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Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

• msoad 9y ago
  Observation: The only successful messaging apps that are still around are the ones who sold to big co.
• ejcx 9y ago
  There isn't a lot here to read in to. I worked at a very small company that was going to be bought by amazon. We were "left at the alter" by amazon. I would be very surprised to see a slack deal go through, knowing what I know about our acquisition process, but they are a little different than we were. If AMazon buys them they have better be sure they can quickly integrate them, unlike twitch that's unique enough to hang around.
  • r00fus 9y ago
    There are so many Amazon purchases that just "hang around" for better or for worse: Audible, Goodreads, IMDB... the list is large. I like they don't necessarily have to vertically integrate all their acquisitions.
    • asplake 9y ago
      In some ways, Goodreads suffers for its integration. List a book that's on Leanpub and not Amazon and you're left with an Amazon button that's worse than useless.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• nathan_f77 9y ago
  I think it would make much more sense for Apple to acquire Slack. Both companies are known for their emphasis on good design and UX. Slack and Amazon appear to have very difficult cultures, so that would be a very interesting acquisition. If I was an engineer at Slack, I would really, really hope that the company could continue to operate independently, as a subsidiary. I would not be happy if I was forced to work for Amazon for the next x months before I could cash out and leave.
  • droopyEyelids 9y ago
    Slack was known for that, but they compromised very quickly with threaded conversations and the mess that is "slack enterprise grid"
• QuinnyPig 9y ago
  Fascinating. Amazon generally only does acquisitions of small companies for core technologies or teams; they've historically been great champions of the "not invented here" philosophy. This would be a radical departure from that pattern.
  • askafriend 9y ago
    What's also interesting is that they have a product that is somewhat of a Slack competitor: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-chime-unified-communications-service/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-chime-unified-commun... It was launched only 4 months ago. I wonder how it's doing today and how important Amazon thinks this space is for them and their platform. It's AWS branded too which is a bit odd.
    • stephenboyd 9y ago
      Amazon teams and products often compete against each other. It's like how they have both Prime Now and AmazonFresh as grocery delivery services.
      • r00fus 9y ago
        PrimeNow doesn't do groceries does it? How is this cross-competition?
        • mcpherrinm 9y ago
          They certainly do groceries in my Zip code. Fresh produce, cheese, dairy, eggs, etc.
        • frakkingcylons 9y ago
          Prime Now delivers produce and other perishable goods, though the selection is not as large that of Amazon Fresh.
  • blazespin 9y ago
    It's not that weird. It makes sense. It would be a good acquisition, a lot of people use aws and slack.
• maitrik 9y ago
  Really believe that Microsoft should have bought Slack. It makes perfect sense for them and aligns with their vision to be the productivity center of everyone's workflow. Microsoft doesnt understand this space at all. Look what they are doing to Skype by making it more like Snapchat when their main use case is business related. Teams also feels so unfinished.
  • jmspring 9y ago
    Don't generalize the company products with the company teams. I don't have an opinion on your comments on Skype. Teams is a competitor and tied to Active Directory. But many employees are involved in slack channels across Microsoft based, open sourced based, and other channels daily. Slack/Teams/etc are tools. Real work will find the right tools and the right people and the right working model.
  • ux-app 9y ago
    >Look what they are doing to Skype by making it more like Snapchat Yes I was definitely thrown for a loop with the new Skype that auto-installed on my phone. I'm a boring 37 year old developer that needs skype for business calls, why the hell does it now look like some teenager's social app?
    • maitrik 9y ago
      Exactly. Way to abandon most of older folks who actually purchase Skype credits. PS. ux-app looks interesting. I can give some feed back as a designer if you want.
      • ux-app 9y ago
        > PS. ux-app looks interesting. I can give some feed back as a designer if you want. Thanks :) and yes, I'd love to hear your feedback, me email is eli@ux-app.com
  • taurath 9y ago
    Skypes main use case isn't business related, and you can tell because they still use freaking Lync on macs
• vesak 9y ago
  As somebody who happily advocates Matrix[1], I'd be ecstatic if Slack would be bought by some giant and thus slowly made obsolete :) [1] http://matrix.org http://matrix.org
  • lgas 9y ago
    You're not a very good advocate. You didn't even give a single reason someone should look into Matrix.
    • vesak 9y ago
      Does reasoning ever work in marketing, though?
      • sidegrid 9y ago
        Yes.
      • lgas 9y ago
        I'd love to say it's the only kind that's effective on me, but obviously that's not true. I do believe it's the most effective on me though. If nothing else it's the only kind I intentionally engage with on a regular basis.
• LAMike 9y ago
  Starting off at a new company this past week, and realize a lot of commerce happens on Slack. Whether it's deciding what monitor to order, the best shows to watch on TV or what live events are happening that weekend. Amazon could see this as a way to capture some value generated there. Also, an easy way to get companies signed up w/ Amazon Prime!
  • brd 9y ago
    This is an interesting take on the motivation. Amazon has shown that they're interested in building their own private labels in certain verticals. That trend coupled with the talk about "social shopping" and I can start to buy into the idea that this deal could possibly originate from somewhere other than AWS.
• stock_toaster 9y ago
  I would think Discord was a better fit for Amazon. 1. Great fit with twitch. 2. Seems like it could be "forked internally" and reskinned to compete with slack in the business space too.
  • madsushi 9y ago
    Twitch bought Curse and revamped their app as the Twitch App, it's moving towards Discord-like features already.
    • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Yeah, but Twitch's chat sucks. Discord feels like an incredibly good fit with Twitch and Curse. I've been expecting this acquisition for at least a year. Figured it would be how Amazon broke into the chat space.
  • jakebasile 9y ago
    To your second point, I already use Discord over Slack at work. It is better in every way that matters. Some open source communities are feeling it out too.
  • unabst 9y ago
    Discord is the better app at this point. Even for business use. But Slack from an acquisition POV must be different. They have revenue, traction, and that all important paying subscriber base. It's like everyone has always said. Slack is just a chat app. It's not about the app, but rather, what they achieved with it. I love discord so much part of me wants Amazon to buy Slack just so it would kill it (or MS or Verizon or anyone who tends to not know what to do with things).
    • iand675 9y ago
      Having not really used Discord, what about it is better to you?
      • 9y ago
• BhavdeepSethi 9y ago
  I'm assuming the idea would be to onboard existing Slack clients to Amazon Chime.
  • blazespin 9y ago
    Most likely the opposite. Slack will keep its own brand like twitch or audible.
• sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO. Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something. Turns out there's a market for ubiquitous software. Slack seems similar. Another datapoint: Look how well the acquisition of Oculus turned out. Palmer now has money, which would've come eventually. He no longer controls Oculus, and hence can't impact the world. And in a twist of fate, Palmer has attracted public annoyance due to some political decisions, so he went from favorite underdog to just another wealthy person. For ambitious people, this can sometimes be a worse fate than not being rich. Ideas require opportunity and timing, and opportunities like Oculus, Snapchat, and Slack are rare. $9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather affect the world?
  • ido 9y ago
    $9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather affect the world? Absolutely. Get real, they're not curing cancer they're providing a (great) chat service for businesses and organizations.
    • sillysaurus3 9y ago
      So is Snapchat.
      • freyir 9y ago
        If only we could all aspire to affect the world like Snapchat.
  • IanCal 9y ago
    > $9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather affect the world? That's a false dichotomy isn't it? You could have a large impact on the world with that sort of money.
• Steeeve 9y ago
  The power of slack isn't in their technology, it's in their marketing. There have been a thousand IRC clones. Few have gained any traction at all. I suspect under new management it will falter, but at the same time I also think that it's a terrible idea not to sell if the opportunity arises.
  • dangero 9y ago
    That and they have a lot of integrations which means it's hard for people to switch to something else other than slack because they will lose their plugins.
  • romanovcode 9y ago
    > The power of slack isn't in their technology, it's in their marketing. Exactly, because their technology is complete crap.
  • Eridrus 9y ago
    I haven't used Slack in a while, but if they got Search working well, that would be a real differentiator. I've seen them hiring quite a bit on that front too.
• perseusprime11 9y ago
  Microsoft will counter with $12b. Makes sense to sit with Microsoft. The new culture at Microsoft will allow for the caring and feeding of Slack.
  • anon_8247582 9y ago
    As someone who pays for Slack and uses it throughout the working day, I hope nobody acquires them, especially Microsoft. I don't have anything against Microsoft per se, but in my opinion, they ruined Skype.
    • perseusprime11 9y ago
      I mean they are clearly looking to sell and Stewart is trying to create a bidding war to get the most money out of this deal. How many companies can afford to create new enterprise contracts with Amazon for enterprise software? They are either Google customers or Microsoft customers for employee productivity software.
• i-machine-learn 9y ago
  Can someone (espescially with a finance mindset) explain the valuations we are seeing? Slack has 1.5 million users. Assuming average yearly revenue of $100 per user that's $150 million in gross revenue. A 9 billion valuation would mean 60X revenue! If you compare it to Dropbox, their last valuation was $10 billion and their rev rate is supposed to hit $1 billion this year. So why are Dropbox and Slack valued similarly when Dropbox makes 7x the revenue? I get that growth rate impacts your multiple, but not to this extent. I actually think Slack is a cool company and can have a sustainable business. However, what I'm missing is that a lot of valley companies have valuations that are completely outside their fundamentals (revenue, growth rate, margins, etc.). In this category of "great companies but overvalued" are Snapchat, Slack, Uber. I would expect a 10-20x multiple on slack since they are high growth. So a valuation of 1.5 - 3 billion would make sense. What am I missing here?
• deleted 9y ago
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• tdburn 9y ago
  One article yesterday suggested that the Amazon non compete lawsuit agaimay their former AWS employee might indicate that they're planning on getting into the business productivity market. With this news that might have credibility
  • ceejayoz 9y ago
    They're already in that market to some extent. https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/ https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/
    • tdburn 9y ago
      Thanks. I want familiar with their efforts
    • mrep 9y ago
      Throw chime in there to which is really good: https://chime.aws/ https://chime.aws/
• wcummings 9y ago
  How much revenue does slack generate?
  • flipp3r 9y ago
    "The company reportedly has about 5 million daily active users, with 1.5 million of those paying for the service." * https://slack.com/pricing https://slack.com/pricing At least 10 million a month, I assume? Edit: "Slack has 5 million daily active users -- 1.5 million of whom pay to use the service -- and had $150 million in annual recurring revenue as of Jan. 31." from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/messaging-startup-slack-said-to-draw-interest-from-amazon-com https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/messaging...
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • dsr_ 9y ago
      Interesting that they derive $100 per paid user per month. I The Enterprise level pricing must be 6-10x the top team level.
      • adamrt 9y ago
        I think you might be off by an order of magnitude
      • michaelt 9y ago
        Pretty sure that's $100 per paid user per year - which fits with the fact they have $7/mo and $12/mo tiers.
      • mrkurt 9y ago
        That's annual, so ~$8/user/mo.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• holydude 9y ago
  I hope they do not buy it but I am afraid they will. I am somehow sick of these companies that do not generate enough profit to sustain themselves and have to be bought by oligopolies like Amazon.
  • accountyaccount 9y ago
    Is Slack actually unsustainable? They take in more than $150m in revenue a year at this point.
    • holydude 9y ago
      Well this is what I do not know. I am not an investor nor a shareholder but I suspect a single niche product is not that appealing. How long will it take for Facebook/Google/Microsoft to get a good enough product and release it for "free" ? I am not sure but I think it will be hard for slack to diversify its portfolio. Would Twitch survive against Google's YouTube gaming if it would not get acquired by Amazon ?
      • rrdharan 9y ago
        Both Google and Microsoft have already done the "release it for free" part, but it's unclear if / when the market will think the products are "good enough": https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat... https://blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterprise-focused-hangouts/ https://blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterprise...
• alexwilde 9y ago
  "Of the so-called big-five tech companies in the US, Amazon is the only one without a messaging platform." https://chime.aws/ https://chime.aws/
  • jasonlotito 9y ago
    Chime is for video. Slack is for text.
    • losteric 9y ago
      Chime is for both, it's just not very good at text.
      • adreamingsoul 9y ago
        You mean it's not very good at emojis, bot integration, and other fun features that exist with other platforms.
      • jasonlotito 9y ago
        Then slack is for both, because it has video. But it's not really. It's primarily focused around text, and chime is around videos and meetings. That's the use case. Chime is built around meetings. Slack is built around chat.
      • illumin8 9y ago
        This is not true. We use Chime for text every day. It doesn't have all the 3rd party integrations that Slack does, but it give you the same basic functionality. Disclaimer: Work for AWS.
        • phinnaeus 9y ago
          It's definitely true. My team also uses Chime for text every day. The client has virtually no options, even basic formatting stuff that has been available on dozens of IRC clients for decades. Disclaimer: Also work for AWS.
• cylinder 9y ago
  ... why?
• dkural 9y ago
  Amazon's been a prudent steward of its cash and shareholder value. I'd be really surprised if it spent this sum over Slack & encourage Bezos to go get his head checked. Messaging platforms come and go. Many better ways to spend $9B for Amazon.
  • pavel_lishin 9y ago
    They might be less interested in the app itself, and more interested in the giant corpus of conversation stored therein.
    • jitix 9y ago
      Is all data on slack just available for viewing? If it were so I think its customers would have raised this as an issue by now.
      • Cthulhu_ 9y ago
        You can go back through all of history in all Slack conversations as long as you pay the subscription fees, so yes. I'd expect Slack to put older conversations into cold storage too.
        • 013a 9y ago
          They do store a complete history of messages for non-paying teams. You can test this by paying for a month of Standard on a team that is really old; the conversation history will immediately expand backward until the beginning of time. Stop paying and you're limited again.
      • adamnemecek 9y ago
        You mean available to slack? Ofc, how else would search work?
        • jitix 9y ago
          I'd imagine that they have separate, encrypted siloed search indexes for each paying organization. Why would someone put sensitive information on Slack otherwise?
• tzakrajs 9y ago
  Too late to buy, Slack is such old news now and their market is super saturated. This could have been a decent decision several years ago, but not now.
  • josefresco 9y ago
    https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=slack https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=slack Although the search data would indicate Slack is still super hot - I tend to agree (anecdotally) that the market is saturated, first movers have already ... moved, and most likely growth will be slow.
    • ShardPhoenix 9y ago
      https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=slack,discord https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=slack,discord So far of course Slack is still much more popular among business users, but I've anecdotally noticed a big surge in Discord usage among consumers (on Reddit especially).
  • Oras 9y ago
    Can you elaborate how it's an old news? Do you have stats of market share among messaging apps?
  • aantix 9y ago
    What has replaced Slack if it's "old news"?
  • oculusthrift 9y ago
    wouldn't it's have been a bad decision a few years ago considering you're saying it's old news now?
  • bluetidepro 9y ago
    I think you accidently wrote "Slack" when you actually meant "HipChat." /s ...But seriously, Slack is no where near "old news."
• deleted 9y ago
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• chollida1 9y ago
  Serious question..... but also more me fleshing out my thoughts on messaging apps.... What is the point in buying a messaging app? - instant messenger - ICQ - Skype - Yammer - WhatsApp They all seem to be popular for a short time and then fad away. What does owing one of these get a company? The case against owning them is that they all go out of favour and you only have a small window, say up to 5 years, where your platform is dominate before everyone moves onto another solution. At one point the theory was it got people to use a companies proprietary login, when companies thought there was value in having people use their login. At this point, if I said Slack would be a shell of its former self in 5 - 10 years would anyone put up an argument , if so what's the argument that this time its different. I'm a happy slack user, but i"ll move to a new platform tomorrow if a better one comes along, there is almost no network effect or lock with these apps so switching has almost zero cost. Plugins might provide a slight lockin but time has shown again and again the same plugins will move to the next popular messaging app, which seems to negate any benefit.
  • sp332 9y ago
    WhatsApp didn't fade at all. They have 1.2 billion monthly active users and climbing. Their "stories" feature got 177 million daily active users in just 10 weeks. For comparison, Snapchat is only at 166 million DAU as of Q1 this year.
    • ForHackernews 9y ago
      WhatsApp is (AFAIK) the only major chat service that offers a J2ME app. There are a _lot_ of feature phones in the Global South, and a lot of telecoms that charge gouging rates for SMS and MMS.
      • sangnoir 9y ago
        > WhatsApp is (AFAIK) the only major chat service that offers a J2ME app WhatsApp's support for J2ME ended in 2016[1] - it is now smartphone only, because it requires "advanced features" (or bloat) to compete with Snapchat and complete Facebook's flanking manoeuvre (along with Instagram). 1. https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/s60/21099118 https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/s60/21099118
• usaphp 9y ago
  Could they legally buy slack and then use all the conversational data to teach their Alexa AI on how to talk more like humans?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    Slack would be the wrong dataset, it's all text after all which has its own colloquialisms and whatnot.
  • adreamingsoul 9y ago
    It would be easier to win the lottery than to teach any AI to talk like humans.
• intopieces 9y ago
  It would be an interesting acquisition given Amazon recently launched its own AWS-hosted competitor to Slack, called Chime.
• chinathrow 9y ago
  I wonder if the price/valuation will be so high if they have a large and growing _paying_ customer base or if they assume to monetize the customer data in the long term via other means (e.g. selling aggregate data for ad purposes).
• rrdharan 9y ago
  No one expects the Amazon slackquisition.
• roflchoppa 9y ago
  Should just buy AIM.
• gigatexal 9y ago
  9 billion to purchase the service to push ads for AWS. Hmm.
• rsp1984 9y ago
  Whatsapp: 500 million users for $18b. Slack: ~10 million users for $9b? This doesn't make much sense to me. What's the rationale behind this?
  • josefresco 9y ago
    Just guessing: Maybe the user base is more "business-y" and therefore valued higher than the general public?
  • askafriend 9y ago
    Those are 10mm mostly enterprise users. A lot of them are on paid plans on company budgets. Different product means different user economics.
  • nathan_f77 9y ago
    The business models are completely different. Whatsapp users were paying something like $2 per year, while businesses are paying $8 per user per month.
    • dexterdog 9y ago
      I think most whatsapp users were paying $0. I know I was.
  • oculusthrift 9y ago
    just counting users would make twitter worth way more than it is. monetization matters
• adreamingsoul 9y ago
  This is inaccurate: "Of the so-called big-five tech companies in the US, Amazon is the only one without a messaging platform. Apple has iMessage, Facebook has Messenger, Microsoft has Outlook and Teams, and Google has Hangouts." Amazon has Chime.
• anth1988 9y ago
  Oh good, I was worried they would escape the conglomerates. Can't have that nowadays.
• Apocryphon 9y ago
  Is it true that Slack can't scale to companies with thousands of people? I've heard that Uber uses HipChat instead for that reason.
  • hello_newman 9y ago
    I don't think that's true. I've worked w/ GA and they use slack and they have thousands of employees.
• criddell 9y ago
  I was the person that first brought Slack into our company. I worked hard to get people to start using it and now it's used a great deal. So now, I find myself using email more again. Slack seems to bring with it expectations of instant replies and lately I find myself preferring the more asynchronous nature of email. I do like that the Slack archive is generally open and searchable to all, but the interruptions suck. If the Slack client was silent unless it had focus, I think it would work better for me.
  • tmail21 9y ago
    You might want to consider a deep collaboration tool (specifically built for asynchronous communication) like TMail21 (https://tmail21.com https://tmail21.com) . Deep Collaboration makes Deep Work possible. For more on Deep Work, you can check out Cal Newport's book by the same name. (http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ ). It's a great read and definitely makes one rethink productivity.
  • sjg007 9y ago
    Yeah, I hate hangouts/gchat for that reason as it is inside gmail. So annoying. Same with Facebook messenger. If I want you to get in touch with me you can send me an SMS/iMessage.
    • derimagia 9y ago
      Just because the chat sends instantly doesn't mean you have to reply instantly. I think that's a poor reason to stay away from a service like Slack
• sitkack 9y ago
  I'd only do an acquire. Slack is on the ropes.
• jgalt212 9y ago
  How did they mistake Slack for Whole Foods?