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Slack Closes $250M Funding Round at $5B Valuation
- meddlepal 9y agoWow I'm quite surprised at all the negativity towards slack on here... My team hasn't experienced most of these issues and we love using it.
- Tokala 9y agoI think a lot of it comes from the inflated rhetoric they present themselves with. It's a chat application, it's not curing cancer. See: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067246/the-unexpected-design-challenge-behind-slacks-new-threaded-conversations https://www.fastcompany.com/3067246/the-unexpected-design-ch...
- pdimitar 9y agoSo your mobile notifications work without fail? On Android I receive one out of 20 notifications. The desktop app is horribly laggy -- and my computer can handle a lot. I have 2x 75Mbps internet links that stream 1080p effortlessly so it's not my net either. And you're pleased with the lack of granularity of the notification settings, too?
- TremendousJudge 9y ago>The desktop app is horribly laggy Just try this out on linux (maybe works on other OSs): open a system manager with a real time CPU usage chart. Open the Slack desktop app (or a session in Chrome, it's the same). Open a channel (#random should work). Scroll up. Watch usage of all your CPU cores skyrocket. Stop scrolling. CPU usage goes back down. They to hog all of my cores just to scroll up a list of messages. BTW, this doesn't happen in Firefox: scrolling up doesn't cause CPU usage to go up measurably
- pdimitar 9y agoCheck out my other comment so I don't pollute the thhread with copy-pasting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15279602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15279602
- redwood 9y agoAndroid app is a total disaster. Unreads? No you can't see them!
- DoofusOfDeath 9y agoMaybe now they'll have the budget to support Github style markdown / code formatting.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- unfunco 9y agoWhy should Slack support GitHub's implementation of markdown, why shouldn't they just use the common markdown standard?
- scrollaway 9y agoIs that really a question? For convenience of course. Also, https://githubengineering.com/a-formal-spec-for-github-markdown/ https://githubengineering.com/a-formal-spec-for-github-markd...
- unfunco 9y agoIt's only convenient for users of GitHub, there is surely a large number of users that use both, but there is also a common standard.
- scrollaway 9y agoBut you realize that there isn't a common standard, right? Markdown is a language which has no official spec. CommonMark is as close as it gets to one and that one does include github-style code fencing, so I don't know what you're even on about.
- unfunco 9y agoIt was CommonMark I was thinking of, it just seemed to make more sense (to me at least) to implement that reference, rather than one that seems specific to GitHub (nothing against GitHub flavoured markdown, I use it and I like it's simplicity)
- alexashka 9y agoCan somebody explain the expenses/need to raise money? From what I can tell the major competitor to Slack is Basecamp - a profitable company with 50 or so employees? What is Slack doing with all this money? The slack I used at work was an html version of irc - is there more?
- phamilton 9y agoHipchat is the main competitor I'd say. From what I've heard, Slack hit a pretty big infrastructure wall when it came to big organizations. Teams just didn't scale past 1000 people. So they've had to rebuild significant parts of the product in order to target large corporate customers. Looking at some of their latest API updates, you can see glimpses of enterprise support. (eg moving away from handles to user ids likely enables active directory integration). Back to the question: Why raise money? Because enterprise whales are a much more solid backbone than thousands of 20 person startups, and they still have some eng investments they need to make to handle someone like Walmart in an on premise installation with 10s of thousands of users.
- maxxxxx 9y ago"Why raise money? " I think the more likely answer is because they can.
- dbbk 9y agoTheir CEO Stewart said of the last round "we should because it's cheap right now".
- daok 9y ago---
- qwert12355 9y ago>>What are you talking about? He's talking about teams in the context of Slack not a different product.
- skizm 9y agoCan you please just make the mobile app work correctly now?
- rishabhparikh 9y agoI don't understand how people can continue to use it even though the notifications are extremely unreliable. Unacceptable for any chat-based app.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoI haven't had any problems with missing notifications over the past year on the iOS client, and I'm signed-in to three different teams simultaneously. My only complaint about the iOS app is its RAM consumption (it's not an Electron app on mobile too, I hope?) as iOS seems to suspend it and thaw it whenever I switch to another app. Oh, and it's still kinda slow, switching between teams takes 3-6 seconds.
- nerdwaller 9y agoOr a real desktop app? Electron is a fine start, but there's little reason anymore that they don't build a real app I don't need to close when on battery.
- matchbok 9y agoCrazy to me. Slack is a constant distraction - 20+ channels makes it seem like I'm in 20+ day-long, slow meetings. Real-time chat rooms just to make productive teams, I've found.
- akerl_ 9y agoEasy enough to make it not real-time: mark self as "away", disable notifications, let your team know the right way to contact you if they have a critical issue.
- doingmything 9y agoSo why would you need slack then in the first place?
- ec109685 9y agoBecause you can catch up during breathers / breaks from your main task.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoYou don't, but have little choice when it's foisted on you. If you're a knowledge/tech company, would you let me put a device in your worker's workspace that emitted an annoying noise randomly ever 5-15 minutes, interrupting them and causing them to spend time regaining their focus on that ask they were working on? Probably not, but orgs are handing money over hand over fist to Slack for the privilege of enabling this. Knowledge Productivity Diagram Example: https://i.imgur.com/sAdZ63y.jpg https://i.imgur.com/sAdZ63y.jpg
- vlunkr 9y agoBecause it's the standard for communication at your company. I don't mind Slack, but I have co-workers who hate it, but don't really have a choice but to use it at least occasionally.
- akerl_ 9y agoI actually really like slack for casual conversation, for non-blocking work comms, and for general info, I only dislike when folks expect urgent responses via slack. So I've adjusted my slack config to make it work wonderfully for the use case I prefer, and to work around the use case I don't.
- zaroth 9y agoDid I read that right - they currently have $200M ARR? Keep in mind the $5B "valuation" probably is based on share price of the preferred share times total number of all shares. In other words, fiction.
- swyx 9y ago25x sales - high but seems reasonable for high growth b2b saas with network effect. you were expecting more or less? not clear from your qtn
- zaroth 9y agoManaging to create a network effect for corporate chat rooms is impressive. But it is a bit depressing that centralized unencrypted chat for corporations is a billion dollar product.
- bkanber 9y agoThe chat room isn't what's worth a billion dollars. The fact that they basically own the productivity chat market is.
- somehnreader 9y ago"productivity chat market" <-- whats that?
- bkanber 9y ago"Work chat"
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pm90 9y agoDespite all the detractors, Slack definitely made collaboration much easier b/w teams. IRC was just too techy for tech and non-tech teams to collaborate. However, I don't think the future of collaboration will be Slack. It is just too expensive and quite buggy at the moment. I'm hoping there will be competition that will either make Slack better or replace Slack with a cheaper, less buggy alternative.
- rishabhparikh 9y agoHoping for the same. Stopped using Slack primarily because of their mobile (iOS) experience. Push notifications never seem to come on time and I hate that the notifications get pushed in reverse order when EVERY other app does the opposite.
- verelo 9y agoI struggle to agree, despite being the person who initially championed it at the company. It feels like the worst of both IM and email: people use it instead of email, so delayed responses are ok (although sometimes you want a realtime convo and cannnot get it), but alike IM they also just don't respond sometimes (this reminds me of how people sometimes treat iMessage/SMS). I was thinking about the impact of taking it away again, if Hangouts supported "channels" that people in the domain could join I think we would have a pretty seamless departure. The channels feature is about all I've remained to love after having slack for 2 years.
- jaypaulynice 9y agoIt seems like companies exist nowadays to raise funding. Not to be profitable businesses. Say they go IPO soon after, where does the money come to actually run the company? Is there a designated pool of shares for that? Do they buy back the shares then?
- natural219 9y agoOut of all the software this validly applies to, Slack has the most solid business model I've seen in software since Microsoft Office. Almost every modern organization is inclined to stress over whether $6.66 / user / month is worth the price of the substantially enhanced collaboration Slack provides for anywhere between small teams and 1000+ - person companies. Not a Slack employee or anything, just love the software.
- AstralStorm 9y agoThe real question is: why buy Slack when relatively equivalent solutions such as Mattermost or even Discord exist? Seriously, the only thing that could convince a company is either lower admin cost (vs Mattermost) and way better customer service when something fails. (vs Discord) Pretty sure big co mc corp wouldn't like a potential competitor running its comms. Additionally a strong competitor is as always email. Perhaps enhanced with scheduling and mailing lists. If you don't like to set it up, you could pay Google for example. And both Google and MS are improving their chat/IM offerings. They can and will undercut such a start-up instead of buying it, unless they see enough value in an acquihire.
- owenwil 9y agoBecause with Mattermost or Discord you have to maintain it yourself, and their tooling isn't very good?
- raesene6 9y agoThe major difference, to me, between Slack and Office is that Slack lacks user lock-in. Companies that make heavy use of office would find it very difficult to move over to another office suite (if they could find one that meets their needs), whereas moving off slack to one of the many alternatives, doesn't seem that hard.
- h4pless 9y agoAll this and I still can't use Screenhero on Ubuntu? Way to destroy a useful platform for the open source community, Slack.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ben_jones 9y agoThought experiment: how much money and how long would it take you to build a product with complete feature parity to Slack?
- c-smile 9y agoI personally can do UI of Slack client in 5-8 months (so 5-8 man/months) + one/two backend developers needed. And it will be almost native client with client distribution less than 5mb. As a proof, it took me 2 months to make this application: https://notes.sciter.com/ https://notes.sciter.com/ (and site for it in that time too).
- askafriend 9y agoThat's the easy part. The hard part is scaling, marketing, and building a business/platform around the product so that you take it worldwide. Several people have built Slack clones and there's even multiple open source projects out there. Building a company and business at a scale like Slack is the incredibly difficult part and nobody has managed to replicate that.
- c-smile 9y agoThat's true. My personal educated estimation is that only 5-10% of income is spent on R&D in established companies.
- ctraganos 9y agoI'd pay for an alternative "lite" Slack client for basic channels, DMs, and attachments. With 10+ accounts, my 2017 mac struggles under the weight of the Electron mac client
- itomato 9y agoA competitive app would have: - easy signup for public access - integrations for killer apps in other verticals - plugin architecture - public and private apis - mobile app(s) with 80% of core desktop functionality - end-to-end encryption Maybe it's sufficient to extend IRC. Add support for custom emojis & Giphy integration. Voice, video conferencing and screenshare would be essential.
- mkhalil 9y agoFor $200M ARR, in a non-fictional world I may have it as low as 600M valuation and as high $1.2b depending on growth. But in this world, it's valued @ 5B. The tech world (bubble) is amazing. Businesses are now being appraised like houses: "Comparable businesses were just bought for X dollars". At the end of the day the valuations don't rely on businesses bottom line. They are based on two factors: - How much Google, Apple, etc. MIGHT buy them for in the future. - How much investors THINK Google, Apple, etc. would buy them today for. Speculative markets have never failed us. /s
- ejcx 9y ago3x revenue for a SaaS business that is probably growing at 100% yoy makes no sense. I have no idea why people continue to cite this. Even public SaaS companies aren't getting valuations so low.
- wyattk 9y agoI agree. 8-12x ARR seems to be the standard multiplier for valuation of a SaaS startup. This is also growing ~100% YoY at this scale. That being said, 25x seems very bullish. Even 20x kind of jumps off the page to me. Keep in mind, it's also the SaaS darling in the valley right now, so it's gonna get a bump.
- AstralStorm 9y agoThe service is very cheap and easy to replace, so such valuation makes sense actually. Do you really expect Slack to bring in 10x more business than it has now?
- mhluongo 9y agoThat's not what a 10X multiple implies
- ec109685 9y agoHow can you put a limit on their market cap without understanding their growth rate?
- aresant 9y agoSomething interesting On their last raise @ $3.7b it was thought they were doing around $64m/year - so a 57x of revenue! On this round they're raising @ $5b with $200m/yr - a ~25x of revenue valuation. (1) http://www.businessinsider.com/thrive-leads-slacks-round-of-financing-at-a-37-billion-valuation-2016-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/thrive-leads-slacks-round-of-...
- nopatternhere 9y ago... which makes complete sense. The multiplier eventually falls to the P/E of a stock standard public company, which is what, 12? Lets just say 12. The investors need to give a solid X if they expect the value to grow, as the founders want to keep a high %. So 57X -> 25X is about the right track.
- noddy1 9y agoSlack lacks a truly broad network effect. Already loads of competitors with equivalent or better products - lots of people seem to be using telegram now. Whatsapp rooms are just as good too. They are really going to struggle to aggressively price such a commodity product.
- abhij89 9y agoWith Microsoft’s Teams catching up, i think Slack need more than just funding and valuation. I have been using it for while and doesn't see much of the development happening. Only thing they have introduced is "Threads", and nothing else which is noticeable. I would love to see few of these in Slack: - Video calling - Storage - Private Sharing - Guest member - Meeting rooms
- drcongo 9y agoDepending on your definition, it has all of those things.
- abhij89 9y agoI don't see meeting rooms.. i don't see guest member feature.. i don't see functionality where i can share stuff privately with someone outside of slack... storage?? where is it that feature, i desperately need that..
- Artemis2 9y agoThis should cover guest members for you: https://slackhq.com/new-improved-ways-to-manage-guest-accounts-in-slack-892d4741d984 https://slackhq.com/new-improved-ways-to-manage-guest-accoun...
- kemitche 9y agoWhat features does a "meeting room" have, in your mind? I'm curious what you're looking for.
- Robdel12 9y agoAfter using MS Teams for a couple months.. I think they have a long ways to go to.
- djhworld 9y agoI like Slack as a product. I hate how a lot of open source projects have adopted it as the de-facto community discussion forum, mainly because it's a product designed for companies/organisations - not a disparate band of interested contributors. In my password manager I have 8 passwords for different Slack "teams" that I've joined, because you can't just have one account. Being on some mailing lists, the most annoying spam is from people requesting an invite to the community Slack channel. Every day you'll get at least one or two people wanting an invite. It's silly, but I don't see what the alternative is - Slack has built a product that people like, it's just it doesn't gel well outside a corporate environment in my opinion
- scrollaway 9y agoDiscord is actually fantastic for open source communities. React uses it. We use it at my company. It doesn't have the "8 different team accounts" issue you mention and there's this fantastic cross-protocol bridge called Matterbridge you can use to do n-way mirrors: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/ https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/
- zizek23 9y agoThere is always a 'pragmatic' silence about PHP on slack discussions here. Wikipedia, Facebook, Slack. PHP has unquestionably delivered on scale.
- pdimitar 9y agoYeah, pressing Enter and waiting 0.5 to 1.5 secs for the message to appear is indeed an unquestionable progress! (I have a machine that can run 5 virtual Linuxes and 2 copies of a full HD game on 60fps, simultaneously, and can stream 1080p from my net, so no, it's definitely not my setup.) Have you used Miranda 10-13 years ago?
- dbbk 9y agoWhat are you talking about? Posting a message in Slack? It's instant for me.
- DiThi 9y agoNobody mentioned matrix/riot.im as potential open source alternative?
- robotmay 9y agoI quite like the concept but it was pretty slow the last time I tried it. I'm going to keep checking in on it though.
- Arathorn 9y agoWe just sped up Riot/Web by 2-3x in the last week - https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/4997 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/4997 has the gory details if anyone cares. The bleeding edge CI build lives at https://riot.im/develop https://riot.im/develop if you or anyone wants to try it again :)
- robotmay 9y agoSounds great :) I like the project, I've got high hopes for it!
- aloisdg 9y agoGlad you mentioned it! I use it for most of my chat nowadays. You can use it with bridges to irc, gitter, slack and more. No problem for me. They plan to improve the native experience with more native code (Qt or GTK).
- voxadam 9y agoI'll definitely be on the lookout for a better, more native desktop client as I personally find the UI of Riot to be painful. Maybe I'm alone but I find the amount of screen real estate the Riot requires to be obscene.
- JesseObrien 9y agoSurprised no one here has mentioned Twist. https://twistapp.com/ https://twistapp.com/ We're currently evaluating it in lieu of Slack on our team of ~10 people because of the vast array of issues Slack has. I don't know if it's something that could be considered for larger organizations, but the way it puts together channels and threads is very intuitive, and cuts out a lot of noise for individuals. In terms of Slack's misgivings, I don't think I've used a more incredibly bloated, buggy, slow electron app. Multiple team logins with no centralized account is _insane_ to mange across teams, this single point frustrates me and most people I talk to a lot. Not to mention the more teams you have, the more your electron app slows to an absolute crawl. The notifications leave a lot to be desired in terms of granularity per channel. They've done a really terrible job on "threads", the UI around it is messy and confusing, and the concept doesn't inline well. Those are just the most apparent daily gripes.
- snarf21 9y agoSlack is basically the "open office" of communications. It has become almost mandatory even though most people seem to hate it (at least some of the time).
- i_live_there 9y agoI wish Slack had some features that Discord has... * Text channel 'voice' restricted by user level. Eg: a read-only channel * Dark mode * Option to mute someone in voice channel * Push-to-talk
- s3r3nity 9y agoI came here just to mention this app. I had done a small trial with a few colleagues for an alumni advisory group we run for our alma mater, and the consensus was that: 1) It absolutely solves some of the problems we had with slack, with a thoughtful approach to how people work and respond to the new "streaming inbox." (vs. the "batch inbox" a la David Allen's GTD paradigm.) 2) However, it just felt like a snappier version of email. Which isn't bad, but let's call it like it is. If it looks like a pig, acts like a pig, etc. etc. Which I don't mind! I actually love systems/ tools that work with email - it's pretty much the one universal app that works for everyone with no training! Nevertheless, the overall experience with Twist was good and would recommend as a solid Slack alternative.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agooh look at that, 5% of the float is dictating the entire valuation. Might be a new low for Silicon Valley, by low I mean percent of cash raised to made-up-on-the-spot valuation. If they want to go public and keep that valuation with that constricted of a supply, S&P/Nasdaqs/NYSE won't list you, but Hong Kong will love you, alongside the other 1% float unicorns.
- chopete 9y ago>> S&P/Nasdaqs/NYSE won't list you Whats the cut off?. Is there a link you can suggest to read more about % of cash raised/valuation?
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoThey all have minimum listing criteria that you can find, a private industry solution to curb what they considered abuses.
- lisper 9y agoI'm sorry to be the hater, but I find Slack is a horrible productivity sink for me. I am currently a member on seven Slacks. Each one has a different username and password combination. I have to log in to each one separately. AFAICT there is no way to link them so I can log into all of them all at once. And then once I'm in, every Slack has multiple channels. Trying to keep up with all of them is hopeless. But if I'm not paying attention to a conversation in real time, going back after the fact and trying to extract meaningful content is difficult (it's hard just to find where a particular conversation starts and ends). Trying to go back and make a contribution to the conversation after the fact is completely hopeless. Yes, real-time chat can be very handy, but I don't see anything that Slack does that Adium or Skype doesn't do better IMHO. And for archival discussions I'd much rather have a Google group. Keeping a threaded structure makes it so much easier to go back and trace the conversation after the fact.
- d23 9y agoSlack's entire UX is gamified to take your attention by any means necessary (bright colors, flashing lights, "join this channel!" notifications). It's a massive productivity sink, and it's designed to be that way.
- elliotec 9y ago>>> I am currently a member on seven Slacks There's your problem. I'm pretty surprised that you think Adium and Skype are better products than Slack - neither are the same and they are pretty clearly much worse at team communication, if you can call it that.
- lisper 9y ago> There's your problem. That's certainly one of my problems. But I work on multiple projects and every one of them has its own Slack. So what exactly am I supposed to do about that? I also don't think the situation would be much better if I were only on one Slack. One Slack with multiple channels is more or less equivalent to multiple Slacks (except for the multiple login annoyance).
- darksim905 9y agoThis is awesome & good news in every way. A lot of the comments here seem to really circle around how people treat instant message communication vs e-mail and/or being inundated with being a part of multiple Slacks. If you are blocking co-workers like one person mentioned or muting them, you have other issues (yes, you can mute a user) If you're demanding or need instant communication with someone, just call them from Slack. Or, alternatively, make sure you '@' them properly & force a send notification. The issue I see is that not everyone is all about real time comms -- some people put Slack on their phone or on multiple machines. Some don't. Some people claim it's buggy -- I've had far more issues with HipChat just when it comes to displaying on two monitors than I have ever had with Slack. I saw a few people complain about productivity sinks but the reality is if you want to be a part of a certain group to keep up top of what's being discussed, that's the pulse & one way to do it if you have a large amount of brain power in the room. Meh. I'm excited.
- kentt 9y agoI've stopped trying to understand why such a buggy product with horrible UX is praised as the opposite. To me it seems the takeaway is advertising/hivemind is still much more powerful and good product.
- d23 9y agoA couple of years ago I was praising them as the most perfect product I had ever used. Every single UX element was on point. Two years later, it is one of the most buggy, frustrating pieces of software I have ever used. Clearly somewhere along the way their priorities shifted.
- justinzollars 9y agoImagine that. They had a lot less staff and funding two years ago.
- cpursley 9y agoCongrats. Please allocate $1 million to build a native (i.e., non-electron) client application.