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An application that lets you chat to other people from your computer is valued at a quarter of a company that puts stuff into space. (Yes, I appreciate it's no

• hippich 8y ago
  So the question is - is it slack overpriced, or company you mentioned is underpriced?
• duderific 8y ago
  I personally don't get a lot of productivity gain from putting stuff into space. I do, using Slack, and I suspect a lot of other people do as well.
  • dingaling 8y ago
    You get immense prodictivity benefits from putting stuff into space. You just don't personally notice unless it breaks. Did you check today's weather forecast specific to your location? Compared to what the 2,000 active satellites enable, Slack is just chatter.
    • bad_user 8y ago
      Also see this page on Wikipedia documenting some of NASA’s inventions that have benefited us: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
    • buboard 8y ago
      ULA does that, not spacex and spacex doesnt plan on going public and technically it's russian engines that launch them in any case company valuation is not based on aspirations
      • deleted 8y ago
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      • stanleydrew 8y ago
        > in any case company valuation is not based on aspirations It kind of is though. Valuation is based on future discounted cash flow. Aspirations inform how much future cash flow a company can generate.
        • buboard 8y ago
          but are satellite launches a growing market? there is only so much space up there. Mars is a different beast, but that's quite a few decades ahead before it starts bringing "cash flow"
          • TaylorAlexander 8y ago
            I’m not sure if you’ve checked recently, but there’s a lot of space up there.
            • shaklee3 8y ago
              Not really. Geosynchronous orbital slots are filling up very quickly. They tend to space them about 2 degrees apart due to interference.
          • bagels 8y ago
            Yes, they are. Multiple constellations with thousands of satellites each are planned.
      • mikeash 8y ago
        That just reinforces the point; ULA is worth even less.
    • megy 8y ago
      Or use GPS?
    • jayd16 8y ago
      >Did you check today's weather forecast specific to your location? No but I used Slack today.
      • ehnto 8y ago
        His example was just one of many problems solved by putting stuff in space. The modern world would have a very hard time operating at the current scale of humanity without sats. Flight ops, shipping ops, transit navigation and routing for the stuff that you buy, general communication links you probably don't even know you're using when you are using them. Slack is obviously very useful, but it's also trivially replaced. The ability to put stuff in space is not easily replaced. Conquering the inherit business risk of space operations and engineering when others won't is part the value of space companies. Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware.
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  • Barrin92 8y ago
    >I personally don't get a lot of productivity gain from putting stuff into space You don't use phones, digital maps, or are glad that your national defense is up and running?
    • duderific 8y ago
      Of course, but that productivity is "baked into the cake" at this point. How much incremental productivity is gained by the new things being put into space now?
      • gpm 8y ago
        Edit: Just 1 GPS satellite, I misread. Satellites don't last forever. SpaceX launched 10 gps sattelites in 2018... (or more, not sure, that's just one launch) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_Block_IIIA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_Block_IIIA
        • njarboe 8y ago
          I believe SpaceX has launched one next generation GPS satellite so far (Dec, 2018). They are big and take up the full payload of a Falcon 9. So heavy, in fact, that SpaceX has to launch them in disposable mode. It is the Iridium satellites are the ones that SpaceX launches 10 at a time.
          • gpm 8y ago
            You're right. Put an edit at the start of my post making it clear I misread. Thanks!
      • jackfraser 8y ago
        Something tells me that it's possible these devices will need to be replaced or upgraded at some point
  • welly 8y ago
    Yes you do. You apparently just don't know it.
  • jointhefuture 8y ago
    I use slack to you know, slack off. My productivity has never been as low since slack was added as a constant distraction
    • duderific 8y ago
      It's possible you only notice the productivity loss, but the gains are so seamless (sharing a screenshot, a chat that removes the need for a meeting etc.) that they aren't as noticeable. You can always quit out of the program for a while if you need to really focus, I do that often.
  • b3b0p 8y ago
    From what I see and experience, Slack has a negative impact on productivity the way most companies and employees end up using it. People get easily distracted, context switch, create random non-work related chats (music, video games, movies, etc.), and constantly check it like a bad habit. I guess I'm old, moldy and miss the productivity and work ethic before the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, and Slack were excessively popular and overly accessible.
• jobigoud 8y ago
  The company that put stuff into space probably needs its people to chat to each other from their computers in order to operate.
• ghobs91 8y ago
  Company valuation isn't based on the complexity of the product, it's based on potential/future earnings. Sure, valuations aren't an exact science, but the fact of the matter is the market has decided at the moment that Slack in its current state has more earning potential than SpaceX.
  • bad_user 8y ago
    And the market is of course irrational and wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve got nothing against Slack, but they are just another Snapchat. They provide a useful service, don’t get me wrong, but suffers from the same disease as many other software companies that grew via venture investment.
    • the_reformation 8y ago
      Please name one similarity between Slack and Snapchat. The market is more often correct about future earnings over any meaningful window than any individual on Hacker News.
      • magicalhippo 8y ago
        > Please name one similarity between Slack and Snapchat. They're both easily replaceable communication services.
        • xkcd-sucks 8y ago
          Slack is the Oracle of Snapchat, because enterprise lock in is a cornerstone of their business strategy
          • bad_user 8y ago
            Slack does not have vendor lock-in [1], which implies significant cost and thus inability for most customers to switch to alternatives. In case you didn't know, Oracle has lock-in over their customers because their platforms expose proprietary features not delivered by competitors, or because they have certifications demanded by law in certain industries. The cost of switching from Slack to something else is insignificant and there's nothing that Slack can do to prevent competitors from emerging, short of burning cash to acquire them like they did with Hipchat. Slack does not even target the market of Oracle, because big enterprises prefer and even require on-site solutions. I've worked with German companies threatening to fire employees if Skype or Slack were found on company owned computers. Comparing Slack with Oracle is like comparing Snapchat with Microsoft Exchange. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in
• paxys 8y ago
  Funny enough the "company that puts stuff into space" likely pays for Slack as well.
• dgzl 8y ago
  Team chat is highly valuable, and surprisingly difficult to do well.
• nightfly 8y ago
  One has high risk and high capital expenses, the other basically prints money by charging people for web-IRC.
• nostrademons 8y ago
  And at 1/13 the value of a company that gives you cancer (Altria, $92B). Capitalism profits from giving people what they want. There are more people that want to chat with others from their computer than there are folks who want to put stuff into space. There are quite a few more people who want to ruin their health, rasp up their voice, make their clothes & apartment stink, and give themselves cancer than want to chat with others from their computer.
• tomhoward 8y ago
  My brain (a trivial organ that just lets my body parts talk to each other) weighs 5 times as much as my kidneys (organs that filter all the blood in my body and keep the whole thing alive). Ridiculous! (I appreciate that the reality is slightly more nuanced than that.)
  • Jedd 8y ago
    > My brain (a trivial organ that just lets my body parts talk to each other) weighs 5 times as much as my kidneys (organs that filter all the blood in my body and keeps the whole thing alive). > Ridiculous! > (I appreciate that the reality is slightly more nuanced than that.) You are hilarious. Ignore the people that say poor analogies doused in sarcasm make for weak arguments. If you had literally dozens of dozens of paid-for, or hundreds of free, brains at your disposal, any of which could be dropped into place and be fit for the purpose of letting your body bits talk to each other, then that may be a slightly more appropriate analogy. Unless you're implying a chat app is analogous to the renal system? It's not really clear what point you were trying to make.
    • tomhoward 8y ago
      The point is that it's meaningless to compare the valuation (or weight) of two companies (or organs) that serve very important but completely different functions. And as others have pointed out, there are most likely teams working on putting stuff in space who use Slack, and Slack or its employees couldn't function without the services like communications and weather data that satellites provide. So just like vital organs in a human body, one can't really function without the other. But their relative valuation or weight is unrelated to how important one is to the other or to the rest of the world or body. Each company or organ's valuation or weight is entirely determined by what it needs to be to carry out its function. > If you had literally dozens of dozens of paid-for, or hundreds of free, brains at your disposal, any of which could be dropped into place and be fit for the purpose of letting your body bits talk to each other It's a common trope to argue that Slack is easily replaceable by a competitive product or open-source protocol like IRC. When people say things like "any of which could be dropped into place" or "Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware" [1], we're entitled to ask "so why don't they"? The reasons are to do with network effects, cost-of-ownership, security, scalability, easy-of-use, and countless other factors - but all those factors add up to the reason why Slack is valued at its current valuation. But a nature metaphor applies here too: the evolutionary forces of creation and destruction have meant that a player that may only have been slightly fitter than what was there before has become completely dominant, and made it extremely difficult for another player to challenge it. We can all sit back in our chairs and scoff at how easily another player could replace Slack's function in any individual context, but that tells us nothing about just how the alternatives will usurp Slack's present market dominance in reality. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19082841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19082841