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Slack Taps Goldman Sachs to Lead IPO
- pavlov 8y agoFeels like this might be one of those IPOs that end up being fishing expeditions for a higher acquisition price, like happened with Qualtrics last month (bought out by SAP week before the IPO).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aluminussoma 8y agoI doubt it. The founders the company saw Flickr starve to death after its acquisition. Surely they don't want the same to happen to Slack. Side thought: I wonder if Flickr could have become what Instagram is today if not for the acquisition!
- jmathai 8y agoI don't believe Flickr was ever targeting the same audience. There are very few companies which succeeded in the space Flickr was focused on. Smugmug is probably the closest and they wound up buying Flickr from Yahoo!. Turns out there's not much of a monetizable market for professional and hobbyist photographers to have a portfolio-like social photo service. Or no one's found it yet.
- CPLX 8y agoIt’s called Instagram.
- LyndsySimon 8y agoNot even close to the core of Flickr users, especially when they were new and growing.
- lloydde 8y agoIf you read articles by early Instagram team members and users, I think you might be surprised at the overlap in audience and similarities in goals. “When Richardson joined Instagram in February 2012, at age 26, the former art history major was drawn to what was then a fast-growing indie platform for photographers, hipsters and artistic-types who wanted to share interesting or beautiful things they discovered about the world. At that time, Instagram was “a camera that looked out into the world," said one of the company’s first engineers, "versus a camera that was all about myself, my friends, who I’m with.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/technology/2018/11/14/quitting-instagram-shes-one-millions-disillusioned-with-social-media-she-also-helped-create-it/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/technology/2018/11/14...
- wpietri 8y agoFlickr very early on targeted mobile, and pioneered the concept of a photostream. My first smartphone photo upload to them was June 2005. And my use case was basically what I use Instagram for today: to regularly share interesting photos with friends and family. So I strongly believe that if Flickr had kept its founders involved and continued to innovate, it could have been the dominant social photo application today.
- jmathai 8y agoAny company could have pivoted to be Instagram. But Instagram was at the right place at the right time with the right product. Flickr did not have time on their side so it didn't matter if they had the other two.
- wpietri 8y agoWhat I'm saying is that it didn't have to be a pivot. Flickr had the key features and smartphone use cases worked out 5 years before Instagram existed. The only reason there was a gap in the iPhone market for Instagram to fill was that internal warring at Yahoo kept them from launching a good iPhone app. If Flickr has just taken their existing smartphone features and put them in an iPhone app on iPhone launch day, they would have been the dominant social photo sharing app on the iPhone, just at they were on the web.
- jmathai 8y ago"5 years before Instagram existed" ... right place, right product, wrong time.
- philwelch 8y agoChat apps (even "enterprise" chat apps) are commodities. Here today, gone tomorrow. The same is going to happen to Slack inevitably; an acquisition (or, really, any financial exit) at least get something for the founders.
- AznHisoka 8y agoThere are high switching costs. Once everyone in your 1000+ company is using it, its hard to get them all to switch to another chat product. You got saved conversations, workflows, integrations, etc.
- grogenaut 8y agoI recently audited our developer integration with slack, it's about 15-20 hooks. We estimated it would take us a few dev weeks max to replace them. The bigger cost is people's preference for a familiar tool and the gnashing of teeth. It's actually their nice webhook design and apis that make it easy to move. And no if you're reading this and know who I am we aren't considering replacing it, chillaxe.
- user5994461 8y agoThere is no switching costs involved. I am in one of the big corporation who's gone through 5 different chat clients. It could decide overnight that one of them must die and it wouldn't matter. It's one of the lowest switching costs. A few weeks lost to redo the integrations that really matter. That's about it. Zero benefit in the end, they're all a basic chat with some fanciness of top. It's just time wasted for all the users who hates change and have to learn a new tool for no benefit.
- pmart123 8y agoDo you think Slack or Github has higher switching costs?
- user5994461 8y ago
- statictype 8y ago>Slack is competing against the likes of Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O) Teams, Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google Hangouts Chat and Cisco Systems Inc’s (CSCO.O) Webex Teams in the so-called workplace collaboration market How is Webex competing with Slack? Slack is for chat-based collaboration with people in your workplace. Webex is for scheduling video calls. Is there some overlapping use-case of either one that I'm missing?
- warent 8y agoSlack supports video calling now. My guess is that's what they're referring to.
- marketgod 8y agoSee Webex Teams. https://www.webex.com/products/teams/index.html https://www.webex.com/products/teams/index.html
- spoondan 8y agoWebex Teams includes what used to be called Cisco Spark. Spark is a Slack clone.
- sjg007 8y agoGoogle should buy them.
- aphextron 8y agoOr Microsoft. With that, GitHub, and VSCode, Microsoft will have effectively subsumed the entire average developer workflow again.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sjg007 8y agoYep. And then someone will start slack/irc 2.0
- ekianjo 8y agoNot entirely related but IRC spec 3 is in the works. it seems to be taking a long time.
- eldain 8y agoThe recent Spectrum acquisition may eventually serve a similar purpose: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18570598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18570598
- Keyframe 8y agoTeams is actually not bad at all (sans linux/skype annoyance), but yeah.
- ekianjo 8y agoTeams is super slow. Searching for past messages takes forever. Keyboard shortcuts are awkward... the list could go on. I cant say it compares well to Slack.
- 8y ago
- tootie 8y agoFun fact, Goldman built a Slack-like chat service in house that they've spun off into a company called Symphony. It's pitch is that it's more compliance-friendly for heavily regulated orgs like banks. Also, it sucks.
- jchw 8y agoThe funny thing about the whole compliance thing is, a lot of traders were using AOL Instant Messenger before it shut down, to the point where I believe Bloomberg Terminal even integrated AIM. Some traders ended up moving to Discord, which is nearly as strange.
- simonbyrne 8y agoWhat is kind of funny was that it varied by markets: Yahoo Messenger was big in commodities markets, especially oil.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Rebelgecko 8y agoI think if Discord ditched some of the gamer aesthetic (or had a pseudo-internationalizion setting to replace the meme-y loading screens strings with a reminder to turn in my TPS report by Friday) they'd get a lot more use in corporate environments
- dvtrn 8y agoThat's not their market though, and they seem to be quite fine with that. Their latest feature: buy games through the Discord client[0]. They know who they want using their product. [0] https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012656092-The-Discord-Store-and-Nitro-Games https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001265609...
- meddlepal 8y ago
- empath75 8y agoMaybe after he becomes a billionaire, Stewart can finally retire and actually release a game.
- RyanShook 8y agoI’ve heard a lot of people talking about MS Teams. Is it as easy to use as Slack?
- hobs 8y agoEvery msft employee I know weeps over it.
- Uehreka 8y agoMy team at my job is pushing Teams over Slack (which the rest of my dept uses). As someone who has to use both, I find Slack to be wayyyy more useful. Teams treats each message as if it is a “post” that is meant to be “commented” on and is extremely oriented around thread-based communication. Each “top-level” message gets borders and huge margins and padding in the UI. As a result, you can see fewer messages on the screen at a time. By contrast, Slack has the feature of threads, but defaults to being focused on the general flow of conversation, with more messages on the screen at a time. Some people probably like the thread-based communication model Teams uses. I do not count myself among them.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoI guess Yammer became in some form Teams.
- austhrow743 8y agoCompany swapped over a couple weeks ago. It doesn't seem to do well with images that only exist on the clipboard being pasted over. Which made for a lot of my previous slack use. Now my desktop is littered with image i never cared to save in the first place. Scrolling message history is a pain. Jittery, seems to be loading a total of like 5 messages at a time so it keeps needing to pause to load. Sometimes it'll just go all white for a couple seconds There was something I didn't like about copy pasting text in it that I can't remember right now.
- awakeasleep 8y agoMS Teams is a beautiful, ambitious idea executed with the attention to detail and technical competence you'd expect from a bargain, outsourced dev sweatshop where the project managers aren't fluent in the same language as the people who hired them.
- eikenberry 8y agoWhat does Slack need to raise capital for? They have their niche and are doing great in it, I don't get why they'd want to be publicly owned with all the headaches that brings. I don't get why a lot of companies do it when they could just as well bootstrap and stay private.
- saurik 8y agoLiquidity for people with stock options?
- wjossey 8y agoI don't know anything about their shareholder distribution at this point, so this is all conjecture. Since they took capital, the funds associated with their prior fundraising rounds ($1.2B total) likely have 10 year horizons. Investors are looking to recoup their investment during that window. Having the company stay private means that they either need to raise a new round to buy out their old investors, or they need to return sufficient profit over a short window (just a few years) that their investors are happy with the dividend. Not to mention, there are tons of advantages in having access to the public markets. It's definitely a headache and work, but it's not without its benefits.
- gowld 8y agoSometimes asset owners want to sell the asset and buy something else. There's not much point in investing if you never can take money off the table and spend it.
- maxerickson 8y agoThey already took VC money, going public follows from that, it isn't a decision the founders are really making for themselves.
- mooreds 8y agoHere is a VCs thought on going public, for what it is worth: https://avc.com/2016/11/going-public/ https://avc.com/2016/11/going-public/ My guess is * liquidity for employees and investors * access to even greater amounts of capital * access to capital that might not be as fickle as private investors
- freedomben 8y agoI worry this will lead to a further reduction in privacy for average users, as Slack is pushed toward "enterprise" features which are basically just giving your boss the ability to read all your private messages. That said, I think it's naive and foolish to have an expectation of privacy on your work slack. Should you have privacy? Yes, absolutely. Do I expect it? No, not at all.
- kevindong 8y agoWhy should an employer not be able to read messages that employees send to one another for the purpose of doing their job?
- dawnerd 8y agoWell if its called a private chat... It's kind of expected that it'd be private.
- BurritoAlPastor 8y agoSlack actually uses the term “Direct Message”, so there’s no textual expectation of privacy.
- freedomben 8y agoPerfectly fair question. I view it much like having a conversation in the hallway or by the watercooler. It would be creepy and weird, and unexpected, to have microphones and cameras all over the office so the boss can record your conversations and eavesdrop whenever they like. It also screams micro-management if the boss needs to drop in, even if you are just using it "for the purpose of doing [your] job." I tend to feel that if you trust your employees so little, then you should just fire them. Conversely if my employer trusted me so little, I should probably quit. Where I would probably make an exception would be if one of the employees filed an HR complaint or something, then I think looking at the existing record would be fine. But, it should be limited in scope to that incident.
- 8y ago
- acchow 8y agoSlack feels so lacking compared to Facebook's Workplace.
- mtanski 8y agoExcept for the fact that very few large companies are willing to give Facebook their data. That is any kind of data besides their social ad campaigns.
- dbbk 8y agoReally? I'm interested in Facebook Workplace but it seems to be just Facebook groups + Messenger. Slack appears a lot more robust than Messenger.