc. I'll just scroll up....what the fuck? I can't scroll up? I have to just stay logged in like...all the time? Ah, you say - yes, but you can install some software. Yes, that's where slack comes in. Except, instead of "install some software" you just "create an account" and log in and. Oh, that's it. Create a room, invite friends, or whatever. Post, DM people, scroll back, add rss feeds etc. It all just works. Nice android app too. Not that i'm trying to sell slack; i can take it or leave it. I'm sure there are alternatives to that. But I have literally no idea why in 2016 anyone would want to subject themselves to irc (plus whatever other crap you have to install/configure to make it bearable).
- shopkins 11y agoI think his point was that IRC, too, allows instant communication, and self-hosting would allow parent to enforce necessary security policies. Not that it is or isn't worth the effort.
- vcarl 11y agoSlack offers markdown, message editing, emoji reactions (which I use the hell out of, one of my favorite features), large snippet sharing, link previews, in-app gif/youtube previews, don't need a logger for scrollback... I love IRC, but the features don't compare. You might be able to implement some/most/all of the missing features, but they're not available out of the box.
- godzillabrennus 11y agoYeah it needs to give admins the right to enforce two step authentication on all users.
- harryh 11y agoIt does this.
- godzillabrennus 11y agoLast I checked it lets you enable it but doesn't enforce it on all users. Has this changed?
- educar 11y agoWhat security features are you looking for? It's like any other SaaS, isn't it?
- slapshot 11y agoAny word on if they had any employee liquidity in the round?
- blakesterz 11y agoSlack's one of the many things we use and don't pay for because the free version does exactly everything we need. Asana, NewRelic... a bunch of things are the same way. I worry some day they'll all dump the free plans and we won't be able to afford whatever pricing they come up with. It's not like we can't pay anything, but have so far found no need for the paid plans. I kinda sorta feel like a free loader. So I guess they have a good number of paying customers? At least with that valuation, I'd hope so.
- snug 11y agoI don't see this happening. Free plans like this will typically help build better products to sell to the actual paying customers, or even help with bug fixes. I don't see them removing their free model.
- Klathmon 11y agoWe found the current slack pricing to be way too expensive for us, but if/when they add video conferencing that equation changes drastically. Like you said, we are willing to pay, but for about $7 per user we aren't getting much more than the free plan...
- AndrewUnmuted 11y agoSlack has a pretty nice integration with appear.in. It's a free in-browser video conferencing service. We've used it with Slack very effectively in the past!
- Klathmon 11y agoThat looks nice, but we need more than 8 participants. We are an entirely remote company, and we found that videochat during our standups really helps. Currently we are paying $5 a month per user for Google apps and only using a very small portion of it (basically just the video chatting), and they allow up to 25 people which is perfect for us.
- 11y ago
- snug 11y agoNow if only they had an on-premies solution.
- disgruntledphd2 11y agoThis is something that they must be working on, as they are leaving a lot of money on the table from big companies. Presumably this was part of the pitch (build on-premise version, hire the good salespeople from MS and Oracle, profit).
- pavlov 11y agoHow do people feel about Quip as a competitor to Slack? https://quip.com https://quip.com I was sceptical, but Quip's combination of chat and group-editable documents feels actually much better for dev teams than Slack, which ends up very unstructured. (I have no association with Quip at all, but recently had the chance to use it in a Slack-like context.)
- bigdubs 11y agothey're two different use cases (for us anyway). we use quip instead of google docs, slack for everything else.
- pavlov 11y agoI guess my question is, why use Slack at all when you have Quip? Quip has chatrooms that work like Slack (or IRC, or any other group chat in the history of the Internet).
- revorad 11y agoI guess because most conversations are not about documents?
- pavlov 11y agoBut Quip's chat rooms are just that. They don't have any forced relation to the documents, and can be set up just like Slack (as far as I can see). So what's the different use case?
- revorad 11y agoOh ok, I didn't know that. I tried Quip when it first came out. Anyway, even if functionally they are similar, the Slack ecosystem is too strong now.
- 11y ago
- paulpauper 11y agoJust more evidence the media, that for months has been sounding the alarm that Web 2.0 had burst, is almost always useless and wrong. Tech media no exception. I guess it's not burst. The Nasdaq stock index is up 15% from the lows in Fed. We're seeing a flight to quality, not a bubble burst, which is a subtly that is lost on most journalists.
- radicalman 11y agodidn't they raise like a billion dollars a few years ago? did they burn through it already? seems like money is created out of thin air with these valuation announcements.
- hatred 11y agoWondering if any of the current/ex-employees were allowed to liquidate their holding?
- medlazik 11y agoMy guess (wishful thinking): They need money to make and maintain an on-premise version.
- pbarnes_1 11y agoConsidering they're (supposedly) profitable, have hundreds of employees, and it doesn't cost $200m to do this -- doubtful. It's highly unlikely we'll ever see an on-prem Slack.
- zaidf 11y agoI was a big Slack skeptic when my employer decided to roll it out. But just a few weeks in, it has cut my skype usage by 90% and has resulted in a lot more communication with colleagues than skype. I think Slack is on its way to really challenging apps like skype and gotomeeting for the enterprise use-cases.
- SEJeff 11y agoOne area they could improve (besides the obvious one being video chat) is integration with other bug trackers. The Jira plugin is quite pathetic. Granted, Atlassian owns hipchat AND jira, but hipchat's jira integration is excellent. The slack plugin for jira is pretty terrible and is why $employer went with hipchat sadly.
- moosey 11y agoYup. I've been doing custom integrations because of this. We have several alerting systems, and catching items getting added to (and leaving) a queue is an important one that I've added, along with other integrations with internal systems that exist where I work. One nice thing about slack is that writing these integrations are very, very simple.
- chatmasta 11y agoI'm honestly astounded that so many high profile corporations are willing to use slack without an on-premise version. Slack is the only SaaS that has access to, and STORES PERMANENTLY, every important private message, group message, document, commit, internal URLs, .... of your company. At some point in the future, slack will get hacked. Every sufficiently popular product does. It's only a matter of time. And when it does, the data hosted by slack will be an absolute treasure trove for competitive intelligence, "insider" trading, hacking, and a variety of other bad, bad things. Not to mention, an arbitrary number of employees at slack can read the internal communications of any company using their product. I'm sure slack has some "security" measures in place to prevent this, but it would only take one rogue employee with the keys to the kingdom to snoop on any data imaginable. This seems incredibly dangerous to me...
- ZoF 11y ago>Every sufficiently popular product does. I'm not a Slack shill, have never used the product, don't know anyone who works for the company. But. Has Facebook ever been hacked to this degree? Has Google ever been hacked to this degree? Has any sufficiently popular social-media/enterprise-knowledge-sharing app been hacked to this degree? What makes you so completely certain that they will be hacked and that a 'treasure trove' will be available to the supposed hackers? Seems like unwarranted FUD tbh.
- jldugger 11y ago> Has Facebook ever been hacked to this degree? Instagram could have been: http://exfiltrated.com/research-Instagram-RCE.php http://exfiltrated.com/research-Instagram-RCE.php.
- DonnyV 11y agoWow this is a disaster waiting to happen. They will never generate enough profits to support this type of funding.
- harryh 11y agoYou don't think they can be as successful as Atlassian?
- ethanbond 11y agoCan a $10m/year chat app be as successful as a $320m/year enterprise software company when they have to justify a nearly identical valuation? No.
- harryh 11y agoMy point was that I think Slack stands a pretty good chance of growing into a company that makes about as much money as Atlassian.
- ethanbond 11y agoSo by the time they do that they'll only have, what, a two trillion dollar valuation?
- harryh 11y agoI'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Is investing at Slack today at a 3.8B valuation a good investment? Maybe, maybe not. But it doesn't seem crazy to me. That's all I'm saying. They already make a lot of money, they're growing fast, and they're in a potentially very large market. Only time will tell how far they get.
- orthecreedence 11y ago> they're in a potentially very large market. They're in a shrinking market. It's not like they "discovered" chat. They slapped a good interface over IRC and centralized everything on their servers. Everyone and their dog is now writing chat apps, including existing big enterprise companies. So while slack got a large initial boost from developer-driven teams, other companies with existing large userbases are now catching up (and fast). Slack is one part decent app five parts hype. It's not worth anywhere near 3.8B, and it now has immense shoes to fill because it apparently thinks it's worth that much.
- paulpauper 11y agoThis is a ubiquitous business model that will succeed where evernote failed.
- ChiCommTroll 11y agoFor the "irc is just as good as Slack, you should just use irc" crowd, Slack's mobile clients are pretty good. Ever tried to get a non techie person to use irc on a mobile device? Ever used irc on a mobile device? The experience is terrible. Slack's clients also have persistence, as in shows the most recent history of communication. Not everyone uses screen/tmux with irc (though they should).
- dijit 11y agoTry palaver on iOS. It's pretty seamless if you don't know much more than a server address.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- nunez 11y agoI hate this argument. Yeah, IRC is open and there are tons of clients for it, but Slack is the only one that I've used that a) retains history without you having to think about it, and b) is actually really really REALLY nice to use. That said, if all you need is simple team communication, IRC works great
- wyck 11y agoWhy does anyone thinks that a centralized chat service is a good idea? I especially don't get why open source projects move to a platform they cannot even control or commit to. It makes no sense.
- st3v3r 11y agoBecause it's easy for everyone to use, even non-technical people. And it requires no maintenance, so the people running the project aren't spending time doing things that are not running the project.
- wyck 11y agoI agree, it's just sad to see several areas of the market move towards centralized closed source solutions. It's as though a new generation of developers don't even know what open source is, including the dangers these "easier" solutions bring to the table and how they shape the future.
- st3v3r 11y agoSo why isn't the open source community moving towards an open source, all in one solution like this? To just ignore the popularity of Slack, and insist that everyone just use IRC and handle the other stuff themselves is just foolish.
- ThomPete 11y agoI love Slack but I fell like they are making the same mistake as Dropbox have done. They have taken a great business and is pumping it up way beyond it's natural growth trajectory and is ignoring what I consider the most important advice for 99% of businesses": Be patient for growth not for profit as Clayton Christensen is saying.
- rbranson 11y agoI guess all the other huge venture-funded tech companies made the same mistake?
- tim333 11y ago>insane 3.5X user growth. Is that that insane for a successful startup? I think that comes out at 2.4%/week which is a bit lower than YC tends to aim for.
- nickpinkston 11y agoDepends on stage and market penetration. It's usually an S-curve. It says they're at 2.7M active users, which they frame as a lot for an enterprise app, so that probably means 10-100K companies - that seems huge for a company growing 3.5X user growth.
- ravenkat 11y agoI'm a great fan of Slack. Large portion of revenue for an b2b app like Slack will come from big corporations and businesses with more than 200 employees. Microsoft/Google are heavily invested on large enterprises. These big giants can pull off a product like Slack and sell to all the big clients. Microsoft already sells communicator to large corps. They can switch that to Microsoft-Slack version and bundle it with their office products taking the large (90% revenue) out of Slack pocket. Slack has to go really big to hit enterprises hard or they will be just serving small medium businesses which will have churn burn and less LTV.
- nikolay 11y agoThis proves that people are not sane these days! $3.8B for a fancy version of Yahoo! Messenger, wow!
- traviswingo 11y agoCan anybody explain this valuation?
- wj 11y agoWithout seeing their financials I'm not sure if I am qualified to explain their valuation. That said, if I had the money and was invited to participate in this round I would have. More so than any other software I have seen, Slack has organic buy-in from everybody outside I.T. Once introduced is spreads like wildfire throughout any company I have heard about. Unlike much (most) software introduced to them Slack has an easy to see value for them, has almost no setup barriers, and is usable with little to no training. All of the objections in this discussion are from an I.T. perspective ("you can just use self-hosted IRC for free") or a compliance perspective (having worked many years in the financial services industry I understand that there are compliance requirements but those are always written by lawyers and often their understanding of the security tradeoffs between self-hosted, with company employed security professionals, and the cloud, with vendor employed security professionals, are dubious at best). I sometimes feel that programmers would write Excel from scratch in order to add two plus two.
- YZF 11y agoBut where is their moat? It seems like these sort of apps come and go with fashion. In my company some people use Slack but there's also a mix of various other solutions from Jabber to HipChat to IRC. Can't say that Slack is spreading like wildfire in our fairly large company... It is getting some use, people say it's ok, and that's about that...
- weisser 11y agoTheir moat is the developer ecosystem and apps on the Slack platform. But it's also the fact that while it's easy to get started, the value and dependence on Slack increases rapidly by your team's investment in using it. Slack takes no time at all to do an initial team setup so you can just get started and as mentioned nothing needs to be learned to dive right in. Users are rewarded for discovering new things and further rewarded by cool points for sharing the tricks and secrets they uncover with others. The ability to search and find a file or a key part of a conversation that happened a year ago faster than you could an email. This feature only gets better the more your conversations happen in Slack — you'll never lose anything again. In terms of features, many of the best customizations involve apps working with Slackbot and Zapier. Setting up these custom features takes time and tweaking to get them exactly perfect — switching costs you won't want to deal with a year from now once they've become part of your routine.
- la6470 11y agoAnother unicorn
- ampvchen 11y agoI loved quora response about the valuation https://www.quora.com/How-is-Slacks-rumored-2-76-billion-valuation-calculated/answer/Patrick-Mathieson?srid=3PV&share=39dba0a2# https://www.quora.com/How-is-Slacks-rumored-2-76-billion-val...
- loingo 11y agoIf you are in ASEAN, let use other solution by https://antbuddy.com https://antbuddy.com or a solution for FREE slack at https://slack.antbuddy.com https://slack.antbuddy.com