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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

• mamon 7y ago
  Venture capitalists are cashing their investments by IPOs - sure sign that the next financial crisis is starting soon :) Dotcom Bubble 2.0 is ready to burst. EDIT: I do not imply that venture capitalists poses some insider knowledge. It is not necessary. It's just the fact that when bullshit companies with bullshit product, that generate losses instead of profit get valued at $16B (other recent examples include Lyft and Uber) it means that economy is in crazy state, and it does not take much to induce panic. My guess is one of these unicorns will fill for bankruptcy soon, thus pushing the market over the edge.
  • sambroner 7y ago
    I keep hearing this take! Yet, I have no real evidence that points me to its truth. The thinking seems to be predicated on VCs having inside knowledge or excellent speculative skills. That might be true, but presumably they're not the only strong speculators. Are we seeing other major players move out of tech? We're certainly not seeing massive liquidation in general.
  • hanniabu 7y ago
    I'd wager it's because they're peaking so best to dump the stock on the market before it goes downhill
  • jjeaff 7y ago
    This is the m.o. for most VCs all the time. Doesn't seem to indicate a market peak It does, however indicate that the VCs think that the company in question has peaked. Unless the argument could be made that somehow, going public is going to really boost Slack's business going forward and was the only way to do so.
• thallavajhula 7y ago
  For those curious, their symbol is $WORK
  • partingshots 7y ago
    Stealing WeWork’s thunder... A smart move, though perhaps a little painful for all the existing plans the WeWork marketing department had.
    • zild3d 7y ago
      WeWork is rebranding as "The We Company", so the word WORK is probably not their #1 choice https://www.fastcompany.com/90289512/exclusive-wework-to-rebrand-to-the-we-company-in-wake-of-disappointing-funding-news https://www.fastcompany.com/90289512/exclusive-wework-to-reb...
      • partingshots 7y ago
        Probably after they found out Slack was going to snag $WORK from them.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • lallysingh 7y ago
        That's terrible.
• durdleturtle 7y ago
  I love the software, though this kind of feels like the Dot Com bubble all over again.
  • acchow 7y ago
    Companies didn't even have revenues back then.
  • patio11 7y ago
    I would encourage people to read the Pets.com 10-Q to understand what the dot com bubble was like from a corporate finance perspective, because there are deeper lessons than "Some companies with substantial Internet operations IPOed." https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100683/000089161800004394/e10-q.txt https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100683/000089161800... Pets.com paid $10.5M for pet food then sold it for $8.7M, while needing $23M to keep the lights on that quarter. Compare to https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/ https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/ : Slack, unsurprisingly because it sells software, has positive gross margins rather than negative gross margins; they're healthy at ~80%. They appear to be able to turn $1 of sales and marketing spend in Year 1 into > $1 of software revenue in year 2. Their churn rate on a dollar basis is 43%. Excuse me, -43%; a cohort of SaaS customers paying $100M in year 1 will pay $143M in year 2 due to growth in number of seats more than offsetting churning accounts. There is no price at which a rational person should want to own Pets.com. There is, very clearly, a price at which a rational person should want to own Slack.
    • tantalor 7y ago
      > a price at which a rational person... This price is not that.
  • paxys 7y ago
    I don't think people who say this were even around at the time of the dotcom bubble. There were public companies adding "tech" to their names and seeing their values rise 10x in a day. THAT was a bubble.
• Roritharr 7y ago
  Well deserved. Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.
  • mehrdadn 7y ago
    I don't know about "well deserved". They did it by holding people's data hostage. It's one thing to make your messages unsearchable or otherwise available in the UI until your pay, but holding your data completely hostage until you pay up isn't exactly a noble way to go about things. Even Facebook isn't this obnoxious about getting you a copy of your message history.
    • colechristensen 7y ago
      Free is there to be a sales demo without deadlines with a casual shrug for people who aren't going to pay, I wouldn't ever use slack if it wasn't my intention to play and slack wouldn't miss me. Choose your customers.
      • mehrdadn 7y ago
        I never used Slack out of choice either. I've used it because I was forced to due to others' decisions. So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.
        • igbrdjk 7y ago
          > So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over. I wrote a simple exporter using Slack api. It archives Slack from position of user, almost everything (like attachments). But I'm not publishing it on GitHub because I don't want more people to use it, and don't want Slack to block mass api calls, and don't want slacks admins to know I written it and use it.
          • 7y ago
• AznHisoka 7y ago
  Is 16B really too high of a valuation when Atlassian is double the market cap at 32B? Both have similar products (collaboration/productivity) and are extremely sticky.
  • logariya 7y ago
    Slack has a broader userbase inside enterprises.
    • spenczar5 7y ago
      Do you have a citation on that? My experience is the other way around.
  • statictype 7y ago
    Atlassian was already profitable weren’t they? There’s a disclaimer these unicorns put in their S1s - “we are not profitable and may never be” - Atlassian probably didn’t have to do that. That should count for something right?
    • segmondy 7y ago
      That disclaimer is as old as dirt. I saw a company that sent public in 1960 had the same. Won't be surprised if Atlassian had the same.
      • jhammons 7y ago
        Atlassian was profitable for well over a decade before the IPO.
      • burlesona 7y ago
        Atlassian is profitable and has been from the beginning. It was bootstrapped.
      • segmondy 7y ago
        I'm getting downvoted, but here it is directly from This is from Atlassian s1 filing, this is standard disclaimer. "We may not be able to sustain our revenue growth rate or maintain profitability in the future." https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015001685/filename1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015...
• wayoutthere 7y ago
  I agree they’re a great product org, but not sure I agree they’re a $16B company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I’m not sold on their long term viability. It’s just too easy for new IM platforms to take root inside a company once the old one gets too noisy. Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product before something shinier comes along.
  • Roritharr 7y ago
    Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded. They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.
    • hackerbabz 7y ago
      Well they might as well acquire Flickr.
      • hug 7y ago
        Flickr were acquired by SmugMug around a year ago, now.
    • caust1c 7y ago
      Their moat is sticky? They were simply the first company to do hosted chat well enough that it didn't constantly piss people off. I wouldn't call that a sticky moat.
      • rtkwe 7y ago
        Wouldn't the Slack bot integration provide a better moat. If they can get orgs using a lot of bots for CI reporting, etc switching gets more difficult at least. Not sure how many teams get that tightly integrated with bots though.
• theturtletalks 7y ago
  Their valuation stems from MAUs and majority are on the generous free tier. Do investors really think they can monetize the free users?
  • zild3d 7y ago
    2018 revenue was $400 million, ~doubled the previous year - Slack isn't a company with just a ton of free users and no monetization
    • fastball 7y ago
      40x still seems like an insane multiple.
      • rayiner 7y ago
        Assuming they have a margin of 50%, their EBITDA multiple is 80. For comparison, Facebook had an EBITDA multiple of ~50 at IPO time.
        • umeshunni 7y ago
          Slack isn't a consumer company, they are an SaaS enterprise company. Most SaaS enterprise companies trade at far lower multiples. A decent comp for Slack would be Dropbox, which has $1.4B and rough valuation of ~$10B
      • randomsearch 7y ago
        It is overvalued, but then so are a lot of tech companies. I think Slack is a good app, one of the tech startups of true value from this boom cycle, but it’s overvalued. When the likely market adjustment happens, it’ll get a haircut, but it will deservedly survive and prosper.
      • efficax 7y ago
        It's a great time to IPO
    • 7y ago
• baybal2 7y ago
  It makes no sense for me. It's just a web frontend on top of an irc chat. $16B for that is a complete insanity. This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales
  • jensvdh 7y ago
    What a complete nonsensical comment. Is Facebook just a frontend on top of a user DB?
    • tantalor 7y ago
      Nailed it
      • Spivak 7y ago
        Is MySQL just a frontend on a filesystem?
        • colechristensen 7y ago
          Remove the pejorative 'just' and the answer is an obvious uncontroversial yes. MySQL is a nicer alternative to managing really big CSV flat files on a filesystem. Facebook is an RSS, address book, message share. Etc.
          • sgustard 7y ago
            Airplanes are just hollowed out birds, and so on.
          • paxys 7y ago
            Sure but if you keep following that analogy then nothing is worth anything
• ddlutz 7y ago
  So they are worth $1,600 per user? I don't understand how that is possible at all.
  • asdfman123 7y ago
    I do post a lot of gifs on slack.
    • dillonmckay 7y ago
      We had /giphy banned b/c of inappropriate use.
  • johannes1234321 7y ago
    It's not about current user, but potential user growth.
    • flukus 7y ago
      Assuming they grow their user base to be 100 times larger than the current 10 million, are they worth $16 per user?
      • seizethecheese 7y ago
        Way more than that. They charge $7-12 per month.
        • bilbo0s 7y ago
          And they lose money on that.
          • zeroimpl 7y ago
            R&D expenses will presumably not grow at the same rate
        • deleted 7y ago
• keyle 7y ago
  I wish them all the best. But I do hope they stay small in spirit and nimble. One of my favourite things about slack is /feedback and the fact that someone will get back to me within 24hrs. There is no product of this scale that has such a low barrier to feedback/questions/bug report.
  • city41 7y ago
    Except in my experience they don't actually fix the bugs. For literally years the Slack app would get into a zombie state if your network changed in any way: switched WAPs, got on/off the VPN, switch from wifi to ethernet, etc. The app would still think it had a network connection but it actually didn't. The only way to fix it was with a hard refresh. To this day I still reflexively do a ctrl-r whenever my network changes. Because after reporting this bug to them over and over and over I got fed up and just moved on. I honestly have no idea if the bug has actually been fixed, ctrl-r has just become complete muscle memory for me now.
    • keyle 7y ago
      Interesting, I'm on MacOS and in a similar environment (switching vlans etc.) and the socket just reconnects fine both on the web version and the 'app'.
      • city41 7y ago
        It’s possibly fixed now. I first encountered this in 2016. Many coworkers complained of it and Slack always acknowledged it was an issue they were looking into whenever I reported it.
• leshokunin 7y ago
  Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free. I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert have already been converted. I expect CAC to go up and payer conversion to stagnate at best. I don't see how they can 2-3x their revenue this year (unless there are drastic, risky changes). In addition, the slow iterations on the mobile and desktop clients, and the meteoric rise of Discord are enough cause for concern. I don't see how this investment would have legs.
  • fpvracing 7y ago
    How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on? I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.
    • dleslie 7y ago
      Discord has far superior voice chat with groups. Discord has better options for channel control. Slack has better integrations with software development tools
      • fpvracing 7y ago
        For my purposes, voice chat is not a useful feature. I want our team's communications to be in text form so that we can communicate asynchronously, people don't have to be online at the same time and it's easy to read back through what has been said previously. I'm communicating with people all around the world, a very different use case to a team all working in the same office or time zone.
• rdiddly 7y ago
  Aha! If you were wondering "What's Slack useful for?" this is the answer.
• not_a_moth 7y ago
  The obligatory "but they have massive losses", > For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, the company reported losses of $138.9 million on revenue of $400.6 million. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million the year prior. [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/slack-first-quarter-financials/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/slack-first-quarter-financ... I don't understand valuations.
  • askafriend 7y ago
    I’d say you don’t understand how revenue growth at scale works. That’s the thing being valued. Doubling revenue without increasing losses is a great sign.
  • fiblye 7y ago
    My question is where the hell is that money going? That money is all the cash flow in some entire minor industries. It’s the GDP of some minor lower/mid-economy nations’ cities. Their losses are equal to half the entire GDP of Palau. Maybe I’m detached. But I don’t understand the cash flow in chat apps today. It’s absolutely bizarre amounts of money for something that can and will easily be replaced in a few years, as always happens.
    • pm90 7y ago
      Why is it so bizzare? Do you think that Palau has enough people engaged in producing goods or services that deserve more than their current GDP? I think comparing the valuations of a US company HQ'd in one of the most expensive cities in the world, that has created a tool that is used by nearly all organizations around the world for communication is well worth the crazy valuation.
      • fiblye 7y ago
        I’m not talking about their supposed $16b value. I’m wondering where the money they’re actually spending is going. They’ve lost nearly $150 million in a year. How? What does that money even go to? Even paying their devs incredibly generous wages and benefits, server costs, advertising, deals with businesses, etc, I can’t imagine the losses being that big. It’s insane amounts of money to burn through.
• 6cd6beb 7y ago
  Is this another one of those companies whose S1 says "We're not profitable and may never be"? Why is that the right time to go public? Once the company has an obligation to move towards profitability, doesn't that expose its investors to the risk of another startup subsidizing the same product or service with VC money, undercutting the new established brand? Like if slack wants to become profitable they probably need to push more people to the paid version of the app, but then won't another company just make a clone and convert some VC cash into a runway with which to poach slack's userbase, and eventually file an S1 saying "we're not profitable and may never be"? I'm struggling to understand why this keeps working, because no one seems to have a problem with it at all.
  • kortilla 7y ago
    Has it occurred to you that some companies do become profitable?
  • zknz 7y ago
    Teams bundling will hold back wider adoption by the large co's who use office365. How will the userbase continue to grow?
• debatem1 7y ago
  There is no way Slack is worth $16 billion dollars. That's over 40x current revenue for a company that lost almost $400,000 a day last year.
  • lallysingh 7y ago
    Dude, when you see the valuations of other unicorns you're gonna be soo pissed...
    • debatem1 7y ago
      Well, you aren't wrong. But I think there are unicorns that are good investments, particularly cloudflare and juul. There are other unicorns I view as highly speculative but potentially viable. But slack? No way. Not at this valuation. If it ever makes this much money, let alone this much profit, I'll eat a hat.
• r32a_ 7y ago
  Slack can eat into Zoom very easily. Massive room for growth
  • chime 7y ago
    Zoom works perfectly every single time. I've managed to make Slack's audio call feature work only rarely. I wish Slack had decent shared whiteboard, screenshare, and audio/video conferencing but that is a hard problem and they are currently not able to deliver. Zoom does flawlessly.
• granshaw 7y ago
  The thing that really struck me about Slack was its level of polish, esp compared to other software around the time of its release. The overall level of polish on similar apps has risen since then so that’s less of a differentiator, but I still refer to Slack as a great example of polish and consistency in product, with mostly great UX as well
• stevehiehn 7y ago
  Crazy, sometimes I picture the creators of HipChat laying in bed staring the ceiling mumbling: 'but, but, we did thi..'
  • hombre_fatal 7y ago
    We tried HipChat for a whole day before bouncing. It was so bad. Had hilariously poor UX, using commands like \code to get a single line of monospaced text, iirc.
    • Apocryphon 7y ago
      Weirdly enough, I had heard that HipChat used to scale better than Slack. Supposedly Uber used to use the former rather than the latter because once an org hit a certain threshold in thousands of users, Slack was no good. This was years ago, however.
      • bastawhiz 7y ago
        Uber did use HipChat instead of Slack, but mostly because Slack was uninterested in standing up servers for Uber. My understanding is that Slack basically ran a single server instance for each Slack team. Atlassian bent over backwards for Uber, but just enough to make it functional. It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone. Uber eventually replaced it with a (forked) Mattermost cluster.
        • lallysingh 7y ago
          " It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone." That was my hipchat experience a few months ago. Thankfully I don't have to use it anymore
• dstaley 7y ago
  It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got Twitter!), but Microsoft is investing in React Native for Windows which could prove really interesting. Hopefully Microsoft doesn't settle for just making Electron better.
  • kareemm 7y ago
    Maybe the lesson is that a decent solution to a painful problem and great sales and marketing are a good recipe for success.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • toomuchtodo 7y ago
      It is a recipe for market share. Profitability and a realistic valuation is yet to be seen.
      • nwienert 7y ago
        But I don't see anyone claiming a native app is the difference to profitability.
        • omeid2 7y ago
          I don't think they do, most "office worker" computer resources are way over provisioned, at least in the developed countries. Does resource consumption matters to me? yes, but that is because I compile stuff, run VMs, do simulations, like many other developers. My grandma or dad at his office? they could do just fine with 1/10th of their resources. This is not an argument for wastefulness, but the reality of business world and the value of computing resources.
• CriticalCathed 7y ago
  That's incredibly overvalued for a glorified chat client.
• scarface74 7y ago
  They will be “successful” once they become profitable. Until then, they still haven’t proven that they have a business model where they can charge customers enough to cover expenses.
  • markmark 7y ago
    They could be profitable tomorrow by decreasing their advertising spend. Their current customers are absolutely profitable, they're just choosing to use some of that money investors are throwing at them to keep growing.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      You’re making the assumption that they have no churn and that they don’t need to acquire new customers.
• duxup 7y ago
  >net loss of nearly $139 million Even that seems like a lot to spend, and that is just the loss... I wonder where the money goes. Granted it is a big impressive product but still it would be interesting to track expenses for a company as they approach unicorn status.
  • trimbo 7y ago
    > I wonder where the money goes. Cost of Revenue: $51M R&D: $157M Sales & Marketing: $233M General & Administrative: $112M [Source: their S-1]
• dillonmckay 7y ago
  I miss Screenhero. That was an amazing implementation of an application.
  • fisherjeff 7y ago
    And now they’re dropping its functionality from Slack! Would LOVE for someone to buy Screenhero back from Slack and bring it back to life. Truly a shame as it is.
    • jsherwani 7y ago
      I’m working on it! :)
      • JofArnold 7y ago
        That’s good to hear. Good luck! The world needs ScreenHero!
      • fisherjeff 7y ago
        Okay, you’ve officially made my day.
  • jsherwani 7y ago
    Screenhero cofounder/CEO here. I’m working on a successor to Screenhero as we speak! Sign up for the beta here: https://scrn.app https://scrn.app
• lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  > Forrester analyst Michael Facemire says it's hard for people to understand why the platform is more useful than other chat applications without trying it for themselves. It isn't. I know Slack probably needs to justify its valuation in front of some people, but Slack is not different from Facebook and Instagram in this regard: They offer nothing unique or technologically superior. The whole point of their business is hoarding users to the point that it's the "default" app in their given context. I'm not saying it's bad. If they didn't do it, someone else would have done it anyway.
  • luckylion 7y ago
    Eh, maybe I'm in the minority here, but I've been forced to work on MS teams for a project and it's atrocious compared to Slack. Not to mention the lack of a client for linux, their web app doesn't work in chromium for no reason (it does in chrome), and the UX is just shit. Slack just works and their UI/UX is on point, everything is intuitive. Their client is slow and eats RAM, but I totally see that it's more useful than other chat applications.
    • rightbyte 7y ago
      MS Teams works well enought for me at work. All I want is having a chat window with the old messages on top to be able to send copy pasted variable names and chat abit. Skype for Business doesn't save the conversation and is useless (it mails it to you ...), for example.
• quickthrower2 7y ago
  Well done! :aussie_conga_parrot:
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• sureaboutthis 7y ago
  I hear people mention Slack once in a while on various forums but I have no clue what it is. I do not know anyone who uses it so it's not something I, or anyone I know, feels a need for--otherwise we would be searching it out. And therein lies a problem. $16B for something few people need or want? I guess I have to look up Slack and see what it is. EDIT: So I looked it up and it looks like something useful for a lot of remote workers that need constant, instant contact with people working on the same stuff at the same time. To me that's a pretty niche market. If I thought the phone or email wasn't good enough, I might pay $5/month for such a service. But irc works pretty good still today. IRC isn't worth $16B
  • Kudos 7y ago
    There's a venn diagram with an intersection of people who use Hacker News and people who don't know what Slack is, and it's literally just you. It's bizarre to me that you feel the need to share your opinion on the valuation of something you knew nothing about a half an hour ago. That said, $16B seems to be about 4x more than I would have expected.
    • sureaboutthis 7y ago
      That I've been deeply involved in the design and implementation of both hardware and software for 40 years and know nothing about it, and don't know anyone in the industry who does either, is a comment on the $16B evaluation. Companies thrive on the needs and wants of people which is why Coke and Google and Microsoft stock prices are so high and maintain those levels. I don't find want and need for Slack among anyone I know. A small space but the same people have heard of and use Coke, Microsoft and Google.
      • mbloomfield 7y ago
        On the contrary, I literally don't know anyone who doesn't know what Slack is. I'm not sure if it's a generational gap, corporate gap, or what, but I've used it at multiple organizations both in and out of tech.
      • 7y ago
• lern_too_spel 7y ago
  This valuation depends on the continued incompetence of Google and Microsoft, who both offer Slack competitors as part of their productivity packages that most of Slack's paying customers already subscribe to. Their offerings are so bad that people pay money to Slack not to use them.
  • gtfratteus 7y ago
    I use Hangouts every day at work. It's works fine. I have no complaints. What could Slack possibly be doing to make it worth paying extra to use it? Seems like the bureaucracy of most companies just hasn't caught up to the fact that Slack isn't really necessary.
  • pgm8705 7y ago
    This has been my experience. Every few months or so we sign in to Google Hangouts Chat in hopes it has made some progress so we can stop paying for Slack, but it is always a disappointment.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• starchild_3001 7y ago
  Slack is a great product (vs email or public chat alternatives). I wish them the best expanding their user base. Are they worth 16B? None of the armchair investors here know their financials (addressable market size, user growth rate, expected ARPU etc). Until a careful analysis done, I would caution you against coming to a quick conclusion.
  • barefootcoder 7y ago
    Why do you say that it's good vs email? In my mind they're for different purposes. Slack for urgent matters, email for asynchronous communication that isn't quite as urgent. Email is also better for things that the recipient may want to refer back to in the future. Regardless, I wish that my co-workers would stop sending a message only saying "hi, name" and then waiting for me to stop working to respond before they type their actual question. "not only am I going to interrupt you, but I'm going to make you acknowledge the interruption before making you wait while I SLOWLY type the actual incomplete question". <Grumble, grumble, I hate when people misuse Slack>
• tjpnz 7y ago
  Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.
  • jingalings 7y ago
    Not specific to Slack (we use MS teams) but the concept of a channel/group/team is great for white noise comms, these types of comms are going to happen (e.g happy birthday) and if it reduces email load (which means the email channel can then be kept for higher priority comms and record keeping especially for later searching), it’s a good thing IMO.
  • dsc_ 7y ago
    Don't forget, it is YOUR choice to have Slack open. Nobody is forcing you to. It might be an unspoken rule to do so, but I value productivity more. In the event someone has something important to say (rarely the case), come up or call me (or PM me on IRC).
    • MPetitt 7y ago
      Anecdotal but most companies I’ve worked with that use Slack, 1. Don’t give devs company phones (and no one should ring my personal cell) 2. Have remote people they communicate with frequently (ask the remote people how slack has included/enabled them more than ever) 3. Only use email for non-urgent, one-way, or external messaging (although bringing high-value 3rd parties into Slack has been great in my experience) No matter your concerns about Slack, once you’re in a company using it you have no choice but to embed yourself completely.
  • count 7y ago
    Yes. Working in a fully distributed team, irc+pictures is great. It's on you to manage your interruptions (it's easy to kill them totally, or to customize what you see). If you just take it all, then yeah, I can see that being a living hell. So like, don't do that.
• jfoster 7y ago
  One aspect of many SaaS companies that I am concerned about is their exposure to economic downturns. Slack charges on a per-user basis, so if their average customer reduces their workforce by 10%, Slack's revenue reduces by 10%.
• ngaut 7y ago
  Mattermost raises $50 million to advance its open source Slack alternative https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/19/mattermost-raises-50-million-to-advance-its-open-source-slack-alternative/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/19/mattermost-raises-50-mill...
  • astrange 7y ago
    Here's another one. http://www.ircd-hybrid.org http://www.ircd-hybrid.org You don't even need a client because you can read https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812 and then use telnet. Just remember to respond to PINGs.
    • pestaa 7y ago
      Is your cynicism targeted at Mattermost? Because I find it to be already better than Slack. Took a few commands to set it up at work on our own server. Convenient, fast, and has the good bits from the Slack UI.
  • ahartmetz 7y ago
    Mattermost is actually open core. Rocket.chat is similar but fully open source.
  • ourcat 7y ago
    Mattermost is a fantastic open source alternative to Slack, nicely integrated with Gitlab. We used Slack on a few projects, but the thought of using a third-party to host corporate development discussion was an absolute no-no in the long run. It's staggering how fast people are to pay for something when there's a cheaper (or free) alternative out there, these days.
    • vageli 7y ago
      > Mattermost is a fantastic open source alternative to Slack, nicely integrated with Gitlab. > We used Slack on a few projects, but the thought of using a third-party to host corporate development discussion was an absolute no-no in the long run. > It's staggering how fast people are to pay for something when there's a cheaper (or free) alternative out there, these days. How can you characterize the price as free? Do engineers at your place of work have so much free time that they can spend it setting this stuff up? What happens when chat goes down? Are you going to invest in becoming experts in running the app? All these are considerations that factor into the total cost of ownership, which oftentimes is far higher than the posted sticker price.
• sandGorgon 7y ago
  It is interesting to remember that slack was built as an outsourced product in its early days.
• farahday 7y ago
  I think you missed this line in your post. >Disclosure: I work/am a shill @ Slack.
  • whenchamenia 7y ago
    Downvoters, how is this not relevant? I value knowing who has a vested interest when talking about efficacy.
    • stochastic_monk 7y ago
      I haven’t voted either way, but do you have a reference for this claim?
      • mamurphy 7y ago
        megaremote seems to be located in Australia and was looking for work in May[1], the claim they work for slack seems to be complete fabrication/wishful thinking/cynicism [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19797592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19797592
• dfischer 7y ago
  Just moved to Workplace by Facebook from Slack. Love it. Async communication via posts is way better than incentivized real-time for everything. edit: lol, this is downvoted? nice.
  • whenchamenia 7y ago
    I am not sure exchanging one walled garden for an even higher walled garden is good practice.
    • dfischer 7y ago
      Everything is a walled garden, if you're that paranoid just pipe everything into your own DB through API capture.
• chx 7y ago
  Slack usability has steadily been decreasing over time. On desktop I am not getting the "unread" grouping but mobile I do. The drafts feature is on both and can't be disabled. Both of them break habits of where my channels are. It is terrible UX. The "threads" feature on the sidebar allows you to reply to a thread but if you get a counterreply you need to click to see it. A better flow can be found if you click the channel name on top of the thread -- there's no indication like a timestamp or anything this jumps you to the thread in the channel -- and then click the thread link in-channel and then answer in the sidebar -- now the conversation flows without further clicks. Do I need to mention how terrible UX this is?
  • mkobit 7y ago
    I agree that the usability has been declining. The threads feature is pretty close to useful, but it still buries information and it isn't clear to other users in a channel when a thread becomes "live" again unless they explicitly follow the thread or make a comment. Both of those actions require excessive clicking on the desktop client (at least for Ubuntu). The most frustrating part for me is that keyboard navigation for threads is nonexistent, and it forces you to weave in and out with your mouse.
• harry8 7y ago
  So given a required rate of return of 5% - $16B is how much you would pay for consistent risk free, net inbound cash flows of $800m per year, in perpetuity. One way of getting that would be 800m users generating profit after expenses of $1 each every year. This is a chat app that is completely and totally replaceable with irc. No really it is. $800m per year in clear profit. Is that really feasible in any way? How? What's the bait and switch here? (With facebrick it was the surveillance nobody knowingly agreed to. Is there something like that here?) Can anyone do a back of the envelope calculation to make this price make sense?
• matchbok 7y ago
  Crazy. I can't stand the software. Experiment for slack fans: Start talking about something in a channel with ~20 people. Then ask a friend to ask another question in the same channel. What happens? A mess. You now have 2 conversations modeled with a single stream of single-line messages, with no context. One someone starts a conversation in a channel every single other user in that channel now has to wait. (or risk being pushed up past the fold, which people never scroll to) Chat just isn't how work gets done. Or how knowledge is transferred and, most importantly, retained.
  • garrett_oh 7y ago
    Isn’t this what threads are for?
    • mamurphy 7y ago
      I've only used discord -- do threads exist on slack? Or is GP right and lack of threads is a major downfall of chat apps, including slack?
      • garrett_oh 7y ago
        Slack does have threads. Everyone at my company is quick to remind those who don’t use them.
        • kbyatnal 7y ago
          Slack threads feel very much like an afterthought though. They never get used at my company (and for good reason).
• fnord77 7y ago
  $16B on $400m of revenue? Is this high or not too bad?
• emtel 7y ago
  Anybody who thinks they know for sure that slack can't possibly be worth $16B should go back and read some threads from around the Facebook IPO (like this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320585). It's very easy to write reasonable sounding things - making accurate predictions about the future is much harder.
  • ngold 7y ago
    So slack sells ads that you can target down to what toothpaste you use and how racist you are? Since that was the last major innovation in stealing user behaviour since google. Also what is their russian state mafia stake in slack? That was a big win for fascists investing.
  • raldi 7y ago
    Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture a guess that Slack is going to do very well for itself, though it may dip and swoon over the next couple years before it reaches that point. An even more applicable comparison is the HN thread about the Dropbox announcement. "What? This is just [IRC|rsync] with gimmicky bells and whistles."
    • drawnwren 7y ago
      I think it's telling that I've seen that Dropbox comment mentioned (and here distorted to the whole thread) probably >100 times yet can't remember the threads it was mentioned in.
      • raldi 7y ago
        I don't understand what you mean about "distorted"
        • saagarjha 7y ago
          Actual comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
• loeg 7y ago
  It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.
  • ganzuul 7y ago
    That just shows how much IRC is worth.
    • jayflux 7y ago
      IRC is just a protocol, it’s a bit like saying Facebook shows how much HTTP is worth.
      • air7 7y ago
        Your comment made me smirk, but on second thought, it actually does!
  • henning 7y ago
    I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can really do anything about it. So, I congratulate them on their success but I, too, am utterly mystified.
    • hayksaakian 7y ago
      I believe hipchat was a paid product, which stunted it's growth compared to Slack. Slack is 'free by default' but converts users to paid.
    • hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
      > I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat Stay up? I was at a company that was on Hipchat, and we really liked it, but the amount of downtime got to be semi-unbearable. We switched to Slack and it had much better uptime.
• huis 7y ago
  To me the succes of Slack also shows how invaluable it is. Companies jumped to it very easily. Everybody just started using it. And the moment something better comes along Slack will be forgotten. I think this is different from Facebook. Company employees come and go so they don't value what they put on Slack very much. And for companies the history on slack is also not very important. Well that's how I see how Slack is being used inside different companies.
  • CoryG89 7y ago
    I don't necessarily think Slack is worth $16B any time soon, but I actually do feel like my searchable Slack history stretching back ~5 years is one of the most valuable resources I have at my fingertips on a dailt basis. The search quickly pulls up stuff from years ago even stuff from before we changed the subdomain for the org.
    • quickthrower2 7y ago
      Yeah it would be wise to get that exported and searchable some other way. Justin case.
    • yardstick 7y ago
      Before Slack, that history might have been contained in email. Which has always been available and goes back decades in my case. Slack worries me in the sense that when it’s gone so is my data, but email I’ve always got my copy.
      • JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
        "Might". There's a lot slack channels that I'm somewhat privy to, but otherwise would be out of the loop on if it were an e-mail. It gives me access to a lot of institutional knowledge in my organization.
  • notatoad 7y ago
    >shows how invaluable Invaluable means very valuable. From the rest of your comment, I'm not sure that's what you meant?
• neumann 7y ago
  Does that mean Zulip is worth $16B? Cos it is awesome and self-hostable if you want it to be.
  • theturtletalks 7y ago
    Rocket.chat and Mattermost are also great open source alternatives. I was surprised I couldn't find an open source plugin for live chat with Slack. Rocket.chat has that built-in and I host it on a VPS.
• nodesocket 7y ago
  Does anybody have any idea how pricing of this will open up compared to an IPO? They are doing a direct offering (DPO), which essentially means no new shares are being allocated and there is no underwriter which typically means the price can be way more volatile on opening day since no underwriters to control and establish pricing. DPO as I understand you are buying shares directly from people who already have them.
• gumby 7y ago
  Maybe now they have some money they can finally afford make video chat work on mobile. We ended up switching to zoom for video chat because it worked on phones as well as computers and handled slow connections (US<->Australia) much better than Slack's electron chat.
  • enonevets 7y ago
    I believe they announced a partnership with Zoom rather than competing against them.
• founderling 7y ago
  I never used Slack. Given a $16B valuation, I wanted to see what it is about. But Slack seems to actively prevent me from using it on Safari on my iPad. It keeps trying to make me install their app. Is there a way to try their web interface it on an iPad?
• HHalvi 7y ago
  I think Slack is a bit undervalued more than over valued. The market is big enough for Slack + Microsoft, Amazon Chime, G Suite and so many other players to coexist. Also Slack to me feels like a good enough messaging apps. P.S: I hate it's knock-knock chime when engrossed in work and the fact that i have to keep the app running to get notifications.
  • efficax 7y ago
    You do know you can change the chime?
• warp_factor 7y ago
  Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history. - They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate. - They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS. - They managed to make a lot of people absolute convinced advocate of Slack so that a lot of hyped startups have now to use Slack de facto or risk mutiny and have people create Slack channels on behalf of the company without any oversight. So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. I'm convinced that we will see Slack retrospectively as something that destroyed productivity. I will agree that Slack can be useful when used correctly but I never saw a place that used it without it becoming that "attention driven" growing monster.
  • yzmtf2008 7y ago
    > So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. While I understand where your complaints are coming from, I encourage you to think about the fact that so many companies are "falling" for them. You and I might care about disturbances, "attention driven" work culture, open protocols, etc., but not everyone is a software engineer. The world is bigger than that. Clearly, some people quite enjoy Slack. I'm not saying it's the most optimal product, but perhaps being optimal is not as important as it seems.
    • Barrin92 7y ago
      Many people enjoy candy too, doesn't mean it's good for you. Not everyone is a software engineer, but everyone has limited attention. Slack's chat nature as the OP points out favours instant messaging over batching up replies, which, like many bad habits, appeals to the reward portion of our brain but is genuinely unhelpful in structuring work. There's a reasonable (and increasing amount) of evidence that multitasking and context switching can lower your working IQ by 10 to 15 points. Deep Work by Cal Newport does a good job of going into the detrimental affects that distraction from workflows has on people.
      • 7y ago
• perfunctory 7y ago
  Off topic. Didn't know NPR had text only version of the site. https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org
  • egze 7y ago
    Link to current story: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=734095998 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=734095998
• askafriend 7y ago
  Slack is great. The valuation makes sense and I wish them continued success. All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company make us more productive. I would hate to go back to what came before it. IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.
  • netwanderer3 7y ago
    Why are we comparing Slack to IRC, a product that came out in 1988?
    • tirpen 7y ago
      Why shouldn't we compare them? IRC has probably 95% of the features slack has, is completely free and has been around since 1988. Seems like a logical comparison to make.
      • dijit 7y ago
        IRC doesn't have the virtue of having millions of dollars spent on clients for it. And we are comparing a service provider/client/protocol to something that is simply a protocol which is a bit apples to oranges. Assuming the same kind of provider exists in your company (IRC+BNC+searchable logging) and you standardised on something like weechat, then perhaps a comparison could be made. Slack Pros: - Voice/Video chat - slackbot "remind" notifications - Number of highly polished integrations - Rich integrations (button prompts etc) - Webhooks for bot integrations instead of needing to subscribe to RTM - User tags ("out of office" markers, "in meeting" markers) IRC Pros: - Your data doesn't have to leave your site - You can force connections to be on your intra-net - Simple, well understood protocol - Which is open, and not going away - More potential to integrate authentication with your normal authentication provider. - Rich moderation story - Flexibility of client, even if we take weechat as the standard it's still possible to run another. Is this fair? Maybe we should weight how much they're worth. But for sure if IRC had the investment slack had then it wouldn't be "trash", there's work to bring it into 2019 too[0] [0]: https://ircv3.net https://ircv3.net
• dr_dshiv 7y ago
  I hope this gives Stewart the resources to build his next amazing game.
• ryanmarsh 7y ago
  I shouldn’t have turned down that offer.
• Alrijlqanturis 7y ago
  This is one the best news in years and congrats for them!
• cdykhoapnt 7y ago
  Nếu bạn có niềm đam mê với y học, bạn muốn theo học ngành y trong tương lai, hãy đến ngay với Trường Cao Đẳng Y Khoa Phạm Ngọc Thạch. Một trong những trường đào tạo ngành y chất lượng nhất trong cả nước. Nếu bạn vẫn băn khoăn thì hãy bài viết này sẽ lý giải lý do lý do vì sao bạn nên chọn theo học tại Trường Cao Đẳng Y Khoa Phạm Ngọc Thạch. http://smilebuilding.com.vn/truong-cao-dang-y-khoa-pham-ngoc-thach/ http://smilebuilding.com.vn/truong-cao-dang-y-khoa-pham-ngoc...
• popotamonga 7y ago
  Congrats and all. But the app still sucks. Since last update, on windows, randomly quits but leaves an invisible process behing consuming 25% cpu. Changing organizations the first time in the day takes ages (imagine when you have a dozen).
• trollied 7y ago
  Awesome. Now their developers will be able to afford the new Mac Pro, with 1.5Tb of RAM, just so that they can run the Slack client! :-)
• hkt 7y ago
  Goodness me, can I IPO off the back of an electron app too?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• mstaoru 7y ago
  Next >$16B opportunity: bring something close to Slack, but that actually works, to China. China is chat-first culture, but neither DingDing, nor Wechat Work achieved the status that Slack has in the US/EU. Problems with Slack in China: it's often blocked, it's unbearably slow, the apps are not in the stores, it's Chinese search is lacklustre, it's UI is centered on "longer" messages but Chinese language is very short so it could be optimized somehow.
  • biztos 7y ago
    You'd probably need it to be very efficient in order to run on some of the cheaper mobile devices, and of course only a Chinese company would ever be allowed to succeed at that scale in China. I could easily imagine a Chinese company coming up with Slack-but-fast-and-easily-monitored, making that >$16B in Asia, and then coming at the US/EU markets with it.
    • mstaoru 7y ago
      In the age of 8-core Snapdragon 660 phones that cost barely north of a hundred dollars this is not much of a concern. Besides, most "office" types update their phones every major release.
• buboard 7y ago
  I wonder how startups come up with valuations. In this climate it seems the market is ready to fill in any valuation and convince itself that it was the right one. Seems like they could easily have gone higher
• mullingitover 7y ago
  It's pretty hilarious that first Stewart Butterfield tried to make an MMO (Game Neverending), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Flickr. Then he tried to make another MMO (Glitch), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Slack. I hope he tries to make another MMO.
  • mettamage 7y ago
    I feel naive for asking: how would you come up with Flickr as a spinoff for an MMO? A chat application, yea seems fair, but Flickr? I am seriously withholding my urge to spam question marks on this page as they are dancing around my head.
    • Kiro 7y ago
      Is it so hard to imagine a photo sharing feature inside the game? MMOs can be anything.
      • Ensorceled 7y ago
        Yes. Can you please explain or give an example of an MMO where photo sharing is a major mechanic or important MVP feature?
        • Kiro 7y ago
          Why does it need to be a major mechanic? It was a feature in Game Neverending and they used that to build Flickr.
          • Ensorceled 7y ago
            I was replying to somebody who was annoyed that somebody was surprised there was a photo uploading and sharing feature. It’s a surprising feature because it isn’t a major mechanic.
        • Aromasin 7y ago
• biztos 7y ago
  I like the human story: Stewart Butterfield co-creates Flickr, revolutionizing online photo sharing; sells it for what at the time was "real money" but quickly discovers he could have held out for a whole lot more; burns through some VC failing at games; and then has that Eureka! moment when he realizes the Enterprise will eat any damn thing you feed it, and he hatches his plan to join the nine-zeroes club he missed out on in 2005, software quality be damned!
  • orcdork 7y ago
    It's like software quality is sometimes irrelevant to monetary success or something.
• amelius 7y ago
  I think they have to thank Google for that one, i.e. for completely messing up hangouts.
• antirez 7y ago
  Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.
  • avip 7y ago
    Is it not an inevitable result of federation and decentralization as governance? A camel is a horse designed by a committee, as the saying has it.
    • buboard 7y ago
      I dont think federation has anything to do with it. There were no incentives to bring it to consumers though (in contrast e.g. to email), and by itself it is not easy to use for vast majority of end users.
      • ethbro 7y ago
        The email protocols pre-date commercial access to the internet. So incentives were very different when it was created.
        • buboard 7y ago
          so does IRC. I believe even if it adopted IRC as a protocol, slack would still be successful, it's all about the UI being dumb-proof, friendly and capable and seemingly in-vogue. Discord, even more.
          • ethbro 7y ago
            If Slack adopted the IRC protocol, it would be subject to the same issue Microsoft had with the early web -- either implementing proprietary extensions to the spec to enable features, kludging in new features by abusing existing functionality, or waiting for spec consensus before expanding. And furthermore, it'd be reimplemented almost instantly by Facebook / Apple / Microsoft / Google. So I can see why they decided to chart a different path.
• fasteo 7y ago
  >>> More than 88,000 Paid Customers, including more than 65 companies in the Fortune 100; and >>> We had 575 Paid Customers >$100,000 of ARR as of January 31, 2019, which accounted for approximately 40% of our revenue in fiscal year 2019. If my math is right, 40% of their revenue is concentrated in <1% of their paid customers. Is this normal in the corporate SaaS market ? I can only think of this as a huge risk. I also saw that this is a direct listing and not an IPO. Again, I can only see this as a risk, basically because no underwriter will push the stock to investors. Is this so ?
  • tpetry 7y ago
    Think about thousands very small customers you simply take the money from and have no effort but they are not the target of your sales team. The numbers sound good to me.
  • vishnugupta 7y ago
    > 40% of their revenue is concentrated in <1% of their paid customers. Is this normal in the corporate SaaS market ? Speaking from my experience of 6 months at a SaaS company this is about the norm. Besides the usual 80/20 rule it gets more skewed at the top. And so even the product development was optimised to keep the top 1% happy. A ton of custom built features with hundreds of feature flags..
    • doomjunky 7y ago
      The 80/20 rule is basically the power law which is one of my favorite laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
      • notSupplied 7y ago
        It is also one of the most abused rules, often used to justify extremely sloppy "big picture thinking".
        • yosito 7y ago
• bluedino 7y ago
  Slack did not kill IRC. It seems like a few people here are saying that. AOL IM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Chat, SMS...all killed IRC. Sure, there's a small niche of users out there but it's a deserted island for the most part.
• pcurve 7y ago
  Even after nice runup in recent months, Atlassian with its diverse portfolio of products is only worth $32B. Which one is overvalued?
  • iamtheworstdev 7y ago
    Probably Atlassian. It's not the quantity of products so much as the desire to use them and their establishment as the product to use for a given purpose. Slack doesn't have that many competitors that are as useful. Whereas Atlassian has a lot of products no one has ever heard of and a lot of competitors other people have heard of.
• peternicky 7y ago
  Slack macOS application is without question the worst performing software I use. Launching slack causes my cpu usage to skyrocket to 100% for 5 or so seconds.
• spookybones 7y ago
  Is anyone here buying shares?
• inputcoffee 7y ago
  These declarations of valuation should be followed by a little note explaining what multiple of earnings (or, failing that, sales) this represents, and how fast it is growing. Is that high? Low? about right? Well, it depends if Slack made $100 million in sales and is flat, or if it did $2B in sales and is doubling every year. (I assume that it doesn't have earnings because its still growing and plowing all that money back into the business)
• szermer 7y ago
  My experience with Slack has been the mixed bag of "I love this", "Turn it off", "I couldn't be global without it". What makes me long on this stock is their position as leader of the Work Graph.(0) SAP and Salesforce have strong positions as trailing indicators of workplace knowledge (this is the information/ process that matters most to us) but Slack and to a lesser extend MS Teams are leading indicators of WHY the information/ process matters. (0) -- https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609319/slack-hopes-its-ai-will-keep-you-from-hating-slack/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609319/slack-hopes-its-ai...
• xmichael999 7y ago
  It's a web based IRC client, I don't get it...
• noja 7y ago
  Slack made minus 139 million dollars profit. They clearly deserve a higher valuation.
• luckie 7y ago
  With all these IPOs coming to market at nearly 50-60 times their earnings remind me of the dot com era. Bond yields are inverting just like before the previous crash in 2008. I see another wealth transfer on the horizon. The smart money is securing the bag.
• tim333 7y ago
  CNBC's interview with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield ahead of direct listing: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Stewart+Butterfield%2C+Slack https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Stewart+Butterf...
• samstave 7y ago
  Slack should make a phone/device. The fb foray into a phone market with that device was an utter disaster and a joke. The fb phone basically introduced one “feature” ‘the circle profile pic’ and the physical phone was chintsy and lame.... Go back in time to the danger device. The hiptop was cool, and all, but even then there was a miss. Regardless of the fact that danger became android... there was still a miss. We beed a messaging only platform device. This need has not been solved. If a slack-first device existed where i have topical channels for things and branch channels, but i can dm and pm and mm people.... thats the device i want. Just give me a slack-first os on a device and ill be ok.