14 ms·

Slack Is Raising $250M from SoftBank, Others

159 points by Element_ 9y ago

phantom_oracle 9y ago
Why does Slack need the money?
- throwaway5752 9y ago
  Only a guess, but to let early investors cash out and then use the rest to finance their operating losses?
  - look_lookatme 9y ago
    My guess would be employee cash-out.
- portman 9y ago
  >> Slack will also let employees and other shareholders sell equity to investors as part of the deal Translation: partial liquidity for founders and early employees.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    So that means not all of the $250M is going into the company? How common is that?
    - marcins 9y ago
      Common enough, Atlassian did the same thing a few years before it's IPO - in this case all the money went to employees: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/atlassian_closes_60_million_investment_from_accel_partners https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/atlassian_closes_60_...
- sna1l 9y ago
  There was an interesting article with the CEO which adds a little color: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/is-slack-really-worth-2-8-billion-a-conversation-with-stewart-butterfield/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/is-slack-really-wo...
  - wastedhours 9y ago
    Refreshing to see someone talk openly about that sort of thing - I've never really seen the appeal of Slack as a product, but their strategy, execution and direction has been stellar.
- bsder 9y ago
  They don't. But there is too much money seeking "unicorns", so you might as well vacuum it up. If you suck in $250 million and have only 500 employees, you can cruise for a very long time.
- brogrammernot 9y ago
  Raise money now on much more preferable terms when you don't need the money, store it in a war chest, improve morale/buy-in with "money on the table" for your employees/early investors. It's pure win for Slack right now.
- inthewoods 9y ago
  Deep pocketed competitors entering the space would be another answer.
nuggien 9y ago
$250m for about 5% of the company, reminds me of when microsoft got 5% of facebook in an investment. Somehow I don't think this will end as well for softbank as it did for microsoft.
grandalf 9y ago
It's amazing to me that Slack has been so successful, considering how so many other alternatives exist. I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client, and each time I wait a few months before trying it again, yet more bugs continue to occur. It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky. I finally realized that the web version works pretty well so now I just use that when I need to use Slack. I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.
- beefsack 9y ago
  > I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC. I'd say you'd be far from the only one. The thing that Slack really brought was an improved onboarding experience, but I have a (probably somewhat vain) hope that protocols will win over corporate controlled walled gardens. Matrix[1] / Riot[2] are really promising and I really hope we settle on something like that sometime down the road. [1]: http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/ [2]: https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/
  - Simon321 9y ago
    There is also Mattermost. An open source Slack.
    - the_common_man 9y ago
      And rocket.chat
      - acosmism 9y ago
neya 9y ago
I was recently pissed off at seeing how many open source projects use Slack despite so many issues with it.[1] Like others have mentioned, I tried several chat clients (open source and non-open source) and realized none of them fit the bill/don't have the customizability that I wanted. So, as stupid/crazy as this sounds, I sat down over a weekend, wrote a simple chat app on Phoenix/Elixir, hosted it on Google Cloud AppEngine, and Bingo! We were done. I know many people will advise against this, but: 1) I'm not into devops, so this setup works really well for me since AppEngine is precisely meant for this. 2) AppEngine allows you to setup firewall rules within their interface, so I restricted access to the outside world and whitelisted only my company's IP. So, I don't really need to worry about security much. 3) Because, this is a custom solution, I was able to integrate stuff such as time tracking, verifying that confidential docs aren't shared between teams, etc. Also, our own custom branding, client support integration within the chat (you can answer to support tickets right from within the interface). 4) I enjoyed the experience thoroughly and it integrates with my entire Saas I've developed[2] very, very nicely. Ironically the Phoenix open source project (and similar others) themselves use Slack (why god, why?) and it's really terrible because Slack doesn't allow you to search for more than 10,000 messages. That's the last thing you want in an open source project - the inability to search for solutions / snippets of code. Hope they move it else where or did what I did. [1]http://sircmpwn.github.io/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack.html http://sircmpwn.github.io/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209
- brogrammernot 9y ago
  That's an interesting use-case. I'm curious if Slack would find open-source work compelling enough to grant a free license for searching messages. I do know for non-profits they offer free standard plan for up to 250 people and 85% off their pricing for those above the 250 person limit. Any chance you mind sharing that code on GitHub? I've been curious about Elixir/Phoenix lately :)
  - neya 9y ago
    Sure! I plan to Open Source it soon :)
logogoto1 9y ago
So much hate for an app that has tried to replace (and done a damn good job) for really bad chat clients FOR BUSINESSES. At least for Silicon valley, really we want to go back to AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Lynx, IRC (the latter is possible I guess). For engineering sure we can do IRC...but really sales/marketing/HR? No. Slack is not perfect...but they have done a pretty damn good job hitting 90% of most tech company needs. (Omg there is even an API)...c'mon give em some "slack"
keithwhor 9y ago
This is fantastic news. Congrats to Slack and the team. Slack recently ran a Slack Developer Workshop (conference with 100+ attendees) to a small group of developers in SF. I was lucky enough to be a part of it. They made it abundantly clear that Slack has a strong interest in being an application distribution platform and they are focused on creating a superior developer experience for their ecosystem. It was amazing to hear. As somebody who grew up on IRC, the power, to me, was in how robust and easy IRC was to build for and around. Bots and commands were very easy to script and get the hang of. In my mind, Slack has actually built something more valuable than IRC. They have built a new model and ecosystem for application distribution, and they've added the right product features to do the job. The next step is to make it insanely easy to develop for and truly surpass the "ease" of the IRC experience for devs. It's inspiring to hear stories about how companies are building entire workflows with Slack being the center of their business; Mike Brevoort of Missions for Slack [1] spoke of a use case they're dealing with where Slack is powering the entire operations of a Canadian craft brewery using Slack + Google Sheets. What Slack really has the potential to do here, in my mind, is be the application layer for business. Think about companies like Envoy (check-in, etc.) with Slack integration; somebody shows up at your office, you get pinged on Slack. You open Slack on your phone to check the notification, there's Slack Actions available for you to unlock the door (or what-have-you). The time-to-delivery on similar applications without Slack... well, it oftentimes just straight up wouldn't happen. We'll see more of these. This is what Slack is getting insanely right. They didn't stop at massive growth + having a "good chat app." They're innovating and enabling new and veteran businesses to grow in novel ways. Disclosure: Slack is an investor of ours [2] and we're also pretty passionate about developer experience. Through that, I've had a chance to interface with a number of their team members and I truly believe it's a fantastic organization. I can't help but root for good people. [1] https://missions.ai/ https://missions.ai/ [2] https://stdlib.com/ https://stdlib.com/
- robtaylor 9y ago
  "I've had a chance to interface with a number of their team members" TIL people actually say stuff like that.
  - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 9y ago
$5B valuation for a chat app. Not bad.
sitkack 9y ago
Wasted money.
djhworld 9y ago
I like Slack as a product. I don't like how some open source and general interest communities use it for communication, as you have to go through this awkward sign up process that describes language like "welcome to the team!" and you have to set individual passwords for each team you join. Slack seems to me like it's designed for businesses and teams to communicate, not as a public forum.
- Kiro 9y ago
  Yeah, Discord is much better in that sense.
  - lewisl9029 9y ago
    Interestingly enough, Discord errs on the other side of the spectrum by not providing a good story for segregating personal/work identities: https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-land/suggestions/10492779-support-multiple-accounts?page=1&per_page=20 https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-...
    - geostyx 9y ago
      Though you can have a different nickname for each server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S...
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Agreed. It's missing /ignore functionality - which is typically not necessary on a team, but absolutely necessary on any sort of public communication platform.
thinbeige 9y ago
OT: I am the only one who thinks Slack is overrated? There are use cases where a group chat is important and crucial but almost every chat product out there has a proper group chat. Even with weaker APIs than Slack they are still ok to use. Moreover: - Slack is the huge distraction and greatly improves ADD - The admin UI is like a forest full of trees, slow, crowded, littered with settings and options, has more pages than Wikipedia, finding the right setting is a ten minutes task if you are not used to Slack; this is my major gripe with Slack which drives me nuts every time - Why do I have to create new accounts with email verification with every new Slack channel? - While people post a lot of crap on Slack (memes, gifs, jokes) important stuff is still handled over email or respective ticketing systems; so now I have many topics in Slack, email and Trello - Slack is def. good for socializing but again--every other group chat is good enough for socializing - Ok there is second use case: echo chambers for token ICOs and obviously there are many at the moment - As a side note: 95% of startups and SMBs use G Suite/G Mail as their mail server which includes Google Chat which has group chat and all the features 95% of us need, which is integrated in everything (such as the address book or search works seamlessly with chat and email messages); why aren't folks just using this? Why the hassle of setting up another tool, setting up roles, team members in the horrible admin pages of Slack? Just to have an ADD powerhouse called Slack in the company? I really don't get it and if I miss something please enlighten me, I want to understand why I need Slack With their market share and their API they have reached a nice network effect without a doubt. But the question is, is it a winner-takes-it-all market and will they ever find somebody who will buy them at that valuation.
- e40 9y ago
  Slack is the huge distraction and greatly improves ADD Then you are using it wrong and you have your notifications set incorrectly.
- sunaden 9y ago
  I think that any kind of chat is as distracting as you let it be, I would not blame that to Slack. However, I totally agree your UI points however for me it applies to Slack overall. Having a thread open on one side, middle being a war between people who use threads to reply and the others using mentions to reply and the left sidebar with bots/apps/direct messages/channels/starred things/all unreads is getting a bit populated too.
biztos 9y ago
It seems to me the only justification for them taking half a billion dollars in VC money[0] -- besides of course "because we can" -- is that Slack must have plans to grow into much, much more than the "enterprise group-chat app." As annoying as Slack's UI can be, it's not as annoying as Jira's, and Atlassian has a market cap over $8B. Salesforce has a market cap over $64B and also has a lot to do with people in big businesses communicating about stuff. My hunch has long been that Butterfield, having sold Flickr too early back in the day, badly wants to join the Three Comma Club. That annoying knock-knock-knock sound is just the beginning. [0]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity
- me551ah 9y ago
  If you don't like their UI , you can also try out https://flock.com https://flock.com.
davidgf 9y ago
Slack! That productivity killer... at least from the point of view of a software developer
- darkstar999 9y ago
  Well at least they put it in the name.
te_chris 9y ago
Just let me block people and bots. Absurd that you can't. I emailed their support and got the most weak, SV response possible: 'If you need to block people then that shows you have a communication problem'. F-the-F-off. If we want to block people or bots who are annoying or irrelevant to us, let us!
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Slack channels are hard to get into; if you've made it open via e.g. one of those auto inviter bots, you've done it to yourself. Slack is not built for big / open communities.
  - te_chris 9y ago
    Who said I was talking about open communities? I don't care if someone moves a Trello ticket, e.g. on some projects, but I do want to still be able to talk about the project in the channel.
    - mateuszf 9y ago
      Then you can use the "mute" feature
      - te_chris 9y ago
        Mute the whole channel because slack won't just let me mute a user? That's ridiculous UX.
        darkstar999 9y ago
        I understand your frustration. Messages should come with a priority level so you can decide to filter out automated messages or gif bots, while still seeing important messages from your team.
        epicide 9y ago
        "Bad UX" gets thrown around like "bad customer service" in retail: usually, it really means "fix my problem before I've even tried to solve it myself" and then throwing a tantrum when that doesn't happen.
inthewoods 9y ago
I think what Slack got right was the on-boarding/time to wow. In a sea of vanilla, sterile enterprise products was this tool that just seemed to be having fun with it. For small companies, particularly in the SF area, it felt like it understood their vibe. For larger companies, it felt like they were joining the cool kids. My team uses Slack now and honestly, it's nothing _that_ special. It's a chat room. It's done well and has nice integrations (that's their product moat), but adoption is so key and they nailed that.
- jernejzen 9y ago
  I think Slack is that kind of product that would never happen outside of the SF. A well know founder with an access to the capital, marketing machinery machinery and critical mass of early adopters. I like Slack and I use it but it's just because others also do. Otherwise I don't find it as amazing shift for the quality of my life or work.
artur_makly 9y ago
and they want me to pay for screensharing !!! Take my $please.
coleca 9y ago
We've been paying customers of Slack since the beta. In general the experience has been great. Although I do worry that with a huge funding round it will bring more employees and those employees will need stuff to do. There's only so much you can do with a chat platform, and Slack eeked out a ton of value out of it early on. What I'm seeing now is features being added or reworked seemingly just so someone has something to do. I see Apple falling into this pattern too (mDNSresponder being replaced by DiscoveryD for example). For example, IMHO one of Slack's best features from the beginning was on the iOS app when you clicked the button to upload a photo you were presented with "Last Photo Taken", "Camera Roll", or "Take a photo". That "Last Photo Taken" button was genius. Simple and I found 90% of the time was what I wanted to do, and it just worked. In one of the last revisions of the iOS app, they removed that feature and replaced it with a newer redesigned photo picker. The new photo picker is riddled with bugs and a good percentage of the time fails to upload the photo at all for most of our paid team members. Some have resorted to using the desktop app to send a photo after transferring it over from their phone. When Slack was a small scrappy startup I'd open tickets and spend the time w/them to get them the information they needed to debug various issues, but now that they are at this scale and size I can't be bothered.
- moretai 9y ago
  When a company like Slack gets all this money, can they decide to not spend the money? Like you said, what else could you really add? Why do companies find the need to expand?
  - koalalorenzo 9y ago
    It is probably about commercial side of it. Selling slack to the enterprise probably is something missing.
    - inetknght 9y ago
      > Selling slack to the enterprise probably is something missing. You know that there are enterprises with 5000+ members on a paid slack, right?
EGreg 9y ago
How does one start to raise money from SoftBank??
120bits 9y ago
When I first heard of slack, I signed up right away and pitched the idea to my supervisor to move to slack. It has all we need. The idea was turned down. But I still wanted to try it out. So, I setup a slack for my family. It has been a great experience. I have multiple channels, trips, events and all. My parents enjoy it. I get asked why not use "Whatsapp Groups". I did tried it, but I felt Slack was a better and I really dont like to get added to random groups without having my consent. So, I stopped using whatsapp. I integrated Dropbox and kayak and ton of others app. My parents are not tech savvy and they can still use it.
j_s 9y ago
Slack's bottom-up approach to getting their foot in the door worked well for them. Providing a fremium service allowing the first email from a domain to be the admin encouraged adoption without official blessing.
josephscott 9y ago
Crunchbase[0] lists the previous funding total at $539.95M over 9 rounds. This would bring the total to $789.95M. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity
johnm1019 9y ago
The Slack client is a mind boggling exercise in excess. It often requires 500MB+ RAM when I am connected to two different Slack "networks" and it's an IRC client!? Honestly with so much money and theoretical engineering talent what went wrong here?
- geostyx 9y ago
  That's insane. Discord is also an Electron app, and is currently using ~127MB (across 3 processes), and I'm in 29 servers.
- loader 9y ago
  My current slack app session is using 27MB of ram.
  - geostyx 9y ago
    I'm curious what makes use 500+ sometimes.
- quacker 9y ago
  Yep. I'm sitting in two teams, about 15 channels between them. One of those teams has >5000 users and >3000 channels. The channels I'm in (excluding #general) each have between 20 and 80 users. Between the "Slack" and "Slack Helper" processes, the OS X slack client is using about 766MB of ram.

159 points by Element_ 9y ago

phantom_oracle 9y ago

Why does Slack need the money?

throwaway5752 9y ago
Only a guess, but to let early investors cash out and then use the rest to finance their operating losses?
- look_lookatme 9y ago
  My guess would be employee cash-out.
portman 9y ago
>> Slack will also let employees and other shareholders sell equity to investors as part of the deal Translation: partial liquidity for founders and early employees.
- Kiro 9y ago
  So that means not all of the $250M is going into the company? How common is that?
  - marcins 9y ago
    Common enough, Atlassian did the same thing a few years before it's IPO - in this case all the money went to employees: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/atlassian_closes_60_million_investment_from_accel_partners https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/atlassian_closes_60_...
sna1l 9y ago
There was an interesting article with the CEO which adds a little color: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/is-slack-really-worth-2-8-billion-a-conversation-with-stewart-butterfield/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/is-slack-really-wo...
- wastedhours 9y ago
  Refreshing to see someone talk openly about that sort of thing - I've never really seen the appeal of Slack as a product, but their strategy, execution and direction has been stellar.
bsder 9y ago
They don't. But there is too much money seeking "unicorns", so you might as well vacuum it up. If you suck in $250 million and have only 500 employees, you can cruise for a very long time.
brogrammernot 9y ago
Raise money now on much more preferable terms when you don't need the money, store it in a war chest, improve morale/buy-in with "money on the table" for your employees/early investors. It's pure win for Slack right now.
inthewoods 9y ago
Deep pocketed competitors entering the space would be another answer.

nuggien 9y ago

$250m for about 5% of the company, reminds me of when microsoft got 5% of facebook in an investment. Somehow I don't think this will end as well for softbank as it did for microsoft.

grandalf 9y ago

It's amazing to me that Slack has been so successful, considering how so many other alternatives exist. I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client, and each time I wait a few months before trying it again, yet more bugs continue to occur. It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky. I finally realized that the web version works pretty well so now I just use that when I need to use Slack. I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.

beefsack 9y ago
> I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC. I'd say you'd be far from the only one. The thing that Slack really brought was an improved onboarding experience, but I have a (probably somewhat vain) hope that protocols will win over corporate controlled walled gardens. Matrix[1] / Riot[2] are really promising and I really hope we settle on something like that sometime down the road. [1]: http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/ [2]: https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/
- Simon321 9y ago
  There is also Mattermost. An open source Slack.
  - the_common_man 9y ago
    And rocket.chat
    - acosmism 9y ago

neya 9y ago

I was recently pissed off at seeing how many open source projects use Slack despite so many issues with it.[1] Like others have mentioned, I tried several chat clients (open source and non-open source) and realized none of them fit the bill/don't have the customizability that I wanted. So, as stupid/crazy as this sounds, I sat down over a weekend, wrote a simple chat app on Phoenix/Elixir, hosted it on Google Cloud AppEngine, and Bingo! We were done. I know many people will advise against this, but: 1) I'm not into devops, so this setup works really well for me since AppEngine is precisely meant for this. 2) AppEngine allows you to setup firewall rules within their interface, so I restricted access to the outside world and whitelisted only my company's IP. So, I don't really need to worry about security much. 3) Because, this is a custom solution, I was able to integrate stuff such as time tracking, verifying that confidential docs aren't shared between teams, etc. Also, our own custom branding, client support integration within the chat (you can answer to support tickets right from within the interface). 4) I enjoyed the experience thoroughly and it integrates with my entire Saas I've developed[2] very, very nicely. Ironically the Phoenix open source project (and similar others) themselves use Slack (why god, why?) and it's really terrible because Slack doesn't allow you to search for more than 10,000 messages. That's the last thing you want in an open source project - the inability to search for solutions / snippets of code. Hope they move it else where or did what I did. [1]http://sircmpwn.github.io/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack.html http://sircmpwn.github.io/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209

brogrammernot 9y ago
That's an interesting use-case. I'm curious if Slack would find open-source work compelling enough to grant a free license for searching messages. I do know for non-profits they offer free standard plan for up to 250 people and 85% off their pricing for those above the 250 person limit. Any chance you mind sharing that code on GitHub? I've been curious about Elixir/Phoenix lately :)
- neya 9y ago
  Sure! I plan to Open Source it soon :)

logogoto1 9y ago

So much hate for an app that has tried to replace (and done a damn good job) for really bad chat clients FOR BUSINESSES. At least for Silicon valley, really we want to go back to AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Lynx, IRC (the latter is possible I guess). For engineering sure we can do IRC...but really sales/marketing/HR? No. Slack is not perfect...but they have done a pretty damn good job hitting 90% of most tech company needs. (Omg there is even an API)...c'mon give em some "slack"

keithwhor 9y ago

This is fantastic news. Congrats to Slack and the team. Slack recently ran a Slack Developer Workshop (conference with 100+ attendees) to a small group of developers in SF. I was lucky enough to be a part of it. They made it abundantly clear that Slack has a strong interest in being an application distribution platform and they are focused on creating a superior developer experience for their ecosystem. It was amazing to hear. As somebody who grew up on IRC, the power, to me, was in how robust and easy IRC was to build for and around. Bots and commands were very easy to script and get the hang of. In my mind, Slack has actually built something more valuable than IRC. They have built a new model and ecosystem for application distribution, and they've added the right product features to do the job. The next step is to make it insanely easy to develop for and truly surpass the "ease" of the IRC experience for devs. It's inspiring to hear stories about how companies are building entire workflows with Slack being the center of their business; Mike Brevoort of Missions for Slack [1] spoke of a use case they're dealing with where Slack is powering the entire operations of a Canadian craft brewery using Slack + Google Sheets. What Slack really has the potential to do here, in my mind, is be the application layer for business. Think about companies like Envoy (check-in, etc.) with Slack integration; somebody shows up at your office, you get pinged on Slack. You open Slack on your phone to check the notification, there's Slack Actions available for you to unlock the door (or what-have-you). The time-to-delivery on similar applications without Slack... well, it oftentimes just straight up wouldn't happen. We'll see more of these. This is what Slack is getting insanely right. They didn't stop at massive growth + having a "good chat app." They're innovating and enabling new and veteran businesses to grow in novel ways. Disclosure: Slack is an investor of ours [2] and we're also pretty passionate about developer experience. Through that, I've had a chance to interface with a number of their team members and I truly believe it's a fantastic organization. I can't help but root for good people. [1] https://missions.ai/ https://missions.ai/ [2] https://stdlib.com/ https://stdlib.com/

robtaylor 9y ago
"I've had a chance to interface with a number of their team members" TIL people actually say stuff like that.
- 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 9y ago

$5B valuation for a chat app. Not bad.

sitkack 9y ago

Wasted money.

djhworld 9y ago

I like Slack as a product. I don't like how some open source and general interest communities use it for communication, as you have to go through this awkward sign up process that describes language like "welcome to the team!" and you have to set individual passwords for each team you join. Slack seems to me like it's designed for businesses and teams to communicate, not as a public forum.

Kiro 9y ago
Yeah, Discord is much better in that sense.
- lewisl9029 9y ago
  Interestingly enough, Discord errs on the other side of the spectrum by not providing a good story for segregating personal/work identities: https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-land/suggestions/10492779-support-multiple-accounts?page=1&per_page=20 https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-...
  - geostyx 9y ago
    Though you can have a different nickname for each server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S...
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Agreed. It's missing /ignore functionality - which is typically not necessary on a team, but absolutely necessary on any sort of public communication platform.

thinbeige 9y ago

OT: I am the only one who thinks Slack is overrated? There are use cases where a group chat is important and crucial but almost every chat product out there has a proper group chat. Even with weaker APIs than Slack they are still ok to use. Moreover: - Slack is the huge distraction and greatly improves ADD - The admin UI is like a forest full of trees, slow, crowded, littered with settings and options, has more pages than Wikipedia, finding the right setting is a ten minutes task if you are not used to Slack; this is my major gripe with Slack which drives me nuts every time - Why do I have to create new accounts with email verification with every new Slack channel? - While people post a lot of crap on Slack (memes, gifs, jokes) important stuff is still handled over email or respective ticketing systems; so now I have many topics in Slack, email and Trello - Slack is def. good for socializing but again--every other group chat is good enough for socializing - Ok there is second use case: echo chambers for token ICOs and obviously there are many at the moment - As a side note: 95% of startups and SMBs use G Suite/G Mail as their mail server which includes Google Chat which has group chat and all the features 95% of us need, which is integrated in everything (such as the address book or search works seamlessly with chat and email messages); why aren't folks just using this? Why the hassle of setting up another tool, setting up roles, team members in the horrible admin pages of Slack? Just to have an ADD powerhouse called Slack in the company? I really don't get it and if I miss something please enlighten me, I want to understand why I need Slack With their market share and their API they have reached a nice network effect without a doubt. But the question is, is it a winner-takes-it-all market and will they ever find somebody who will buy them at that valuation.

e40 9y ago
Slack is the huge distraction and greatly improves ADD Then you are using it wrong and you have your notifications set incorrectly.
sunaden 9y ago
I think that any kind of chat is as distracting as you let it be, I would not blame that to Slack. However, I totally agree your UI points however for me it applies to Slack overall. Having a thread open on one side, middle being a war between people who use threads to reply and the others using mentions to reply and the left sidebar with bots/apps/direct messages/channels/starred things/all unreads is getting a bit populated too.

biztos 9y ago

It seems to me the only justification for them taking half a billion dollars in VC money[0] -- besides of course "because we can" -- is that Slack must have plans to grow into much, much more than the "enterprise group-chat app." As annoying as Slack's UI can be, it's not as annoying as Jira's, and Atlassian has a market cap over $8B. Salesforce has a market cap over $64B and also has a lot to do with people in big businesses communicating about stuff. My hunch has long been that Butterfield, having sold Flickr too early back in the day, badly wants to join the Three Comma Club. That annoying knock-knock-knock sound is just the beginning. [0]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity

me551ah 9y ago
If you don't like their UI , you can also try out https://flock.com https://flock.com.

davidgf 9y ago

Slack! That productivity killer... at least from the point of view of a software developer

darkstar999 9y ago
Well at least they put it in the name.

te_chris 9y ago

Just let me block people and bots. Absurd that you can't. I emailed their support and got the most weak, SV response possible: 'If you need to block people then that shows you have a communication problem'. F-the-F-off. If we want to block people or bots who are annoying or irrelevant to us, let us!

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Slack channels are hard to get into; if you've made it open via e.g. one of those auto inviter bots, you've done it to yourself. Slack is not built for big / open communities.
- te_chris 9y ago
  Who said I was talking about open communities? I don't care if someone moves a Trello ticket, e.g. on some projects, but I do want to still be able to talk about the project in the channel.
  - mateuszf 9y ago
    Then you can use the "mute" feature
    - te_chris 9y ago
      Mute the whole channel because slack won't just let me mute a user? That's ridiculous UX.
      - darkstar999 9y ago
        I understand your frustration. Messages should come with a priority level so you can decide to filter out automated messages or gif bots, while still seeing important messages from your team.
      - epicide 9y ago
        "Bad UX" gets thrown around like "bad customer service" in retail: usually, it really means "fix my problem before I've even tried to solve it myself" and then throwing a tantrum when that doesn't happen.

inthewoods 9y ago

I think what Slack got right was the on-boarding/time to wow. In a sea of vanilla, sterile enterprise products was this tool that just seemed to be having fun with it. For small companies, particularly in the SF area, it felt like it understood their vibe. For larger companies, it felt like they were joining the cool kids. My team uses Slack now and honestly, it's nothing _that_ special. It's a chat room. It's done well and has nice integrations (that's their product moat), but adoption is so key and they nailed that.

jernejzen 9y ago
I think Slack is that kind of product that would never happen outside of the SF. A well know founder with an access to the capital, marketing machinery machinery and critical mass of early adopters. I like Slack and I use it but it's just because others also do. Otherwise I don't find it as amazing shift for the quality of my life or work.

artur_makly 9y ago

and they want me to pay for screensharing !!! Take my $please.

coleca 9y ago

We've been paying customers of Slack since the beta. In general the experience has been great. Although I do worry that with a huge funding round it will bring more employees and those employees will need stuff to do. There's only so much you can do with a chat platform, and Slack eeked out a ton of value out of it early on. What I'm seeing now is features being added or reworked seemingly just so someone has something to do. I see Apple falling into this pattern too (mDNSresponder being replaced by DiscoveryD for example). For example, IMHO one of Slack's best features from the beginning was on the iOS app when you clicked the button to upload a photo you were presented with "Last Photo Taken", "Camera Roll", or "Take a photo". That "Last Photo Taken" button was genius. Simple and I found 90% of the time was what I wanted to do, and it just worked. In one of the last revisions of the iOS app, they removed that feature and replaced it with a newer redesigned photo picker. The new photo picker is riddled with bugs and a good percentage of the time fails to upload the photo at all for most of our paid team members. Some have resorted to using the desktop app to send a photo after transferring it over from their phone. When Slack was a small scrappy startup I'd open tickets and spend the time w/them to get them the information they needed to debug various issues, but now that they are at this scale and size I can't be bothered.

moretai 9y ago
When a company like Slack gets all this money, can they decide to not spend the money? Like you said, what else could you really add? Why do companies find the need to expand?
- koalalorenzo 9y ago
  It is probably about commercial side of it. Selling slack to the enterprise probably is something missing.
  - inetknght 9y ago
    > Selling slack to the enterprise probably is something missing. You know that there are enterprises with 5000+ members on a paid slack, right?

EGreg 9y ago

How does one start to raise money from SoftBank??

120bits 9y ago

When I first heard of slack, I signed up right away and pitched the idea to my supervisor to move to slack. It has all we need. The idea was turned down. But I still wanted to try it out. So, I setup a slack for my family. It has been a great experience. I have multiple channels, trips, events and all. My parents enjoy it. I get asked why not use "Whatsapp Groups". I did tried it, but I felt Slack was a better and I really dont like to get added to random groups without having my consent. So, I stopped using whatsapp. I integrated Dropbox and kayak and ton of others app. My parents are not tech savvy and they can still use it.

j_s 9y ago

Slack's bottom-up approach to getting their foot in the door worked well for them. Providing a fremium service allowing the first email from a domain to be the admin encouraged adoption without official blessing.

josephscott 9y ago

Crunchbase[0] lists the previous funding total at $539.95M over 9 rounds. This would bring the total to $789.95M. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity

johnm1019 9y ago

The Slack client is a mind boggling exercise in excess. It often requires 500MB+ RAM when I am connected to two different Slack "networks" and it's an IRC client!? Honestly with so much money and theoretical engineering talent what went wrong here?

geostyx 9y ago
That's insane. Discord is also an Electron app, and is currently using ~127MB (across 3 processes), and I'm in 29 servers.
loader 9y ago
My current slack app session is using 27MB of ram.
- geostyx 9y ago
  I'm curious what makes use 500+ sometimes.
quacker 9y ago
Yep. I'm sitting in two teams, about 15 channels between them. One of those teams has >5000 users and >3000 channels. The channels I'm in (excluding #general) each have between 20 and 80 users. Between the "Slack" and "Slack Helper" processes, the OS X slack client is using about 766MB of ram.