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Oh Symphony was nothing like Slack. It was meant to be the Bloomberg IB killer[1]. You see, banks weren't happy paying 20k per user for chat. Turns out that the
by fargo 8y ago
Oh Symphony was nothing like Slack. It was meant to be the Bloomberg IB killer[1]. You see, banks weren't happy paying 20k per user for chat. Turns out that the network effect is a thing and banks suck at building products, all Bloomberg had to do was sell Chat as a product and that was it [2].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/16/symphony-a-messaging-app-backed-by-wall-st-gets-63m-at-a-1b-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/16/symphony-a-messaging-app-b...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83c97 https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83...
- goatherders 8y agoI sold hosting to symphony in their earliest days. Before they disclosed who they were they said "money is no object" which is a common thing heard when quoting hosting. When I learned they were backed by GS I laughed...money literally was no object.
- Jd 8y agoPoint of symphony was the privacy focus. If you are a bank you could imagine the issue with have all your data in Slack or a Bloomberg chat DB.
- fargo 8y agoI don't think that the security of Bloomberg and Slack are even comparable. The nature of chat in finance requires messages to be stored by a third party by definition since most of the communications occur in group chats and between banks/traders.