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Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

132 points by Manu1987 8y ago

paulpauper 8y ago
So much for that inevitable/impending Web 2.0 'bubble burst' that the financial and tech media has been predicting since 2012. Nothing has changed from now and 4 years ago .same high valuations.
carlsborg 8y ago
Can slack messages be considered "personal data" under GDPR?
- wglb 8y ago
  Only if they contain information that personally uniquely identifies a person. The information in the individual slack account is most likely PD under the GDPR.
tootie 8y ago
It seems to me that Slack is very vulnerable. Their core product isn't all that innovative and already has credible competitors who could probably beat their price. In fact, I don't understand how they beat HipChat so soundly. I wonder if their next tack will be to start digging a moat of proprietary tooling now that they have a critical mass of adoption.
- growtofill 8y ago
  Atlassian tried to beat them with Stride and failed.
  - debacle 8y ago
    HipChat, flowdock, yammer, etc.
    - ryanmarsh 8y ago
      I look at Slack and think, how hard can it be? Then I look at the graveyard of crappy competitors and think, ok maybe there's something special about Slack.
      - randomsearch 8y ago
        Same. Critiquing easy, making hard.
        dgritsko 8y ago
        This blog post is pushing 10 years old and it's about StackOverflow, but it's still extremely relevant: https://bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ https://bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few particularly choice bits: >"There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation." >The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story.
        tootie 8y ago
        My point isn't that cloning is easy. More that it has already been done multiple times and Slack has very little lock-in. And enterprise software has less network effect. Our IT department could dictate use of Microsoft Teams next month and it would probably be fine.
        icc97 8y ago
        It had been 'done' by IRC 20 years ago, Google had already been heavily in the space with their linking to Gmail and Hangouts and previous attempts with things like Wave. Yet somehow Slack has come in and taken a massive share of the market in a matter of 5 years.
- plasma 8y ago
  As a former hipchat customer atlassian just totally missed the mark. The updates they put out for Hipchat during slacks rise were new emojis.
- seanalltogether 8y ago
  We used Hipchat a lot back in the days. I remember the biggest frustrations for us was that there was no multi-team support, so co-workers were doing crazy workarounds with multiple copies of the same application on different icon and bundle ids. Additionally HipChat was down quite a lot from what i remember.
- jwalton 8y ago
  > digging a moat of proprietary tooling You mean, like disabling XMPP and IRC integrations? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/09/slack_cuts_ties_to_irc_and_xmpp/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/09/slack_cuts_ties_to_...
- Reedx 8y ago
  Aren't the bots and integrations of those already moat-like? Even if a lot of those exist elsewhere and you're not using custom bots, hooking everything back up is a pain point. Along with having to export/import data, getting everyone to sign up and get used to a new service, etc. I think it's probably going to take something that's not just a little better, but significantly better and different.
- DeonPenny 8y ago
  As someone who was a huge hipchat fan that got moved to Slack. It's integrations, bots, and a delightful UI. They figured out UI better than any chat. Sometimes it's just building the right product.
pentae 8y ago
Amazing how they are a $7b company with hundreds of employees and the issue of it still taking minutes to upload an image from the mobile app is happening years after they acknowledged it for the Asia region. We pay hundreds a month for Slack and they are worth 7b but with all their money and hundreds of employees they just can't figure out how to get a photo to upload in a reasonable time. Just can't figure out how to do it!
- lukeqsee 8y ago
  > for the Asia region. Depending on where you are in Asia, this is a hard one. I run a company with geo-distributed systems, and even having a few Asian-base servers it is still difficult to reach the whole region. You almost need to have datacenters in every country to make it work effectively. Not saying it's an excuse…it is $7B after all. That buys a few servers in many different regions. :) Edit: To continue my thought. Here are a few of the issues you're facing: - China has the GFW. - South Korea has very subpar links to anything outside South Korea. - SE Asia is tons of undersea cables with limited capacity. This issue is very likely to be somewhat outside their control, since it sounds very much like a bandwidth issue they may not have the ability to rectify.
  - pentae 8y ago
    Its strange, we have a solid fibre connection in Thailand and have ~20mbit upstream to Singapore. It's not like we are in a shack on a mountain in Peru on a dialup modem. Slack is the only service we use thats ridiculously slow for us and we use a lot of US based services.
    - scruffyherder 8y ago
      I can deathmatch fine in Quake 2 on a US server. but slack? Yeah no.
      - doyoulikeworms 8y ago
        Have you considered Discord? Kidding...
sschueller 8y ago
How much of that valuation is your data?
- lukeqsee 8y ago
  If you want to commit corporate espionage. . . just become a Slack employee? I hope they have very, very good security and encryption measures on all levels.
  - mrep 8y ago
    Not really unless they changed their systems recently. They were mostly a php stack last I heard and they even got hacked in 2015 [0] which is why my last company refused to use them. [0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/27/slack-got-hacked/amp/&ved=2ahUKEwia-pD-q_7cAhWq5YMKHboaBG4QFjAJegQICBAB&usg=AOvVaw1BRViEcNbxVbUsREYuupsb&ampcf=1 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
    - tomschlick 8y ago
      Being a PHP stack has nothing to do with their security. Also, almost every large company has had a data breach at one point or another. What counts is how they respond to that issue and mitigate for the future.
scruffyherder 8y ago
Clearly not enough money for that IRC bridge...
- tapoxi 8y ago
  They onboarded the early adopters onto their platform with a promise of openness, got them to switch their company, and now that they're locked-in it's time to tell those early adopters to eat shit. It's deceitful, but its standard operating procedure for SaaS and we've seen it before with Twitter. I wouldn't be surprised if IMAP is deprecated from GMail in a few years.
  - scruffyherder 8y ago
    Sometimes I'm surprised I can still send and receive email via SMTP. Having lived through the hell that was x.400 I'm almost amazed there isn't a billed tier for businesses to go back to those dark days. Although I think we almost were there with exchange/Skype federation.
- cmiles74 8y ago
  I expect we'll start to see a wide variety of integration disappear as they begin locking their customers into the product.
mechazawa 8y ago
How come Slack is worth $7.1B? I can't imagine they produce that much value or have a high enough revenue to warrant this valuation.
- everyone 8y ago
  Have you been living in a cave for the last decade? This is modern business, whatever is hot and gets a lot of users, gets a ridiculously unrealistically high valuation. Also, you never need to be profitable, as long us ure hot you can just keep doing more rounds of funding.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Sounds an awful lot like a Ponzi scheme to me. From Wikipedia: > A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud in which a purported businessman lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors using funds obtained from newer investors. Investors may be led to believe that the profits are coming from product sales, or other means, and remain unaware that other investors are the source of apparent profits. A Ponzi scheme is able to maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment and are willing to believe in the non-existent assets that they are purported to own, and there continues to be new investors willing to contribute new funds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
    - phailhaus 8y ago
      No. Businesses whose success depend on network effects are not automatically Ponzi schemes.
      - amelius 8y ago
        Who said anything about network effects?
        phailhaus 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
forthispurpose 8y ago
What is the good alternative to Slack now? Cheaper / OS / self-hosted etc?
- bachmeier 8y ago
  If you have just a few users, Rocket is very easy to install and has always worked well on a $5 DO instance. My preference is for Zulip, as it's easier to track multiple discussions, but I don't have an incentive to switch now that my Rocket instance is running. I have no experience with more than a few users. If you want a hosted solution, I have seen reports that Zulip works well with a large number of users.
- wut42 8y ago
  There's Matrix and Riot. it's still a bit rough on the edges but overall it's very cool projects.
  - namibj 8y ago
    He asked about slack, not Whatsapp. ;)
    - EvilEndures 8y ago
      I've used Riot as a Slack replacement and setup notification bots. Its effective for the task and I could use the IRC bridge for a similar function. Only reason I moved over to Discord was too many chat apps and the hobby users were all on Discord anyway.
    - anderspitman 8y ago
      Riot has inline Markdown, so I'd argue it's actually superior to Slack for serious work.
    - wut42 8y ago
      Riot is more slack-like than whatsapp-like. We use it at work instead of Slack now.
- 8y ago
everyone 8y ago
Has anyone considered using Discord instead of Slack? They seem very similar.
- EvilEndures 8y ago
  I use Discord in place of Slack for hobby/non-professional projects. The problem with Discord tbh is I've found it to be less reliable than Slack in terms of uptime/push notifications. It also has fewer devop functions prebuilt which means building them out. Not a big deal if you are a hobbyist, is a big deal if you are paying people $100+/hr to do it.
- davidwparker 8y ago
  We use Discord instead of Slack for work. It works well, most of the time. But it's not a perfect solution, and some bots / things that are just a few clicks away in Slack we've had to build out manually. That said, prefer it to Slack anyway.
- fbnlsr 8y ago
  Discord is MUCH better than Slack. But since it's primarily aimed at the gaming community it doesn't get the same audience.
  - everyone 8y ago
    I used Slack at work about a year and a half ago.. I have recently setup a Discord server for one of my own games. Discord seems to, have more features, work more reliably, and be a lot easier to administrate.. Also its free! Maybe Slack has advanced in the past year and a half tho..
- mechazawa 8y ago
  Discord has a huge image problem. I won't touch it with a 10ft stick or even mention it in a professional environment. Besides that it's very annoying that it's a complicated mess that has no real focus.
  - 8y ago
Pinbenterjamin 8y ago
That's a crazy evaluation, is that company really worth 7.1Instagrams? It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story. Especially since it's built on top of electron, which I'm still trying to accept as a real platform for application development, and not the '3d printer' of the software world. I hope they don't use this money to feature-swamp the app, and instead focus inward on performance and migrating to a more stable platform.
- huntermeyer 8y ago
  Instagram is worth more than $100B: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-25/value-of-facebook-s-instagram-estimated-to-top-100-billion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-25/value-of-...
- hashrate 8y ago
  > and instead focus inward on performance and migrating to a more stable platform Very unlikely , I'm not aware of Slack being an Innovation Driven company. I've seen nothing from them in the Open Source World.
- growtofill 8y ago
  Comparing Slack (B2B) to Instagram (B2C) doesn't seem correct to me. Slack wasn't the first-to-market (there's been Hipchat), but to my understanding, Slack was radically better, that's why it became so successful. As for using Electron for its desktop app: do end users really care?
  - naibafo 8y ago
    Yes, I have stopped using both, the Slack app and the rocket.chat app at work since I was definitely seeing the effect of them in my RAM usage. I don't use an application tray in my desktop, so having browser windows open for the chats is basically feature-equivalent and saves me RAM
  - maxehmookau 8y ago
    I care. It's slow and terrible for accessibility.
maxehmookau 8y ago
Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.
- mechazawa 8y ago
  And one that doesn't use >1GB ram when idle
- joelhaasnoot 8y ago
  And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...
  - drb91 8y ago
    No need! Everyone is already so happy with the electron version; why would they waste more money improving your experience?
    - ihuman 8y ago
      Because not everyone is already happy with the electron version?
      - drb91 8y ago
        (I was sarcastic!)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - hvidgaard 8y ago
    Lets assume well paid developers of $150.000 yearly, 5 man for 3 months is less than $187.500 is wages. Lets be generous and say we double that to account for other expenses. It's $375.000 for a feature that will be a reasonable sales argument.
bumholio 8y ago
This is one of those recent tech success stories that just leave me scratching my head. I simply can't understand the value Slack is bringing and why would anyone pay for an absolutely metoo product. They are either deviously smart or the market is in full bubble mode.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  After Facebook and Instagram I pretty much gave up and stopped trying to figure it out. Maybe I’m a dinosaur but I don’t get the appeal of most software products that have come out in the last decade. It seems the formula is simply: 1. Spend investor money faster than your competitors. 2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there. 3. Load up on hype, marketing. And buzz/PR. 4. Once you have a critical mass of users, lock them in.
  - addicted 8y ago
    Facebook and Instagram make money and have lots of data. I thought the $100bn valuation for them was low and turns out that was right because they had acquired all this data for free. Data which at the time no one valued (and even today don’t value enough) but was worth a lot. Slack has lots of data, but if they try to monetize it, I suspect they will lose a lot of their users (the data they have is what people would consider private, while the whole point of the data shared on Facebook/instagram is to make it public). And I suspect their avenues for making money are closing out. O365 users get Teams for free, and it’s only a matter of time before Google includes something equivalent in Google Apps for Work. I suspect Slack’s best bets for justifying their valuation is hoping Google buys them out or includes Slack in a Apps for Work tier, or if they’re really lucky, Amazon decides they truly want to make a play for the enterprise communications market and buy Slack as the centerpiece for that.
  - phailhaus 8y ago
    > 2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there. You are fooling yourself here. For all the snarky hate Slack gets around here, it's far better designed than any chat app I've had to use so far. It's for work, it doesn't have to be compatible with other chat apps (in fact, that would be a security issue). Searching through your history Just Works, integrations Just Work, and user-friendly features like reactions make it more fun to use (and prevent cluttering up chats with unnecessary chatter). The fact that Slack was able to destroy its established competitors should give you a hint that they're doing something right. People like using slack. My friends have made their own workspaces with it just to keep in touch, because it's so well designed.
akeck 8y ago
Hmmm. The story I keep hearing is companies switching from Slack to Teams, not because Teams is better, but because it's more or less integrated into O365 and has various compliance certs already. 7.1B seems a bit high when competing with MS.
- chrismeller 8y ago
  Ugh. Have you tried using Teams? I’m forced to now and I want to kill cute, fuzzy woodland creatures every single day. Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.
  - nwsm 8y ago
    I missed the part where you detailed any of your problems with it.
    - chrismeller 8y ago
      Hold on to your butts... 1. Click the icon to open it. Flip to another app. Multiple times during startup it will steal focus as I'm trying to do other things. 2. Flip back to another app during #1? It'll sit at "Loading Teams..." for. F'ing. ever. You won't get any notifications during this phase. You will not show up as online. 3. When it does load, I'm always 2 months back in chat conversation and have to spend 2 minutes scrolling down to the current time to see if there's anything new. 4. There is no way to skip to latest... 5. Notifications don't integrate with anything, they are custom. They are quirky and peculiar. There have been times that _none of them_ come through - no badge, no notification, no mobile push notification, no nothing - if I hadn't flipped to the app I would have no idea I got any messages at all. And yes, these are direct messages that I have notifications turned on for. 6. Uploading files is annoying as F. Drag and drop into the message. I have to click into the message input box to even start adding any other text (seems like an obvious transition to me)... when it finishes uploading you might get kicked back out of the text box because it wants to ask if this is the same file as you uploaded before. 7. When focusing on the app I'm never, read _never_, placed into the input box, even if I just saw a notification (miraculously!) that I'm trying to reply to. (Skype also has this same problem.) 8. Defaults to emailing you _for every F'ing thing under the sun_. It's an F'ing chat app, why are "you're missing the conversation!" emails the default? 9. Navigation is a clusterF. Three layers of vertical panes of navigation (ala Slack). Then add on top of that horizontal navigation _in every single one_. And not just a fixed number of tabs as navigation, you never have any idea what it's going to look like because... 10. "Integrations" is just BS. All they mean in Teams is a new tab you can add to the horizontal navigation in #9. 11. Any of their logic regarding recent conversations, recent groups, etc. and what should be displayed in the left navigation is crap. I've only got one team that I use, but I have to expand that single team to get the other "chats" in it? You've got thousands of pixels of vertical real estate here, why do I have to constantly expand the _one thing_ in the list? 12. The "wiki" has no navigation by default, you have to try and figure out (amongst the 15 different layers of navigation) where to expand to find the pages in it. Hardly a wiki, and even the editing tools are quirky and annoying - things disappear and reappear at random. And that's just off the top of my head. This is seriously the _worst_ chat app I have ever used in my life. Some random team at MS took Skype and decided to take the worst UX features of it and make a Slack clone. The fact that they started pushing this to businesses as part of 365 should involve mass firings. Edit: Formatting and a word... and a number.
aviv 8y ago
Now they can afford the Dialpad.com acquisition they have been after.
jahaja 8y ago
What is the lowest acceptable number of employees that a company that's planning to go public can have? Sometimes I wonder if this rapid inflation phase is just a check boxing exercise.
mrchess 8y ago
Someone tried to run this investor scam on me during Slack's funding process. Replace Google with Slack, and the scam was nearly identical in execution. Be careful out there! http://mobile.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/business/con-artist-exploited-eagerness-for-google-prosecutors-say.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/business/con-artist-exp...
dawhizkid 8y ago
Slack refuses to sign BAAs for healthcare cos (for HIPAA compliance) & does not offer an on-prem solution (which Hipchat did but Slack will sunset in 6 months or so)
cntlzw 8y ago
We went from Hipchat to Teams and now Slack. Hipchat was solid. App was great to use and did not consume many resources. Integration with other tools was ok. Of course things like Atlassian were nice. Webhooks, API worked for me. Even writing simple notifications worked. We then switched to teams because we already use Office 365 and the guy in charge likes MS. Enough said. Teams and Office 365 has weird UI experiences and it feels sluggish. Did not like it t all. At the moment we use Slack. You can switch from workplace to workplace. Slack is viral. You need to have it. All the integrations. UI is more polished than Teams but overall I am not a fan. It feels sluggish like Teams at times.
a-b 8y ago
Switched whole organization from slack to https://zulipchat.com https://zulipchat.com - so much happier!
sitepodmatt 8y ago
I wonder if any of investors are backed (indirectly maybe) by memory makers Kingston, Samsung, Micron VC arms etc.. Just a thought..
rkrzr 8y ago
If self-hosting is an option for you, I can highly recommend looking into Mattermost as an open source Slack replacement. We have been using it for the last 2 years and it has been working pretty much flawlessly for us. Upgrading it is really painless too, since it is just one Go binary that automatically applies DB migrations when it detects that you moved to a new version.
- eapartridge 8y ago
  Interesting! How do you find Mattermost does in terms of integrations with GitHub etc? I see that there seems to be a bit of a community around it, but I wonder how stable / reliable / usable they are?
  - rkrzr 8y ago
    Mattermost's webhooks are actually compatible with Slack's data format[0]. We use this e.g. for the Travis CI integration, which is working well. I don't know about other integrations, but I think most Slack integrations should work out of the box with Mattermost, since the data format is the same. It's also easy to add your own webhooks to automatically post to a specific channel. We e.g. use this to announce deployments via Ansible, where the deploy script simply POSTs to that webhook what is being deployed and by whom. [0] https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/webhooks-incoming.html#slack-compatibility https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/webhooks-incoming.html...
shaan7 8y ago
Will that be enough to do a dark theme? :P
acconrad 8y ago
I'm new to venture deals (just read the book of the same name) and I have a question: Slack seems to be in peacetime: aggressive growth, buying things like HipChat. If they're dominating the market, why would they need to raise money?
- gkanai 8y ago
  > why would they need to raise money? The thinking is that the more a hot company can raise, the longer they can stay public. In the current cycle, IPOs are more rare than in previous cycles (partly because FAANG are acquiring more companies and partly because companies are waiting longer to IPO) so having more cash on hand gives the company that much more runway.
  - acconrad 8y ago
    Did you mean private? So even if they are a market leader, give them more cash? I get why Uber does it because they have serious commoditized competition with Lyft, but Slack does not seem to have even a close 2nd place.
- paxy 8y ago
  > In previous rounds, Slack’s CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield has said that the company raises “opportunistically.” That is, it doesn’t have to raise money because it’s already making money and still has some in the bank, but as long as VCs are knocking, it’s worth taking the funding if it’s coming in at good valuations because you never know what might lie ahead.
EpiphanyMachine 8y ago
I wish they never bought screenhero and effectively killed it. The version of it in the slack app is less featured and significantly less preformant.
QML 8y ago
I've been having trouble coming up with an analogy until now: my main gripe with Slack is that it brings over the concept of open office from meatspace onto digital space. I don't think I'm the only one with this sentiment; it's harder to concentrate on work when notifications go off; even if its not pertinent to me, I feel an urge to stay in the loop on things.

132 points by Manu1987 8y ago

So much for that inevitable/impending Web 2.0 'bubble burst' that the financial and tech media has been predicting since 2012. Nothing has changed from now and 4 years ago .same high valuations.

carlsborg 8y ago

Can slack messages be considered "personal data" under GDPR?

wglb 8y ago
Only if they contain information that personally uniquely identifies a person. The information in the individual slack account is most likely PD under the GDPR.

tootie 8y ago

It seems to me that Slack is very vulnerable. Their core product isn't all that innovative and already has credible competitors who could probably beat their price. In fact, I don't understand how they beat HipChat so soundly. I wonder if their next tack will be to start digging a moat of proprietary tooling now that they have a critical mass of adoption.

growtofill 8y ago
Atlassian tried to beat them with Stride and failed.
- debacle 8y ago
  HipChat, flowdock, yammer, etc.
  - ryanmarsh 8y ago
    I look at Slack and think, how hard can it be? Then I look at the graveyard of crappy competitors and think, ok maybe there's something special about Slack.
    - randomsearch 8y ago
      Same. Critiquing easy, making hard.
      - dgritsko 8y ago
        This blog post is pushing 10 years old and it's about StackOverflow, but it's still extremely relevant: https://bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ https://bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few particularly choice bits: >"There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation." >The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story.
        tootie 8y ago
        My point isn't that cloning is easy. More that it has already been done multiple times and Slack has very little lock-in. And enterprise software has less network effect. Our IT department could dictate use of Microsoft Teams next month and it would probably be fine.
        icc97 8y ago
        It had been 'done' by IRC 20 years ago, Google had already been heavily in the space with their linking to Gmail and Hangouts and previous attempts with things like Wave. Yet somehow Slack has come in and taken a massive share of the market in a matter of 5 years.
plasma 8y ago
As a former hipchat customer atlassian just totally missed the mark. The updates they put out for Hipchat during slacks rise were new emojis.
seanalltogether 8y ago
We used Hipchat a lot back in the days. I remember the biggest frustrations for us was that there was no multi-team support, so co-workers were doing crazy workarounds with multiple copies of the same application on different icon and bundle ids. Additionally HipChat was down quite a lot from what i remember.
jwalton 8y ago
> digging a moat of proprietary tooling You mean, like disabling XMPP and IRC integrations? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/09/slack_cuts_ties_to_irc_and_xmpp/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/09/slack_cuts_ties_to_...
Reedx 8y ago
Aren't the bots and integrations of those already moat-like? Even if a lot of those exist elsewhere and you're not using custom bots, hooking everything back up is a pain point. Along with having to export/import data, getting everyone to sign up and get used to a new service, etc. I think it's probably going to take something that's not just a little better, but significantly better and different.
DeonPenny 8y ago
As someone who was a huge hipchat fan that got moved to Slack. It's integrations, bots, and a delightful UI. They figured out UI better than any chat. Sometimes it's just building the right product.

pentae 8y ago

Amazing how they are a $7b company with hundreds of employees and the issue of it still taking minutes to upload an image from the mobile app is happening years after they acknowledged it for the Asia region. We pay hundreds a month for Slack and they are worth 7b but with all their money and hundreds of employees they just can't figure out how to get a photo to upload in a reasonable time. Just can't figure out how to do it!

lukeqsee 8y ago
> for the Asia region. Depending on where you are in Asia, this is a hard one. I run a company with geo-distributed systems, and even having a few Asian-base servers it is still difficult to reach the whole region. You almost need to have datacenters in every country to make it work effectively. Not saying it's an excuse…it is $7B after all. That buys a few servers in many different regions. :) Edit: To continue my thought. Here are a few of the issues you're facing: - China has the GFW. - South Korea has very subpar links to anything outside South Korea. - SE Asia is tons of undersea cables with limited capacity. This issue is very likely to be somewhat outside their control, since it sounds very much like a bandwidth issue they may not have the ability to rectify.
- pentae 8y ago
  Its strange, we have a solid fibre connection in Thailand and have ~20mbit upstream to Singapore. It's not like we are in a shack on a mountain in Peru on a dialup modem. Slack is the only service we use thats ridiculously slow for us and we use a lot of US based services.
  - scruffyherder 8y ago
    I can deathmatch fine in Quake 2 on a US server. but slack? Yeah no.
    - doyoulikeworms 8y ago
      Have you considered Discord? Kidding...

sschueller 8y ago

How much of that valuation is your data?

lukeqsee 8y ago
If you want to commit corporate espionage. . . just become a Slack employee? I hope they have very, very good security and encryption measures on all levels.
- mrep 8y ago
  Not really unless they changed their systems recently. They were mostly a php stack last I heard and they even got hacked in 2015 [0] which is why my last company refused to use them. [0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/27/slack-got-hacked/amp/&ved=2ahUKEwia-pD-q_7cAhWq5YMKHboaBG4QFjAJegQICBAB&usg=AOvVaw1BRViEcNbxVbUsREYuupsb&ampcf=1 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
  - tomschlick 8y ago
    Being a PHP stack has nothing to do with their security. Also, almost every large company has had a data breach at one point or another. What counts is how they respond to that issue and mitigate for the future.

scruffyherder 8y ago

Clearly not enough money for that IRC bridge...

tapoxi 8y ago
They onboarded the early adopters onto their platform with a promise of openness, got them to switch their company, and now that they're locked-in it's time to tell those early adopters to eat shit. It's deceitful, but its standard operating procedure for SaaS and we've seen it before with Twitter. I wouldn't be surprised if IMAP is deprecated from GMail in a few years.
- scruffyherder 8y ago
  Sometimes I'm surprised I can still send and receive email via SMTP. Having lived through the hell that was x.400 I'm almost amazed there isn't a billed tier for businesses to go back to those dark days. Although I think we almost were there with exchange/Skype federation.
cmiles74 8y ago
I expect we'll start to see a wide variety of integration disappear as they begin locking their customers into the product.

mechazawa 8y ago

How come Slack is worth $7.1B? I can't imagine they produce that much value or have a high enough revenue to warrant this valuation.

everyone 8y ago
Have you been living in a cave for the last decade? This is modern business, whatever is hot and gets a lot of users, gets a ridiculously unrealistically high valuation. Also, you never need to be profitable, as long us ure hot you can just keep doing more rounds of funding.
- amelius 8y ago
  Sounds an awful lot like a Ponzi scheme to me. From Wikipedia: > A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud in which a purported businessman lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors using funds obtained from newer investors. Investors may be led to believe that the profits are coming from product sales, or other means, and remain unaware that other investors are the source of apparent profits. A Ponzi scheme is able to maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment and are willing to believe in the non-existent assets that they are purported to own, and there continues to be new investors willing to contribute new funds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
  - phailhaus 8y ago
    No. Businesses whose success depend on network effects are not automatically Ponzi schemes.
    - amelius 8y ago
      Who said anything about network effects?
      - phailhaus 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

forthispurpose 8y ago

What is the good alternative to Slack now? Cheaper / OS / self-hosted etc?

bachmeier 8y ago
If you have just a few users, Rocket is very easy to install and has always worked well on a $5 DO instance. My preference is for Zulip, as it's easier to track multiple discussions, but I don't have an incentive to switch now that my Rocket instance is running. I have no experience with more than a few users. If you want a hosted solution, I have seen reports that Zulip works well with a large number of users.
wut42 8y ago
There's Matrix and Riot. it's still a bit rough on the edges but overall it's very cool projects.
- namibj 8y ago
  He asked about slack, not Whatsapp. ;)
  - EvilEndures 8y ago
    I've used Riot as a Slack replacement and setup notification bots. Its effective for the task and I could use the IRC bridge for a similar function. Only reason I moved over to Discord was too many chat apps and the hobby users were all on Discord anyway.
  - anderspitman 8y ago
    Riot has inline Markdown, so I'd argue it's actually superior to Slack for serious work.
  - wut42 8y ago
    Riot is more slack-like than whatsapp-like. We use it at work instead of Slack now.
8y ago

everyone 8y ago

Has anyone considered using Discord instead of Slack? They seem very similar.

EvilEndures 8y ago
I use Discord in place of Slack for hobby/non-professional projects. The problem with Discord tbh is I've found it to be less reliable than Slack in terms of uptime/push notifications. It also has fewer devop functions prebuilt which means building them out. Not a big deal if you are a hobbyist, is a big deal if you are paying people $100+/hr to do it.
davidwparker 8y ago
We use Discord instead of Slack for work. It works well, most of the time. But it's not a perfect solution, and some bots / things that are just a few clicks away in Slack we've had to build out manually. That said, prefer it to Slack anyway.
fbnlsr 8y ago
Discord is MUCH better than Slack. But since it's primarily aimed at the gaming community it doesn't get the same audience.
- everyone 8y ago
  I used Slack at work about a year and a half ago.. I have recently setup a Discord server for one of my own games. Discord seems to, have more features, work more reliably, and be a lot easier to administrate.. Also its free! Maybe Slack has advanced in the past year and a half tho..
mechazawa 8y ago
Discord has a huge image problem. I won't touch it with a 10ft stick or even mention it in a professional environment. Besides that it's very annoying that it's a complicated mess that has no real focus.
- 8y ago

Pinbenterjamin 8y ago

That's a crazy evaluation, is that company really worth 7.1Instagrams? It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story. Especially since it's built on top of electron, which I'm still trying to accept as a real platform for application development, and not the '3d printer' of the software world. I hope they don't use this money to feature-swamp the app, and instead focus inward on performance and migrating to a more stable platform.

huntermeyer 8y ago
Instagram is worth more than $100B: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-25/value-of-facebook-s-instagram-estimated-to-top-100-billion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-25/value-of-...
hashrate 8y ago
> and instead focus inward on performance and migrating to a more stable platform Very unlikely , I'm not aware of Slack being an Innovation Driven company. I've seen nothing from them in the Open Source World.
growtofill 8y ago
Comparing Slack (B2B) to Instagram (B2C) doesn't seem correct to me. Slack wasn't the first-to-market (there's been Hipchat), but to my understanding, Slack was radically better, that's why it became so successful. As for using Electron for its desktop app: do end users really care?
- naibafo 8y ago
  Yes, I have stopped using both, the Slack app and the rocket.chat app at work since I was definitely seeing the effect of them in my RAM usage. I don't use an application tray in my desktop, so having browser windows open for the chats is basically feature-equivalent and saves me RAM
- maxehmookau 8y ago
  I care. It's slow and terrible for accessibility.

maxehmookau 8y ago

Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.

mechazawa 8y ago
And one that doesn't use >1GB ram when idle
joelhaasnoot 8y ago
And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...
- drb91 8y ago
  No need! Everyone is already so happy with the electron version; why would they waste more money improving your experience?
  - ihuman 8y ago
    Because not everyone is already happy with the electron version?
    - drb91 8y ago
      (I was sarcastic!)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  Lets assume well paid developers of $150.000 yearly, 5 man for 3 months is less than $187.500 is wages. Lets be generous and say we double that to account for other expenses. It's $375.000 for a feature that will be a reasonable sales argument.

bumholio 8y ago

This is one of those recent tech success stories that just leave me scratching my head. I simply can't understand the value Slack is bringing and why would anyone pay for an absolutely metoo product. They are either deviously smart or the market is in full bubble mode.

ryandrake 8y ago
After Facebook and Instagram I pretty much gave up and stopped trying to figure it out. Maybe I’m a dinosaur but I don’t get the appeal of most software products that have come out in the last decade. It seems the formula is simply: 1. Spend investor money faster than your competitors. 2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there. 3. Load up on hype, marketing. And buzz/PR. 4. Once you have a critical mass of users, lock them in.
- addicted 8y ago
  Facebook and Instagram make money and have lots of data. I thought the $100bn valuation for them was low and turns out that was right because they had acquired all this data for free. Data which at the time no one valued (and even today don’t value enough) but was worth a lot. Slack has lots of data, but if they try to monetize it, I suspect they will lose a lot of their users (the data they have is what people would consider private, while the whole point of the data shared on Facebook/instagram is to make it public). And I suspect their avenues for making money are closing out. O365 users get Teams for free, and it’s only a matter of time before Google includes something equivalent in Google Apps for Work. I suspect Slack’s best bets for justifying their valuation is hoping Google buys them out or includes Slack in a Apps for Work tier, or if they’re really lucky, Amazon decides they truly want to make a play for the enterprise communications market and buy Slack as the centerpiece for that.
- phailhaus 8y ago
  > 2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there. You are fooling yourself here. For all the snarky hate Slack gets around here, it's far better designed than any chat app I've had to use so far. It's for work, it doesn't have to be compatible with other chat apps (in fact, that would be a security issue). Searching through your history Just Works, integrations Just Work, and user-friendly features like reactions make it more fun to use (and prevent cluttering up chats with unnecessary chatter). The fact that Slack was able to destroy its established competitors should give you a hint that they're doing something right. People like using slack. My friends have made their own workspaces with it just to keep in touch, because it's so well designed.

akeck 8y ago

Hmmm. The story I keep hearing is companies switching from Slack to Teams, not because Teams is better, but because it's more or less integrated into O365 and has various compliance certs already. 7.1B seems a bit high when competing with MS.

chrismeller 8y ago
Ugh. Have you tried using Teams? I’m forced to now and I want to kill cute, fuzzy woodland creatures every single day. Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.
- nwsm 8y ago
  I missed the part where you detailed any of your problems with it.
  - chrismeller 8y ago
    Hold on to your butts... 1. Click the icon to open it. Flip to another app. Multiple times during startup it will steal focus as I'm trying to do other things. 2. Flip back to another app during #1? It'll sit at "Loading Teams..." for. F'ing. ever. You won't get any notifications during this phase. You will not show up as online. 3. When it does load, I'm always 2 months back in chat conversation and have to spend 2 minutes scrolling down to the current time to see if there's anything new. 4. There is no way to skip to latest... 5. Notifications don't integrate with anything, they are custom. They are quirky and peculiar. There have been times that _none of them_ come through - no badge, no notification, no mobile push notification, no nothing - if I hadn't flipped to the app I would have no idea I got any messages at all. And yes, these are direct messages that I have notifications turned on for. 6. Uploading files is annoying as F. Drag and drop into the message. I have to click into the message input box to even start adding any other text (seems like an obvious transition to me)... when it finishes uploading you might get kicked back out of the text box because it wants to ask if this is the same file as you uploaded before. 7. When focusing on the app I'm never, read _never_, placed into the input box, even if I just saw a notification (miraculously!) that I'm trying to reply to. (Skype also has this same problem.) 8. Defaults to emailing you _for every F'ing thing under the sun_. It's an F'ing chat app, why are "you're missing the conversation!" emails the default? 9. Navigation is a clusterF. Three layers of vertical panes of navigation (ala Slack). Then add on top of that horizontal navigation _in every single one_. And not just a fixed number of tabs as navigation, you never have any idea what it's going to look like because... 10. "Integrations" is just BS. All they mean in Teams is a new tab you can add to the horizontal navigation in #9. 11. Any of their logic regarding recent conversations, recent groups, etc. and what should be displayed in the left navigation is crap. I've only got one team that I use, but I have to expand that single team to get the other "chats" in it? You've got thousands of pixels of vertical real estate here, why do I have to constantly expand the _one thing_ in the list? 12. The "wiki" has no navigation by default, you have to try and figure out (amongst the 15 different layers of navigation) where to expand to find the pages in it. Hardly a wiki, and even the editing tools are quirky and annoying - things disappear and reappear at random. And that's just off the top of my head. This is seriously the _worst_ chat app I have ever used in my life. Some random team at MS took Skype and decided to take the worst UX features of it and make a Slack clone. The fact that they started pushing this to businesses as part of 365 should involve mass firings. Edit: Formatting and a word... and a number.

aviv 8y ago

Now they can afford the Dialpad.com acquisition they have been after.

jahaja 8y ago

What is the lowest acceptable number of employees that a company that's planning to go public can have? Sometimes I wonder if this rapid inflation phase is just a check boxing exercise.

mrchess 8y ago

Someone tried to run this investor scam on me during Slack's funding process. Replace Google with Slack, and the scam was nearly identical in execution. Be careful out there! http://mobile.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/business/con-artist-exploited-eagerness-for-google-prosecutors-say.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/business/con-artist-exp...

dawhizkid 8y ago

Slack refuses to sign BAAs for healthcare cos (for HIPAA compliance) & does not offer an on-prem solution (which Hipchat did but Slack will sunset in 6 months or so)

cntlzw 8y ago

We went from Hipchat to Teams and now Slack. Hipchat was solid. App was great to use and did not consume many resources. Integration with other tools was ok. Of course things like Atlassian were nice. Webhooks, API worked for me. Even writing simple notifications worked. We then switched to teams because we already use Office 365 and the guy in charge likes MS. Enough said. Teams and Office 365 has weird UI experiences and it feels sluggish. Did not like it t all. At the moment we use Slack. You can switch from workplace to workplace. Slack is viral. You need to have it. All the integrations. UI is more polished than Teams but overall I am not a fan. It feels sluggish like Teams at times.

a-b 8y ago

Switched whole organization from slack to https://zulipchat.com https://zulipchat.com - so much happier!

sitepodmatt 8y ago

I wonder if any of investors are backed (indirectly maybe) by memory makers Kingston, Samsung, Micron VC arms etc.. Just a thought..

rkrzr 8y ago

If self-hosting is an option for you, I can highly recommend looking into Mattermost as an open source Slack replacement. We have been using it for the last 2 years and it has been working pretty much flawlessly for us. Upgrading it is really painless too, since it is just one Go binary that automatically applies DB migrations when it detects that you moved to a new version.

eapartridge 8y ago
Interesting! How do you find Mattermost does in terms of integrations with GitHub etc? I see that there seems to be a bit of a community around it, but I wonder how stable / reliable / usable they are?
- rkrzr 8y ago
  Mattermost's webhooks are actually compatible with Slack's data format[0]. We use this e.g. for the Travis CI integration, which is working well. I don't know about other integrations, but I think most Slack integrations should work out of the box with Mattermost, since the data format is the same. It's also easy to add your own webhooks to automatically post to a specific channel. We e.g. use this to announce deployments via Ansible, where the deploy script simply POSTs to that webhook what is being deployed and by whom. [0] https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/webhooks-incoming.html#slack-compatibility https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/webhooks-incoming.html...

shaan7 8y ago

Will that be enough to do a dark theme? :P

acconrad 8y ago

I'm new to venture deals (just read the book of the same name) and I have a question: Slack seems to be in peacetime: aggressive growth, buying things like HipChat. If they're dominating the market, why would they need to raise money?

gkanai 8y ago
> why would they need to raise money? The thinking is that the more a hot company can raise, the longer they can stay public. In the current cycle, IPOs are more rare than in previous cycles (partly because FAANG are acquiring more companies and partly because companies are waiting longer to IPO) so having more cash on hand gives the company that much more runway.
- acconrad 8y ago
  Did you mean private? So even if they are a market leader, give them more cash? I get why Uber does it because they have serious commoditized competition with Lyft, but Slack does not seem to have even a close 2nd place.
paxy 8y ago
> In previous rounds, Slack’s CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield has said that the company raises “opportunistically.” That is, it doesn’t have to raise money because it’s already making money and still has some in the bank, but as long as VCs are knocking, it’s worth taking the funding if it’s coming in at good valuations because you never know what might lie ahead.

EpiphanyMachine 8y ago

I wish they never bought screenhero and effectively killed it. The version of it in the slack app is less featured and significantly less preformant.

QML 8y ago

I've been having trouble coming up with an analogy until now: my main gripe with Slack is that it brings over the concept of open office from meatspace onto digital space. I don't think I'm the only one with this sentiment; it's harder to concentrate on work when notifications go off; even if its not pertinent to me, I feel an urge to stay in the loop on things.