22 ms·

Atlassian Acquires Loom

212 points by amrrs 3y ago

heisgone 3y ago
This make perfect sense. Atlassian is cornering the market of "features nobody ask for but make for good sales pitch to clueless managers".
- hshsh667 3y ago
  Absolutely agree
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  You have to fill in the mandatory metadata correctly (both on the meeting and in the linked Epic, you did remember to link an Epic right?) or the meeting won't start. Just imagine how pretty the Atlassian admin's productivity dashboards will look now!
- edgyquant 3y ago
  In what world is loom something no one asked for? I, and my team, use it everyday and have at my past two jobs as well. For engineers it’s a life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting (or asking what some piece of code does) and also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA.
  - eptcyka 3y ago
    Coming from a deep, shameful corner of ignorance, but what's special about recording a screen and sharing it via the comms tool of choice (IM, Slack, Signal, e-mail)? I do love the idea of sharing a screen recording of features though.
    - swivelmaster 3y ago
      It’s well-executed and convenient. That’s worth a lot.
      - hannes0 3y ago
        This discussion reminds me of when Dropbox was at ShowHN and someone was commenting on how this could be done with FTP. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
        scott_w 3y ago
        To be fair, the person asking the question genuinely is interested in the answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37858345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37858345
        eastbound 3y ago
        I still haven’t purchased Dropbox. When the choice came up, it seemed important for our backups not to be made in USA. So, indeed, a very cool replacement was SSH. I still don’t know anyone who didn’t leave Dropbox after they jacked up the prices. A USB key is much cheaper (and reliable, at the rate at which Dropbox nukes accounts that they deem not compliant with whatever policy).
        solardev 3y ago
        Most people I know just went with their cloud provider's sync solution once everyone added one (GDrive, iCloud, Amazon photos, OneDrive, Creative Cloud, etc.) Can't remember the last time I saw a USB key in use anymore. The cloud stuff is convenient, but it quickly became a commoditu Dropbox is still better in some small ways (like delta syncs) but it wasn't enough I guess.
        mikeyouse 3y ago
        It's amusing to see "but it wasn't enough I guess" in relation to a profitable $10 billion company with 3,000 employees. That's a pretty good outcome!
    - CharlieDigital 3y ago
      They're not necessarily buying it just for the tech; I have no doubt that Atlassian could build their own version of Loom. I'd guess that a big part of it is customer acquisition and then raising prices or ramping customers to other Atlassian products.
      - eptcyka 3y ago
        No, I mean, desktop and mobile screen recording, in my opinion, seems to be simple enough even for laymen. I could also be convinced otherwise :)
        CharlieDigital 3y ago
        As others have pointed out, it's not the recording that's the hard part per se; more so the entire workflow from hitting firing up the recording tool to getting the final recording -- possibly edited -- into the cloud for sharing in some seamless flow. Lots of ancillary stuff involved. I know a team that went down this route and built a competing tool and the hardest part was working out the streaming upload and storage. Then you layer on things like permissions, lifecycle management, etc.
      - politelemon 3y ago
        Also recently Atlassian released a Whiteboard (read Miro/infinite canvas) feature in Confluence cloud, so this could become another tool in the set that they release to keep people collaborating on their platform and not heading elsewhere.
      - groestl 3y ago
        I have a lot of doubt Atlassian can build anything in a reasonable timeframe. CLOUD-6999.
        mvdtnz 3y ago
        Oh that's nothing. Check out CONFSERVER-5926. Create April 2006 and finally closed with resolution Duplicate(???) in 2019.
    - throwanem 3y ago
      Loom makes it very easy to voice over and annotate a recording, with both individually editable in a way raw screen recordings don't support, and to share the result via a link. It's not (yet?) heavily used among engs where I am, but we love it anyway for massively shortening the feedback loop with designers who can drop a 30-second demo of some prototype UI at the head of a Slack thread and asynchronously receive the kind of nuanced feedback that'd usually need to start off with a (necessarily synchronous) huddle.
      - eptcyka 3y ago
        Cool, this is the answer I was looking for. Thank you so much!
        KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
        Their video summarization and speed-ups are killer features.
      - jzelinskie 3y ago
        I think lots of people haven't realized that video clips like Loom are actually built into Slack. The button that looks like a video camera below the input text box does it. It's not a full replacement, but it's the one you already have.
        gumby 3y ago
        I had never even noticed that button before. thanks.
        BossingAround 3y ago
        Slack's huddle feature is actually so nice. We use it more often than the dedicated MS Teams our org pays for (sadly).
        killingtime74 3y ago
        We used it for a bit then stopped after discovering the screen share resolution is super low
  - duped 3y ago
    I've been using Peek for this for years and never thought it was a billion dollar feature
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    Command+shift+5 is built into OSX I find the loom extension redundant and glitch prone
    - chenster 3y ago
      Loom gives a much better UX and easy to use and more important ability to share. They probably have a huge user base that other businesses interested in acquire.
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    On MacOS Loom is extremely buggy and, even when it works, is way worse than MacOS’ built-in screen recording.
    - paiute 3y ago
      Loom is gold on windows.
  - jmuguy 3y ago
    They seem to be glossing over the fact that Loom doesn't just record the screen - it immediately gives you a link to that recording.
    - JCharante 3y ago
      So ShareX?
      - smaddock 3y ago
        ShareX uploads videos in a pipeline: record, optimize, then upload. Loom does this while the video is being recorded to give you the link as fast as possible.
        seanhunter 3y ago
        And that's worth a billion dollars?
  - flashgordon 3y ago
    Actually the bigger q is where is Loom's moat? I've used loom too and I agree that being able take a video and do "mini editing" is useful but I guess I wouldn't pay for it given cmd-optiom-5 on osx. But still the real thing is where is the moat? I ask this because until recently I hadn't given much thought to "having paid users who will feel stupid to move off" was not a big deal but clearly it is? To play devil's advocate though from a numbers point I think loom has about 20m users so this is $5 per user. But if acq is for a billion then I'd assume their actual revenue is something like 100m. So $5 /user/year. I guess in that sense once a user has paid that low price they are not thinking of moving off for a year so it is plenty of upsell opportunities for atlassian. Ofcourse depending on usage just the video hosting could cost them more than $5/user/ year? Interesting stuff!
    - sb8244 3y ago
      Maybe going outside of engineering? I use both loom and cmd opt 5, but my CS and sales team would not be able to effectively use cmd5 (editing, hosting, comments, etc.) The moat for us is that it just works and is cheap enough that moving off is literally not worth my time.
      - foobarian 3y ago
        Sadly these days it seems that having good taste and not having embarked on the enshittification train itself is a pretty great moat.
      - flashgordon 3y ago
        This is fair. I think I was giving less credit to looms packaging of a "complete" feature. Almost like their work is "done".
    - solardev 3y ago
      If I remember correctly, they also host the edited videos and the recipient gets a link to their hosted version. That's the reason I didn't sign up (I wanted to send the video over Slack directly), but it does functionally add a moat where all your videos are on their servers, like YouTube.
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    I understand that stuff like Loom exists and people use it. But people are saying it makes no sense, not that it doesn't happen. > also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA... life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting Developers who don't know if what they write works or who can't express a bug in words... they're in trouble. You don't need experience for that. Non-developers / non-pros doing QA is symptomatic of greater problems. > life saver being able to share a quick video Who is supposed to be watching these videos? In your honest, no-BS assessment, when you're staring at these Zooms you might be doing professionally with like 9 people and only 1 of them is an engineer, and he's offshore: like isn't that the problem?
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    This is news to me I don't recall having the need to use video to express anything that comes to code. Perhaps user interface stuff, yes. But code? Can't remember...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - unixhero 3y ago
    People really don't like Atlassian around these parts
  - krooj 3y ago
    I guarantee you the snark originates from a hatred of JIRA.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Nah, Loom is a really valuable tool. I cannot count the number of meetings I've been able to skip because I could just send a video out for comments. It's also much better than screenshots for providing context to Jira tickets and bug reports.
  - heisgone 3y ago
    Maybe the problem is need of fixing is "too many meetings".
    - karaterobot 3y ago
      Yep, and Loom is a good tool for that. That's why it's been so useful.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  YMMV of course but it is straightforwardly useful in my experience.
- tristor 3y ago
  Loom is the best option currently in the market for doing screencast recordings and demo recordings. I use it extensively, and started out using other alternatives like complex configurations in OBS. Loom is not only a superior UX, but the built-in web editor works perfectly without requiring the heavy weight of installing, learning, and using (and often paying for) a more pro-grade video editor for doing simple tasks. This may be because I'm a PM now, because I didn't do this type of thing as an engineer, but I have grown a huge appreciation for visual tools because "a picture is worth a thousand words". If I can show somebody the behavior that I am talking about, actually get a record of a bug happening, or build a demo that doesn't feel like a slide deck and is showing actual product experience, it has a deeper visceral impact on customers and engineers, and speeds up resolution time or identifying directionality of design.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  I don’t use it but I have a family member who uses it extensively and has a love-hate relationship with it (perfect for it to be owned by Atlassian). It’s a great tool _when it works_ and they’ve told me they would switch in an instant if there was something better. I guess it crashes and loses data for them semi-regularly, sometimes they have to contact support to find something the web/app lost. Personally I use, and love, CleanShotX but I don’t need to record my face and I’m not even sure if you can draw on the videos you create like you can in Loom. I use it mostly for annotating pictures. And before “macOS has this built in”, yes they do and what they provide is way better than nothing but it doesn’t hold a candle to CleanShotX. It’s way clunkier and hard to make edits once you’ve added something to the screenshot, CleanShotX is a breeze and being able to record video as a gif is awesome for bug tickets or documentation.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
andygcook 3y ago
For anyone else curious, Loom raised $205M with the last round at a $1.5B valuation. This deal is for $975M in cash. Sources: - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/loom https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/loom - https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenli1/2022/03/14/nearly-broke-to-15-billion-how-he-built-loom-and-grew-it-to-14-million-users/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenli1/2022/03/14/nearly-bro... - https://twitter.com/andrew__reed/status/1712458243883110599?s=46&t=AyPpMAhv4dl5_SNCRuKiSA https://twitter.com/andrew__reed/status/1712458243883110599?... (Edit: formatting)
- pyrophane 3y ago
  Without knowing the specific of their last round, does anyone have an idea of what selling at roughly 2/3 of their previous valuation likely means for their employees? I know that VCs typically have some kind of "upside protection" in later rounds that guarantees them first money out in the event of a sale on some multiple of their investment, but I don't know what terms are common.
  - djbusby 3y ago
    Frequently Investors and Founders get money before Employees. Investors frequently have clauses (warrants/ratchet) to increase their position if the sale wasn't at some threshold, which will affect (to downside) the basis for Employees payout. If the Employee thought the stock was at $150/share at 1.5B they will get less than $97 on payout.
  - gangstead 3y ago
    The startup system is pretty rigged against accidentally making anyone rich who is a mere employee. That money is for the investors, not the working class. The days of the office assistant making millions on stock are long gone. There's options with huge tax implications, long vesting periods, the investors get preferred stock, they get guaranteed multiples, if there's a down round there's a carve-out that you won't be part of. Not only do the investors have priority shares over employees, each investor can negotiate a guaranteed multiple. For example if they put in 100 million for 10% ownership but also had a 5X multiple guarantee and a sale price of 1 billion then the 500 million they walk away with ends up being 50% of the sale price. That part of the agreement isn't made public as far as I know.
Corrado 3y ago
Darn it! We just started looking at using Loom to enhance our development efforts. I'm loath to add another Atlassian product to our lineup though.
- rasbt 3y ago
  It's fascinating that it's a 1B business. I thought it was just uploading screen recordings to the cloud (basically UI around uploading. Like macOS QuickTime + YouTube private video upload)
athorax 3y ago
Who is asking for this? As Atlassian consolidates Loom into its platform, engineers will soon be able to visually log issues in Jira, leaders will use videos to connect with employees at scale, sales teams will send tailored video updates to clients, and HR teams will onboard new employees with personalized welcome videos
- the8472 3y ago
  > engineers will soon be able to visually log issues in Jira I already use windows game mode for screen captures. Why would I need a separate application for that?
  - layer8 3y ago
    Where I’ve worked Game Mode was disabled by GPO in enterprise environments.
    - the8472 3y ago
      Disabling a built-in, non-networked feature and then replacing it with a cloud-linked, self-updating 3rd-party one doesn't seem like it would improve security.
      - layer8 3y ago
        They were using on-prem Atlassian, no cloud link and no self-updating, of course.
  - becurious 3y ago
    I used to do that but you can record screen video with the Snipping Tool now. Works fine, mp4 file as output.
- chrisandchris 3y ago
  Generation TikTok?
- tekla 3y ago
candiddevmike 3y ago
$1.5B for a screen recorder
- a1o 3y ago
  I thought it was a point and click game
  - organsnyder 3y ago
    Ask me about it!
    - herman_toothrot 3y ago
      Is it more than 20 bucks?
      - organsnyder 3y ago
        Of course not! No one should spend more than 20 bucks for a computer game!
    - bentcorner 3y ago
      So, tell me about LOOM
      - organsnyder 3y ago
        You mean the latest masterpiece of fantasy storytelling from Lucasfilm's™ Brian Moriarty™? Why, it's an extraordinary adventure with an interface of magic, stunning, high-resolution, 3D landscapes, sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point 'n' click control of characters, objects, and magic spells. Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom™ today!
- codegeek 3y ago
  Reminds me of the infamous dropbox comment :)
Zambyte 3y ago
From loom.com > Loom works wherever you do. > Get Loom for Free > For Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android Looks like Loom does not work wherever I do.
- pcmaffey 3y ago
  Also loom does not work at all offline, even the video recording…
  - butlike 3y ago
    I suspect this will become a more-and-more common occurance as deep fake videos become more ubiquitous. There will have to be some mechanism to validate the origin of the video is truly from the content creator. If the video was created offline and uploaded after the fact, who knows if it's generated audio super-imposed over a deep fake?
    - VTimofeenko 3y ago
      In that case it's possible to generate a deepfake offline, then open the video in a player and record that. I doubt online-ness by itself will do anything if it's still just a video signal leaving the machine.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  All of our backend devs (including myself) are on Linux (and use Firefox) so Loom was a nonstarter for us.
  - otachack 3y ago
    It's always a blast when technology and marketing collide.
  - j45 3y ago
    It’s surprising loom doesn’t work on Linux. I wonder why.
fishnchips 3y ago
Can they acquire Asana and merge it with Jira so that I can dislike one project management tool instead of two?
- butlike 3y ago
  Jirana or Asira? I'm drinking my morning Bawls with Guarana, reading Jirana!
- sb8244 3y ago
  Do you dislike the tools or dislike the process that gets created around the tools?
  - malermeister 3y ago
    I dislike the tools for the process they encourage.
  - fishnchips 3y ago
    I think both tools could use some serious UX love. The processes folks introduce around them - that's a different topic obviously. You can enforce atrocious processes with Trello or ClickUp but I find these much less bad.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  If you have influence on what tools you use at your place of work, then consider trying https://www.shortcut.com/ https://www.shortcut.com/. It's UX is IMO fantastic (and it's UI is fast) while being a lot more full-featured than something like Trello. (not associated with the company - just a happy customer who feels like they ought to be more widely known than they seem to be)
  - fishnchips 3y ago
    I think my team looked into that, among good few others. There is a decent number of tools that would work better for dev/product teams, but if you want to have one solution for the whole company, the list is shorter. We're currently living with ClickUp.
gigatexal 3y ago
975M for what the company does seems awfully high imo. But nice exit all things considered for the Loom folks and their investors.
- blairbeckwith 3y ago
  companies are generally valued based on their revenue and user base rather than their product it is true that $975M is too high a price for a screen recorder when they could have bought a licence to Cleanshot for $19
  - j45 3y ago
    Neat. Does cleanshot auto upload and process the video as well?
    - blairbeckwith 3y ago
      There is an associated cloud service called Cleanshot Cloud – all licenses get a small amount of storage for free, or you can upgrade to Unlimited for a monthly subscription. Alternatively, because it's a great native-first app, you can just set the saving directory to an existing cloud provider on your machine like Dropbox and let it handle uploading and serving the file.
      - j45 3y ago
        Associated? See the thing with something like loom is it just works. I used mono snap for a while for example. Native apps to capture are great but they seem to get acquired.
        blairbeckwith 3y ago
        I'm not sure what your point is. Lots of apps, native or not, get acquired. What are we talking about here?
altdataseller 3y ago
For a second, I thought they acquired the diet app and were planning to diversify into the diet business
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
consumer451 3y ago
Tried out Loom, installed the desktop tool, took up >50% of CPU at random times when not being used. Nope, nope, nope.
jitl 3y ago
Bummer. Our sales and customer success people really like Loom, and users often send us loom recordings to report issues or suggest features. I’m not happy it’s Atlassian.
antondd 3y ago
What do you folks think Loom's revenue was in the recent years? I'm curious what the ARR multiple would be in this deal. 20X? 40X?
- altdataseller 3y ago
  Probably much much lower. If this was 2020 or 2021, perhaps, but multiples haven't even in that high in the public market for high growth companies for the past few years
  - davinci123 3y ago
    You can do approximate math from Series C, where they raised $130M at $1.5B valuation - announced in May 2021. The ARR multiples in 2021 was 50X NTM ARR. They potentially hit $30M by end of 2021 (raised sometime late 2020/early 2021). Now even if they grew at 40-50% YoY CAGR (which is on the bullish side) - $60M-$70M ARR, approximately giving them a 10-12x ARR multiple for NTM revenue, put them squarely in the median to high-end valuation mutiple for PLG companies growing at 30-50% YoY (https://www.meritechcapital.com/benchmarking/historical-trading-data/ev-ntm-revenue https://www.meritechcapital.com/benchmarking/historical-trad...)
sb8244 3y ago
C'mon Atlassian, have the decency to throw another 25M their way...
- davinci123 3y ago
  Almost like buying a retail product for $9.99 :D
lijok 3y ago
People really will buy anything hey
NKosmatos 3y ago
Oh great, that’s what Jira and Confluence needed in order to make them more sluggish, less responsive and more user unfriendly… a video messaging platform integration. Good grief, who thinks of these things :-( With 1 billion and a team of software developers, I would put Jira and Confluence back on the right road, not acquire a video company ;-)
- j45 3y ago
  Agreed. The loom integration has been useful to attract some users who don’t use Jira otherwise. I just wish Jira-1369 would get solved after 20 years because users refuse to adopt Jira or confluence when they’re getting waterboarded with notifications instead of a timed digest that can be set.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    Jira-1369 was closed four years ago.
    - j45 3y ago
      As one of jira’s bigger brain farts, it seems it’s was recreated and continued in a new ticket. Open: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-1369 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-1369 Closed: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369 The original JRA-1369 was opened in 2003. Addressed a little in 2019, but not the digests to solve it all. Odd since plug-ins have to. closing this is one way to improve optics I guess. Ps, I don’t hate Jira. Wasn’t a huge fan and it took a few years to see the light of what it does that so few platforms do when it comes to being able to absorb complexity as it evolves. Managing evolving complexity is a real thing, and the pain can be reduced by having more in one tool vs not. It’s a tough space, and I think Aha.Io is one tool suited to win their prize and grow into Jira’s space. Their worst sin remains how many people are subjected to an out of the box install compared to one that is setup to your processes. Tweaking it makes such a difference.
      - 3y ago
tiborsaas 3y ago
Great, more potential clients to sell Jira to :(
lasermike026 3y ago
Why is this a good thing?
- usrnm 3y ago
  Some people will get fat bonuses
- blackoil 3y ago
  Good for who? Receiving billion dollar must feel good.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gjsman-1000 3y ago
Great, the developers of Jira are expanding their horizons. On the other hand, having used Loom a few times, I admit I can completely understand why. Loom is an almost unbelievable piece of software.
toddmorey 3y ago
This is a bummer. I really liked Loom. I was surprised to find some really neat video tools now by Prezi. Who else is doing good stuff around quick async collaboration?
- alalani1 3y ago
  I use Tella.tv which is effectively a Loom replacement but their desktop mac app hasn't ever crashed on me
- gangstead 3y ago
  It's kind of silly but at my work we're using Gather. Walking your little pixel art character around the "office" is silly at first, but it's really lowered the friction to short video interactions. It's way less friction than sending someone a link and waiting around for them to join a meeting.
  - jeremy_k 3y ago
    We use Gather too; it's amazing for real time collaboration. I use Loom to summarize work and send updates to a larger audience in an async fashion.
- ValentinTrinque 3y ago
  Doist Inc. with Twist (https://twist.com https://twist.com). A sane replacement for slack that focus on making your life easier, and get actual job done by levering the concept of "threads" to make them first-class citizens that bridge the gap between instant chat where direct communication is needed and task manager where you need to declare a discussion to be open or closed. They side with the "Deep Work" philoshopy, and encourage (written) async collaboration.
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    Twist is much nicer than Slack in my opinion. The signal to noise ratio tends to be much better, and I find myself distracted by it far less because information I need is much easier to find when I need it.
antidnan 3y ago
I know screen recording tools are widely used in the engineering world... I always thought they were more impressive for how much they culturally normalized screen recording in the rest of the corporate world. Separately, I'm a big fan of cleanshotX.
- passion__desire 3y ago
  Isn't there a Mac app which can record your programming presentation or demo video and turn into slides using AI? That feature could be next step for Loom acquisition.
  - dbish 3y ago
    We're a new startup that has recording -> docs, not slides yet, but it's easy enough to go that direction. We just started a beta of a product that is a drop in loom replacement and “smarter” in that we both generate doc artifacts and completely index not just what you said but what you showed on screen (OCR) and what you did (captured actions) to make everything easier to find, easier to get quick answers from (built in chat assistant who “watched” the video already), etc. Taking on new beta users and feedback on feature requests, check out a post about it here: https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 or drop me a note diamond@augmend.com
thenerdhead 3y ago
Glad for the founders, but I cannot help but think this is such an overpriced acquisition for a glorified screen capture tool and ecosystem. Now you can attach videos to jira tickets, seems a bit overkill.
- objclxt 3y ago
  It’s a bargain compared to their Series C valuation in 2021 of $1.5 billion.
  - kylecordes 3y ago
    Ouch. I wonder how much of the exit value got absorbed by their preference stack.
  - thenerdhead 3y ago
    Not really a discount if you arguably don't need to buy it in the first place! That valuation to begin with is ridiculous with their DAU.
- binarymax 3y ago
  At 25M users it's about $40 per user, and Atlassian needs some kind of screencast data to bolster their future in training project management models. Also, they can afford it, so it's a good time to get into the market.
  - thenerdhead 3y ago
    Hopefully they aren't paying for all those ghost users from the pandemic hype. Could be a good acquisition but Atlassian somewhat known for just buying useless crap.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  Waiting for a future, where you cannot simply look at a ticket, but have to skip through a video over and over again, just like with voice messages that people send on messengers. Instead of having to think about clear writing in tickets, one has a vague not well defined speech in a video. Then maybe they will add automatic transcription and again people will think "Now it's all fine!", which of course it won't be.
willio58 3y ago
Anyone have a good alternative to loom? It’s honestly a great tool but I foresee the 20 free videos going away with this eventually
- chenster 3y ago
  To name a few, RecordIt (gif only), Camtasia, Snagit
- dbish 3y ago
  We just started a beta of a product that is a drop in loom replacement and “smarter” in that we completely index not just what you said but what you showed on screen (OCR) and what you did (captured actions) to make everything easier to find, easier to get quick answers from (built in chat assistant who “watched” the video already) and auto generate things like docs out of it. Looking for beta users and feedback on feature requests, check out a post about it here: https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 or drop me a note diamond@augmend.com
- tln 3y ago
  I switched to scre.io
- nakodari 3y ago
  You can try out Jumpshare (https://jumpshare.com https://jumpshare.com). We are seeing many people move to our platform from Loom. I am the founder so feel free to ask anything.
- Zaheer 3y ago
  Zappy from Zapier is free: https://zapier.com/zappy https://zapier.com/zappy
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- spdif899 3y ago
  Screenstudio is incredible and a one time purchase
yesimahuman 3y ago
As a loom customer, color me very surprised. I did not expect it to have such a strong business since we generally just sporadically use it and it's a vitamin not a painkiller. Just goes to show how you can't accurately evaluate companies based on your own limited experience. Congrats to the team
davinci123 3y ago
Atlassian has a record of failed acquisitions: Bitbucket, HipChat, Trello, OpsGenie,.. and the list goes on. Add Loom to that list. In this market, when every single collab company is struggling, Atlassian goes and acquires a collab company when there are so many companies in the DevTools space or get your pick in AI. Spending a billion on a video sharing tool? Unsure what they were thinking and who all are advising the founders. I see the Aussie connection though..
- namuol 3y ago
  They didn’t spend a billion for the tech, they spent it for the huge userbase already full of fledgling enterprise leads. It’s a lead generation acquisition. I do hope they don’t ruin the product, though.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  I was not aware Trello is considered a failure. BitBucket and Hipchat, for sure. OpsGenie, until the really bad way they handled an outage last year, it was, sometimes begrudgingly, widely used, recommended sometimes even. Trello, on the other hand, seems like what everyone wants to use but no organization seems to want to let people use. Everyone that uses Trello seemingly, likes it
mschuster91 3y ago
Can Atlassian just for once first go and stabilize their existing product lineup before trying to shoehorn yet another thing into their offering? I mean, it's basic stuff that just isn't possible on JIRA Cloud for example, like setting a global sender address for notification emails - something perfectly possible on on-premise installations, but on Cloud you have to do that for each project and you can't even set it up as a default for new projects. Or maybe what about a first-party Terraform provider. Or a support that's actually worth the name instead of underpaid callcenter employees that seem to have to strictly follow some sort of script instead of actually being allowed to use their brains or to properly read what customers write them. That billion $ they just dumped out on this acquisition could have been invested into their existing products.
jordigg 3y ago
Loom is an excellent piece of software, but from my perspective in IT I've never been able to justify it's ROI. I've been always pushing for it to go away as soon as had to start looking at SaaS spend. Looking at the analytics only a few power users really made use of it while the biggest majority of users never used to record or maybe only recorded 1-2 videos a quarter. It was too expensive and video is very expensive to run on the cloud. Zoom released a competitor recently and that must be killing them. Other companies are also offering cheaper alternatives and egress traffic for video-centric businesses is crazy expensive. They had layoffs not so long ago, like many companies, and during my last negotiations with them they were very aggressive with pricing. Aggressive to the point of their executive team asking what amount we wanted to pay, and they actually committed to the price we offered... Glassdoor reviews and Blind comments weren't good at that time either, but that is true for most companies. I think they couldn't keep the revenue curve up-to-the-right to offer a decent return to their investors and it was turning more into an OK business. Time to sell, stay there for a year and move on to start their next thing. For Atlassian is a relevant acquisition, especially as they are also focusing more into chasing freshdesk or zendesk as a customer support platform. I wish them the best, as I said, the product itself was very well designed and engineered compared to any other alternatives out there. I think they missed to make it relevant and a must have for companies, maybe focusing more to sale to sales and customer experience/support teams which tend to have big budgets compared to other teams.
habosa 3y ago
Loom is probably the simplest billion-dollar piece of software, but it's also excellent software and I am happy they're getting paid. Screen recording before Loom was a pain. You had to open up some program, start it, save the file, upload the file somewhere, and share it. And if you had to edit the recording at all ... probably start over. With Loom it's all one click and it's ready to share the instant you hit the Stop button. At my company we make and share dozens of Looms per day and it's a key part of maintaining a remote culture.
- segasuperstar 3y ago
  My immediate reaction was that value-wise it was a joke, how can they be worth $1 billion? I agree with what you're saying here though, one click, ACL controlled and simple to use videos. Concur with the enablement of the remote culture. I would have thought Atlassian could clone that so simply. The Loom software is super buggy though, I have to open their site or extension or desktop app multiple times before it starts working, but when it does work the editing is just about OK. I have thought about using Google Meet to record my desktop, I've heard the editor in that is pretty good, and you can stop, start, trim/edit & share in Google Drive or share further with a link.
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    > I have thought about using Google Meet to record my desktop, I've heard the editor in that is pretty good, and you can stop, start, trim/edit & share in Google Drive or share further with a link. Surely loom can't be any worse than google chrome
  - Atotalnoob 3y ago
    They are worth $1 billion due to their customer base.
    - tootie 3y ago
      I think the concern is more that they have such a small moat. Their product seems too easy to copy. But given that they are first to market, did a very a good job with what they offer and have acquired a lot of customers, that is all worth a lot of money. Is "a lot" $1B? Hard to say.
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fortyseven 3y ago
That's silly, it's only like 9.99 on Steam. ;)
- chungy 3y ago
  $5.99 on GOG. That was my first thought as well. Hadn't heard of the Loom described in TFA before.
technics256 3y ago
If you have a mac, Cleanshot X I find is better across the board cleanshot.com
- terpimost 3y ago
  I wish they would have web/windows/linux version
  - porridgeraisin 3y ago
    Sharex does all that and more, it's there for windows. I don't know the wine story for it though. It's a .net app
- breakfastduck 3y ago
  Absolutely brilliant software. I use it absolutely constantly at work, brilliant UX and it fits into macOS so well. Have yet to find anything remotely close in terms of quality for screen capture / annotation / recording.
- m1keil 3y ago
  +1. One of these apps that makes leaving macOS impossible.
- xyst 3y ago
  Such a clean app. Would probably use this if I haven’t mastered usage of Final Cut Pro. yes it’s overkill, but it’s one less tool I have to learn. I do like its ability to capture scrolling content. Would buy it just for that. Also a plus: one time fee w/ optional upgrades. Definitely a plus
zoogeny 3y ago
I applied to Loom several years ago while they were still tiny. The CEO sent me a Loom thanking me for applying and asking me to send him back a Loom describing why I was excited to work for his company. Something about that rubbed me the wrong way at the time. I didn't reply and dipped out of the interview process.
- 1123581321 3y ago
  I like that. Much faster than writing a cover letter or application email and shows you understand what they make. I take it you weren’t that interested in their product.
- WXLCKNO 3y ago
  That's fine. Your options would have only been worth Checks notes Millions of dollars.
  - woeirua 3y ago
    Nope. Loom was last valued at $1.5 billion in 2021, so with this acquisition a lot of people's options undoubtedly got totally wiped out due to liquidation preferences.
    - y_gy 3y ago
      This comment misunderstands how liq pref works. Liq pref is about the amount of money invested ($175M), not about the valuation. At a $975M exit and a par-for-the-course liq pref of 1.0, it is very likely that all shareholders will have made money on the exit.
      - claytonjy 3y ago
        Shareholders who got in before that last round, that is. Employees who joined in the last few years will likely have underwater options unless Loom internally repriced already-granted options.
chenster 3y ago
This reminds Buffer how simple the idea was and how well they executed it. A good product doesn't have to be complex.
simplyluke 3y ago
Interesting if not surprising to see the criticisms here. We use loom extensively at work and as a remote employee it’s one of my favorite collaboration tools. Sending a video explaining a problem while I walk through code is often much easier than getting on a zoom call, and Loom is absolutely easier and more feature-filled than other forms of screen capture.
- zegerjan 3y ago
  Whats wrong with the Slack version? It's on-par UX for me for recording, and wins just because it's already in Slack?
- heisgone 3y ago
  The issue that I have is that everyone that praise Loom are talking about how they enjoy using it to create videos. I don't hear anyone saying they enjoy consuming them. Do you?
  - earthling8118 3y ago
    I can give you the opposite opinion. I hate loom. I've never made a video with it. I've only had the displeasure of meeting a few people who used it for everything. It isn't fun to use. I'd rather have a block of text and maybe some screenshots l.
- deleted 3y ago
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zelphirkalt 3y ago
Future will tell, whether Loom becomes enshittified, like basically everything else Atlassian touches or produced. Lets see how much usability will be impacted by putting it behind attrocious Atlassian logins and adding new unwanted features and integrations to it.
- conqrr 3y ago
  It's almost a guarantee in SaaS. Look at Salesforce with Heroku, Tableau and Slack.
conqrr 3y ago
At some point, companies become big enough that innovation is a risk (Innovater's dilemma). Atlassian is likely at this stage. Ofcourse, loom's tech is nothing impressive, one could argue that only a small segment of enterprise Loom customers would be willing to convert to Atlassian ecosystem. Nonetheless, the show must go on and Atlassian has to choose action instead of inaction to please the stock market. Good exit for loom though!
- faramarz 3y ago
  I think it's more likely that Atlassian gives it away for free to its client base .. groups like Linear are coming after them and tools like Loom make a material difference in getting quality work out the door. we use it for outward facing and training material, but the royal honey is when you can async-align on product initiatives down to the pixel. Video is a powerful story telling tool in today's remote world. Figma on the other hand will have to sway towards Atlassian territory to add value to the tech bit of the pipeline. the dev mode has made it clear they are headed that way, on their own terms. I just wish that more founders prioritize enterprise customers and clear the way to onboard by investing in compliance (SOC-2) reporting early! it's a total showstopper and that's unfortunate for all sides.
  - dalex00 3y ago
    Atlassian gives not much out for free the new whiteboard feature in confluence will also be monetizes like everything. E.g. automations for their products will cost soon meaning you need to upgrade your product to next tier. After we implemented everywhere...
- eastbound 3y ago
  Atlassian is not afraid of innovating, they can’t. They just hired the worst developers again and again. Good students go to Canva, dropouts go to Atlassian. Talk to partners. Everyone is pulling their hair at the new APIs. It’s architecturally bad, inside their systems. Even the architects are outputting crap! The best programmers of the company! I’ve move my data outside Atlassian to prevent loss…
pibefision 3y ago
Microsoft implemented the same functionality in Office365 (it's called Stream). I think it's a great exit to sell to Atlassian.
- baq 3y ago
  Timely, too; in a year everyone will have something like this
- vxNsr 3y ago
  I don't see where to use it or how, doesn't appear to allow you to record your screen...
paxys 3y ago
I like Loom, but once Slack launched clips and huddles there was really no reason to continue using it (nearly 100% of our usage was recording a video clip and posting it to Slack). Wonder what Atlassian has in store for the product.
- a13o 3y ago
  The 5 minute cap, and difficulty getting a slack video URL to paste into code review tool or bug tracking tool, is what led us away from Slack videos. If Slack stepped it up, it'd probably come down to who has the better bundle price.
- Rapzid 3y ago
  > Slack launched clip What?!!! I'm not sure how I haven't known about this. Been using Dropbox capture for basic stuff(obs for complicated).
itomato 3y ago
Is this another Bitbucket in the making?
Legion 3y ago
Ask me about LOOM
- mayormcmatt 3y ago
  So, tell me about LOOM.
  - kridsdale3 3y ago
    There it is.
  - bentcorner 3y ago
    You mean the sensational platform for video messaging and screen recording from the geniuses at Loom™? Ah, it's a revolutionary experience that'll transform how you communicate in the business landscape! Boasting an intuitive interface that even your grandma can use, jaw-dropping video quality, and super-speedy sharing capabilities. We're talking about top-notch encryption, folks, not to mention screen and camera recording with pixel-perfect clarity! No more tedious emails or confusing Slack threads. Simplify your life! Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom™ today!
sidcool 3y ago
Nobody likes Atlassian products but everyone uses them.
throwaway2990 3y ago
Another product for atlassian to trash!!! Awesome!
Spunkie 3y ago
I consult with a very large variety of businesses and literally my only interaction with loom in the wild is when a few LMS I'm in started randomly started replacing youtube embeds with loom embeds. Everyone hates it though because the loom embed player is hot garbage and actively distracts from the experience. I've heard much the same from most of my colleagues also going through the LMS courses. $1B seems a crazy price, but I guess overpriced garbage is right up Atlassians street.
mkjonesuk 3y ago
I use and love Loom. I am not happy about this. Their acquisition of Trello was very painful and our company stopped using it because of this. What alternatives to Loom Pro/Team would people recommend?
tqi 3y ago
If this[1] is accurate (a big if) 2023 rev is 35M, which would make this a ~30X multiple!? [1] https://getlatka.com/companies/loom https://getlatka.com/companies/loom
- simantel 3y ago
  1. Those numbers on Latka, ZoomInfo, etc. are often educated guesses. 2. The graph on Latka shows that $35M figure as being from 2021. 3. The 2021 fundraising announcement[0] said they grew revenue 1100% YoY that year, so the 30x multiple might be warranted. [0] https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-loom/ https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-loom/
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HL33tibCe7 3y ago
The natural cycle of enshittification of SaaS products continues
m3kw9 3y ago
If you have a mac, buy Compressor app from Apple set up Folder watch, use Zoom to start an empty video meeting to show video of yourself, minimize(shift cmd m) and float(cmd alt f) the zoom window, then use MacOS screen record(cmd shift 5) to record. I can get this screen grab setup up running in 10 seconds. You don’t need Loom for most cases
- deleted 3y ago
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- codemac 3y ago
  You can use quicktime to show your webcam + cmd-shift-5 as well.
  - m3kw9 3y ago
    QuickTime if you used it has a huge window at its minimum that blocks a lot of screen, zoom allows a small one
- aosaigh 3y ago
  This is such an on-brand HN response. “You don’t need Loom, just do these [10 inconvenient steps] and it’s the same”. How do you share and upload those videos? Where are they hosted? Can you set a CTA on the video? Get transcripts? Find who has viewed your video? Add a custom thumbnail? Get comments on your video? Set a description? These are all baked-in things that Loom handles, not to mention one-click recording that doesn’t involve wiring together 3 different apps.
  - Nezteb 3y ago
    Agreed, especially because Compressor is $50: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/compressor/id424390742 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/compressor/id424390742 At that point, you may as well just buy CleanShot X for $30: https://cleanshot.com/ https://cleanshot.com/
    - m3kw9 3y ago
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constantlm 3y ago
great exit, but rip
warthog 3y ago
Don't know why Techcrunch almost literally shit on Loom in the article - https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/12/atlassian-to-acquire-former-unicorn-loom-for-975m/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/12/atlassian-to-acquire-forme... They sold for almost 50% less than their last raise but selling a clip recorder product for US$ 1bn is still a big achievement and it is indeed a good software product. Curious on the multiples they paid though. My guess => US$ 30 MM ARR @ 30x revenue multiple
- peanuty1 3y ago
  I feel bad for the employees who joined at the previous valuation though.
pcurve 3y ago
Maybe it's just me, but in the video, the founder doesn't seem all that excited about the acquisition. It's almost like he's having second thoughts, but it's too late to back out.
paulryanrogers 3y ago
Command + Shift + 5 Just be sure to click Options -> (pick a mic) the first time Now what happened to iMovie ... ?
xyst 3y ago
What’s the point in this acquisition? Why do enterprise projects need short form videos (aka Tik Tok)? Atlassian products are already dog shit slow. Add in the number of plugins that admins add over the years plus processing and hosting of videos … It’s going to be a hot mess. Would hate to be the person on the project that has diminished vision or completely blind. Screen readers don’t stand a chance against QA’s short form videos with no audio or description of the bug or feature. Seems like bloat to me. Atlassian trying too hard to become the sole solution for project management.
- prometheon1 3y ago
  Text to speech models like Whisper are getting good enough that screen readers would stand a chance. The video itself is still more difficult to caption, but the things that would be shared in video are probably being shared with screenshots right now, so it would not be worse.
hacknews20 3y ago
I hope they don't take this private or make it an Atlassian bundle only thing, as Loom is excellent.
XavierFras 3y ago
[dead]

212 points by amrrs 3y ago

This make perfect sense. Atlassian is cornering the market of "features nobody ask for but make for good sales pitch to clueless managers".

hshsh667 3y ago
Absolutely agree
jjoonathan 3y ago
You have to fill in the mandatory metadata correctly (both on the meeting and in the linked Epic, you did remember to link an Epic right?) or the meeting won't start. Just imagine how pretty the Atlassian admin's productivity dashboards will look now!
edgyquant 3y ago
In what world is loom something no one asked for? I, and my team, use it everyday and have at my past two jobs as well. For engineers it’s a life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting (or asking what some piece of code does) and also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA.
- eptcyka 3y ago
  Coming from a deep, shameful corner of ignorance, but what's special about recording a screen and sharing it via the comms tool of choice (IM, Slack, Signal, e-mail)? I do love the idea of sharing a screen recording of features though.
  - swivelmaster 3y ago
    It’s well-executed and convenient. That’s worth a lot.
    - hannes0 3y ago
      This discussion reminds me of when Dropbox was at ShowHN and someone was commenting on how this could be done with FTP. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
      - scott_w 3y ago
        To be fair, the person asking the question genuinely is interested in the answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37858345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37858345
      - eastbound 3y ago
        I still haven’t purchased Dropbox. When the choice came up, it seemed important for our backups not to be made in USA. So, indeed, a very cool replacement was SSH. I still don’t know anyone who didn’t leave Dropbox after they jacked up the prices. A USB key is much cheaper (and reliable, at the rate at which Dropbox nukes accounts that they deem not compliant with whatever policy).
        solardev 3y ago
        Most people I know just went with their cloud provider's sync solution once everyone added one (GDrive, iCloud, Amazon photos, OneDrive, Creative Cloud, etc.) Can't remember the last time I saw a USB key in use anymore. The cloud stuff is convenient, but it quickly became a commoditu Dropbox is still better in some small ways (like delta syncs) but it wasn't enough I guess.
        mikeyouse 3y ago
        It's amusing to see "but it wasn't enough I guess" in relation to a profitable $10 billion company with 3,000 employees. That's a pretty good outcome!
  - CharlieDigital 3y ago
    They're not necessarily buying it just for the tech; I have no doubt that Atlassian could build their own version of Loom. I'd guess that a big part of it is customer acquisition and then raising prices or ramping customers to other Atlassian products.
    - eptcyka 3y ago
      No, I mean, desktop and mobile screen recording, in my opinion, seems to be simple enough even for laymen. I could also be convinced otherwise :)
      - CharlieDigital 3y ago
        As others have pointed out, it's not the recording that's the hard part per se; more so the entire workflow from hitting firing up the recording tool to getting the final recording -- possibly edited -- into the cloud for sharing in some seamless flow. Lots of ancillary stuff involved. I know a team that went down this route and built a competing tool and the hardest part was working out the streaming upload and storage. Then you layer on things like permissions, lifecycle management, etc.
    - politelemon 3y ago
      Also recently Atlassian released a Whiteboard (read Miro/infinite canvas) feature in Confluence cloud, so this could become another tool in the set that they release to keep people collaborating on their platform and not heading elsewhere.
    - groestl 3y ago
      I have a lot of doubt Atlassian can build anything in a reasonable timeframe. CLOUD-6999.
      - mvdtnz 3y ago
        Oh that's nothing. Check out CONFSERVER-5926. Create April 2006 and finally closed with resolution Duplicate(???) in 2019.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    Loom makes it very easy to voice over and annotate a recording, with both individually editable in a way raw screen recordings don't support, and to share the result via a link. It's not (yet?) heavily used among engs where I am, but we love it anyway for massively shortening the feedback loop with designers who can drop a 30-second demo of some prototype UI at the head of a Slack thread and asynchronously receive the kind of nuanced feedback that'd usually need to start off with a (necessarily synchronous) huddle.
    - eptcyka 3y ago
      Cool, this is the answer I was looking for. Thank you so much!
      - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
        Their video summarization and speed-ups are killer features.
    - jzelinskie 3y ago
      I think lots of people haven't realized that video clips like Loom are actually built into Slack. The button that looks like a video camera below the input text box does it. It's not a full replacement, but it's the one you already have.
      - gumby 3y ago
        I had never even noticed that button before. thanks.
      - BossingAround 3y ago
        Slack's huddle feature is actually so nice. We use it more often than the dedicated MS Teams our org pays for (sadly).
        killingtime74 3y ago
        We used it for a bit then stopped after discovering the screen share resolution is super low
- duped 3y ago
  I've been using Peek for this for years and never thought it was a billion dollar feature
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  Command+shift+5 is built into OSX I find the loom extension redundant and glitch prone
  - chenster 3y ago
    Loom gives a much better UX and easy to use and more important ability to share. They probably have a huge user base that other businesses interested in acquire.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  On MacOS Loom is extremely buggy and, even when it works, is way worse than MacOS’ built-in screen recording.
  - paiute 3y ago
    Loom is gold on windows.
- jmuguy 3y ago
  They seem to be glossing over the fact that Loom doesn't just record the screen - it immediately gives you a link to that recording.
  - JCharante 3y ago
    So ShareX?
    - smaddock 3y ago
      ShareX uploads videos in a pipeline: record, optimize, then upload. Loom does this while the video is being recorded to give you the link as fast as possible.
      - seanhunter 3y ago
        And that's worth a billion dollars?
- flashgordon 3y ago
  Actually the bigger q is where is Loom's moat? I've used loom too and I agree that being able take a video and do "mini editing" is useful but I guess I wouldn't pay for it given cmd-optiom-5 on osx. But still the real thing is where is the moat? I ask this because until recently I hadn't given much thought to "having paid users who will feel stupid to move off" was not a big deal but clearly it is? To play devil's advocate though from a numbers point I think loom has about 20m users so this is $5 per user. But if acq is for a billion then I'd assume their actual revenue is something like 100m. So $5 /user/year. I guess in that sense once a user has paid that low price they are not thinking of moving off for a year so it is plenty of upsell opportunities for atlassian. Ofcourse depending on usage just the video hosting could cost them more than $5/user/ year? Interesting stuff!
  - sb8244 3y ago
    Maybe going outside of engineering? I use both loom and cmd opt 5, but my CS and sales team would not be able to effectively use cmd5 (editing, hosting, comments, etc.) The moat for us is that it just works and is cheap enough that moving off is literally not worth my time.
    - foobarian 3y ago
      Sadly these days it seems that having good taste and not having embarked on the enshittification train itself is a pretty great moat.
    - flashgordon 3y ago
      This is fair. I think I was giving less credit to looms packaging of a "complete" feature. Almost like their work is "done".
  - solardev 3y ago
    If I remember correctly, they also host the edited videos and the recipient gets a link to their hosted version. That's the reason I didn't sign up (I wanted to send the video over Slack directly), but it does functionally add a moat where all your videos are on their servers, like YouTube.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  I understand that stuff like Loom exists and people use it. But people are saying it makes no sense, not that it doesn't happen. > also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA... life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting Developers who don't know if what they write works or who can't express a bug in words... they're in trouble. You don't need experience for that. Non-developers / non-pros doing QA is symptomatic of greater problems. > life saver being able to share a quick video Who is supposed to be watching these videos? In your honest, no-BS assessment, when you're staring at these Zooms you might be doing professionally with like 9 people and only 1 of them is an engineer, and he's offshore: like isn't that the problem?
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  This is news to me I don't recall having the need to use video to express anything that comes to code. Perhaps user interface stuff, yes. But code? Can't remember...
- deleted 3y ago
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- unixhero 3y ago
  People really don't like Atlassian around these parts
- krooj 3y ago
  I guarantee you the snark originates from a hatred of JIRA.
karaterobot 3y ago
Nah, Loom is a really valuable tool. I cannot count the number of meetings I've been able to skip because I could just send a video out for comments. It's also much better than screenshots for providing context to Jira tickets and bug reports.
- heisgone 3y ago
  Maybe the problem is need of fixing is "too many meetings".
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    Yep, and Loom is a good tool for that. That's why it's been so useful.
diogenes4 3y ago
YMMV of course but it is straightforwardly useful in my experience.
tristor 3y ago
Loom is the best option currently in the market for doing screencast recordings and demo recordings. I use it extensively, and started out using other alternatives like complex configurations in OBS. Loom is not only a superior UX, but the built-in web editor works perfectly without requiring the heavy weight of installing, learning, and using (and often paying for) a more pro-grade video editor for doing simple tasks. This may be because I'm a PM now, because I didn't do this type of thing as an engineer, but I have grown a huge appreciation for visual tools because "a picture is worth a thousand words". If I can show somebody the behavior that I am talking about, actually get a record of a bug happening, or build a demo that doesn't feel like a slide deck and is showing actual product experience, it has a deeper visceral impact on customers and engineers, and speeds up resolution time or identifying directionality of design.
joshstrange 3y ago
I don’t use it but I have a family member who uses it extensively and has a love-hate relationship with it (perfect for it to be owned by Atlassian). It’s a great tool _when it works_ and they’ve told me they would switch in an instant if there was something better. I guess it crashes and loses data for them semi-regularly, sometimes they have to contact support to find something the web/app lost. Personally I use, and love, CleanShotX but I don’t need to record my face and I’m not even sure if you can draw on the videos you create like you can in Loom. I use it mostly for annotating pictures. And before “macOS has this built in”, yes they do and what they provide is way better than nothing but it doesn’t hold a candle to CleanShotX. It’s way clunkier and hard to make edits once you’ve added something to the screenshot, CleanShotX is a breeze and being able to record video as a gif is awesome for bug tickets or documentation.
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andygcook 3y ago

For anyone else curious, Loom raised $205M with the last round at a $1.5B valuation. This deal is for $975M in cash. Sources: - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/loom https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/loom - https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenli1/2022/03/14/nearly-broke-to-15-billion-how-he-built-loom-and-grew-it-to-14-million-users/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenli1/2022/03/14/nearly-bro... - https://twitter.com/andrew__reed/status/1712458243883110599?s=46&t=AyPpMAhv4dl5_SNCRuKiSA https://twitter.com/andrew__reed/status/1712458243883110599?... (Edit: formatting)

pyrophane 3y ago
Without knowing the specific of their last round, does anyone have an idea of what selling at roughly 2/3 of their previous valuation likely means for their employees? I know that VCs typically have some kind of "upside protection" in later rounds that guarantees them first money out in the event of a sale on some multiple of their investment, but I don't know what terms are common.
- djbusby 3y ago
  Frequently Investors and Founders get money before Employees. Investors frequently have clauses (warrants/ratchet) to increase their position if the sale wasn't at some threshold, which will affect (to downside) the basis for Employees payout. If the Employee thought the stock was at $150/share at 1.5B they will get less than $97 on payout.
- gangstead 3y ago
  The startup system is pretty rigged against accidentally making anyone rich who is a mere employee. That money is for the investors, not the working class. The days of the office assistant making millions on stock are long gone. There's options with huge tax implications, long vesting periods, the investors get preferred stock, they get guaranteed multiples, if there's a down round there's a carve-out that you won't be part of. Not only do the investors have priority shares over employees, each investor can negotiate a guaranteed multiple. For example if they put in 100 million for 10% ownership but also had a 5X multiple guarantee and a sale price of 1 billion then the 500 million they walk away with ends up being 50% of the sale price. That part of the agreement isn't made public as far as I know.

Corrado 3y ago

Darn it! We just started looking at using Loom to enhance our development efforts. I'm loath to add another Atlassian product to our lineup though.

rasbt 3y ago
It's fascinating that it's a 1B business. I thought it was just uploading screen recordings to the cloud (basically UI around uploading. Like macOS QuickTime + YouTube private video upload)

athorax 3y ago

Who is asking for this? As Atlassian consolidates Loom into its platform, engineers will soon be able to visually log issues in Jira, leaders will use videos to connect with employees at scale, sales teams will send tailored video updates to clients, and HR teams will onboard new employees with personalized welcome videos

the8472 3y ago
> engineers will soon be able to visually log issues in Jira I already use windows game mode for screen captures. Why would I need a separate application for that?
- layer8 3y ago
  Where I’ve worked Game Mode was disabled by GPO in enterprise environments.
  - the8472 3y ago
    Disabling a built-in, non-networked feature and then replacing it with a cloud-linked, self-updating 3rd-party one doesn't seem like it would improve security.
    - layer8 3y ago
      They were using on-prem Atlassian, no cloud link and no self-updating, of course.
- becurious 3y ago
  I used to do that but you can record screen video with the Snipping Tool now. Works fine, mp4 file as output.
chrisandchris 3y ago
Generation TikTok?
tekla 3y ago

candiddevmike 3y ago

$1.5B for a screen recorder

a1o 3y ago
I thought it was a point and click game
- organsnyder 3y ago
  Ask me about it!
  - herman_toothrot 3y ago
    Is it more than 20 bucks?
    - organsnyder 3y ago
      Of course not! No one should spend more than 20 bucks for a computer game!
  - bentcorner 3y ago
    So, tell me about LOOM
    - organsnyder 3y ago
      You mean the latest masterpiece of fantasy storytelling from Lucasfilm's™ Brian Moriarty™? Why, it's an extraordinary adventure with an interface of magic, stunning, high-resolution, 3D landscapes, sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point 'n' click control of characters, objects, and magic spells. Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom™ today!
codegeek 3y ago
Reminds me of the infamous dropbox comment :)

Zambyte 3y ago

From loom.com > Loom works wherever you do. > Get Loom for Free > For Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android Looks like Loom does not work wherever I do.

pcmaffey 3y ago
Also loom does not work at all offline, even the video recording…
- butlike 3y ago
  I suspect this will become a more-and-more common occurance as deep fake videos become more ubiquitous. There will have to be some mechanism to validate the origin of the video is truly from the content creator. If the video was created offline and uploaded after the fact, who knows if it's generated audio super-imposed over a deep fake?
  - VTimofeenko 3y ago
    In that case it's possible to generate a deepfake offline, then open the video in a player and record that. I doubt online-ness by itself will do anything if it's still just a video signal leaving the machine.
CalRobert 3y ago
All of our backend devs (including myself) are on Linux (and use Firefox) so Loom was a nonstarter for us.
- otachack 3y ago
  It's always a blast when technology and marketing collide.
- j45 3y ago
  It’s surprising loom doesn’t work on Linux. I wonder why.

fishnchips 3y ago

Can they acquire Asana and merge it with Jira so that I can dislike one project management tool instead of two?

butlike 3y ago
Jirana or Asira? I'm drinking my morning Bawls with Guarana, reading Jirana!
sb8244 3y ago
Do you dislike the tools or dislike the process that gets created around the tools?
- malermeister 3y ago
  I dislike the tools for the process they encourage.
- fishnchips 3y ago
  I think both tools could use some serious UX love. The processes folks introduce around them - that's a different topic obviously. You can enforce atrocious processes with Trello or ClickUp but I find these much less bad.
nicoburns 3y ago
If you have influence on what tools you use at your place of work, then consider trying https://www.shortcut.com/ https://www.shortcut.com/. It's UX is IMO fantastic (and it's UI is fast) while being a lot more full-featured than something like Trello. (not associated with the company - just a happy customer who feels like they ought to be more widely known than they seem to be)
- fishnchips 3y ago
  I think my team looked into that, among good few others. There is a decent number of tools that would work better for dev/product teams, but if you want to have one solution for the whole company, the list is shorter. We're currently living with ClickUp.

gigatexal 3y ago

975M for what the company does seems awfully high imo. But nice exit all things considered for the Loom folks and their investors.

blairbeckwith 3y ago
companies are generally valued based on their revenue and user base rather than their product it is true that $975M is too high a price for a screen recorder when they could have bought a licence to Cleanshot for $19
- j45 3y ago
  Neat. Does cleanshot auto upload and process the video as well?
  - blairbeckwith 3y ago
    There is an associated cloud service called Cleanshot Cloud – all licenses get a small amount of storage for free, or you can upgrade to Unlimited for a monthly subscription. Alternatively, because it's a great native-first app, you can just set the saving directory to an existing cloud provider on your machine like Dropbox and let it handle uploading and serving the file.
    - j45 3y ago
      Associated? See the thing with something like loom is it just works. I used mono snap for a while for example. Native apps to capture are great but they seem to get acquired.
      - blairbeckwith 3y ago
        I'm not sure what your point is. Lots of apps, native or not, get acquired. What are we talking about here?

altdataseller 3y ago

For a second, I thought they acquired the diet app and were planning to diversify into the diet business

deleted 3y ago
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consumer451 3y ago

Tried out Loom, installed the desktop tool, took up >50% of CPU at random times when not being used. Nope, nope, nope.

jitl 3y ago

Bummer. Our sales and customer success people really like Loom, and users often send us loom recordings to report issues or suggest features. I’m not happy it’s Atlassian.

antondd 3y ago

What do you folks think Loom's revenue was in the recent years? I'm curious what the ARR multiple would be in this deal. 20X? 40X?

altdataseller 3y ago
Probably much much lower. If this was 2020 or 2021, perhaps, but multiples haven't even in that high in the public market for high growth companies for the past few years
- davinci123 3y ago
  You can do approximate math from Series C, where they raised $130M at $1.5B valuation - announced in May 2021. The ARR multiples in 2021 was 50X NTM ARR. They potentially hit $30M by end of 2021 (raised sometime late 2020/early 2021). Now even if they grew at 40-50% YoY CAGR (which is on the bullish side) - $60M-$70M ARR, approximately giving them a 10-12x ARR multiple for NTM revenue, put them squarely in the median to high-end valuation mutiple for PLG companies growing at 30-50% YoY (https://www.meritechcapital.com/benchmarking/historical-trading-data/ev-ntm-revenue https://www.meritechcapital.com/benchmarking/historical-trad...)

sb8244 3y ago

C'mon Atlassian, have the decency to throw another 25M their way...

davinci123 3y ago
Almost like buying a retail product for $9.99 :D

lijok 3y ago

People really will buy anything hey

NKosmatos 3y ago

Oh great, that’s what Jira and Confluence needed in order to make them more sluggish, less responsive and more user unfriendly… a video messaging platform integration. Good grief, who thinks of these things :-( With 1 billion and a team of software developers, I would put Jira and Confluence back on the right road, not acquire a video company ;-)

j45 3y ago
Agreed. The loom integration has been useful to attract some users who don’t use Jira otherwise. I just wish Jira-1369 would get solved after 20 years because users refuse to adopt Jira or confluence when they’re getting waterboarded with notifications instead of a timed digest that can be set.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Jira-1369 was closed four years ago.
  - j45 3y ago
    As one of jira’s bigger brain farts, it seems it’s was recreated and continued in a new ticket. Open: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-1369 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-1369 Closed: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369 The original JRA-1369 was opened in 2003. Addressed a little in 2019, but not the digests to solve it all. Odd since plug-ins have to. closing this is one way to improve optics I guess. Ps, I don’t hate Jira. Wasn’t a huge fan and it took a few years to see the light of what it does that so few platforms do when it comes to being able to absorb complexity as it evolves. Managing evolving complexity is a real thing, and the pain can be reduced by having more in one tool vs not. It’s a tough space, and I think Aha.Io is one tool suited to win their prize and grow into Jira’s space. Their worst sin remains how many people are subjected to an out of the box install compared to one that is setup to your processes. Tweaking it makes such a difference.
    - 3y ago

tiborsaas 3y ago

Great, more potential clients to sell Jira to :(

lasermike026 3y ago

Why is this a good thing?

usrnm 3y ago
Some people will get fat bonuses
blackoil 3y ago
Good for who? Receiving billion dollar must feel good.
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gjsman-1000 3y ago

Great, the developers of Jira are expanding their horizons. On the other hand, having used Loom a few times, I admit I can completely understand why. Loom is an almost unbelievable piece of software.

toddmorey 3y ago

This is a bummer. I really liked Loom. I was surprised to find some really neat video tools now by Prezi. Who else is doing good stuff around quick async collaboration?

alalani1 3y ago
I use Tella.tv which is effectively a Loom replacement but their desktop mac app hasn't ever crashed on me
gangstead 3y ago
It's kind of silly but at my work we're using Gather. Walking your little pixel art character around the "office" is silly at first, but it's really lowered the friction to short video interactions. It's way less friction than sending someone a link and waiting around for them to join a meeting.
- jeremy_k 3y ago
  We use Gather too; it's amazing for real time collaboration. I use Loom to summarize work and send updates to a larger audience in an async fashion.
ValentinTrinque 3y ago
Doist Inc. with Twist (https://twist.com https://twist.com). A sane replacement for slack that focus on making your life easier, and get actual job done by levering the concept of "threads" to make them first-class citizens that bridge the gap between instant chat where direct communication is needed and task manager where you need to declare a discussion to be open or closed. They side with the "Deep Work" philoshopy, and encourage (written) async collaboration.
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  Twist is much nicer than Slack in my opinion. The signal to noise ratio tends to be much better, and I find myself distracted by it far less because information I need is much easier to find when I need it.

antidnan 3y ago

I know screen recording tools are widely used in the engineering world... I always thought they were more impressive for how much they culturally normalized screen recording in the rest of the corporate world. Separately, I'm a big fan of cleanshotX.

passion__desire 3y ago
Isn't there a Mac app which can record your programming presentation or demo video and turn into slides using AI? That feature could be next step for Loom acquisition.
- dbish 3y ago
  We're a new startup that has recording -> docs, not slides yet, but it's easy enough to go that direction. We just started a beta of a product that is a drop in loom replacement and “smarter” in that we both generate doc artifacts and completely index not just what you said but what you showed on screen (OCR) and what you did (captured actions) to make everything easier to find, easier to get quick answers from (built in chat assistant who “watched” the video already), etc. Taking on new beta users and feedback on feature requests, check out a post about it here: https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 or drop me a note diamond@augmend.com

thenerdhead 3y ago

Glad for the founders, but I cannot help but think this is such an overpriced acquisition for a glorified screen capture tool and ecosystem. Now you can attach videos to jira tickets, seems a bit overkill.

objclxt 3y ago
It’s a bargain compared to their Series C valuation in 2021 of $1.5 billion.
- kylecordes 3y ago
  Ouch. I wonder how much of the exit value got absorbed by their preference stack.
- thenerdhead 3y ago
  Not really a discount if you arguably don't need to buy it in the first place! That valuation to begin with is ridiculous with their DAU.
binarymax 3y ago
At 25M users it's about $40 per user, and Atlassian needs some kind of screencast data to bolster their future in training project management models. Also, they can afford it, so it's a good time to get into the market.
- thenerdhead 3y ago
  Hopefully they aren't paying for all those ghost users from the pandemic hype. Could be a good acquisition but Atlassian somewhat known for just buying useless crap.
zelphirkalt 3y ago
Waiting for a future, where you cannot simply look at a ticket, but have to skip through a video over and over again, just like with voice messages that people send on messengers. Instead of having to think about clear writing in tickets, one has a vague not well defined speech in a video. Then maybe they will add automatic transcription and again people will think "Now it's all fine!", which of course it won't be.

willio58 3y ago

Anyone have a good alternative to loom? It’s honestly a great tool but I foresee the 20 free videos going away with this eventually

chenster 3y ago
To name a few, RecordIt (gif only), Camtasia, Snagit
dbish 3y ago
We just started a beta of a product that is a drop in loom replacement and “smarter” in that we completely index not just what you said but what you showed on screen (OCR) and what you did (captured actions) to make everything easier to find, easier to get quick answers from (built in chat assistant who “watched” the video already) and auto generate things like docs out of it. Looking for beta users and feedback on feature requests, check out a post about it here: https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 or drop me a note diamond@augmend.com
tln 3y ago
I switched to scre.io
nakodari 3y ago
You can try out Jumpshare (https://jumpshare.com https://jumpshare.com). We are seeing many people move to our platform from Loom. I am the founder so feel free to ask anything.
Zaheer 3y ago
Zappy from Zapier is free: https://zapier.com/zappy https://zapier.com/zappy
deleted 3y ago
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spdif899 3y ago
Screenstudio is incredible and a one time purchase

yesimahuman 3y ago

As a loom customer, color me very surprised. I did not expect it to have such a strong business since we generally just sporadically use it and it's a vitamin not a painkiller. Just goes to show how you can't accurately evaluate companies based on your own limited experience. Congrats to the team

davinci123 3y ago

Atlassian has a record of failed acquisitions: Bitbucket, HipChat, Trello, OpsGenie,.. and the list goes on. Add Loom to that list. In this market, when every single collab company is struggling, Atlassian goes and acquires a collab company when there are so many companies in the DevTools space or get your pick in AI. Spending a billion on a video sharing tool? Unsure what they were thinking and who all are advising the founders. I see the Aussie connection though..

namuol 3y ago
They didn’t spend a billion for the tech, they spent it for the huge userbase already full of fledgling enterprise leads. It’s a lead generation acquisition. I do hope they don’t ruin the product, though.
no_wizard 3y ago
I was not aware Trello is considered a failure. BitBucket and Hipchat, for sure. OpsGenie, until the really bad way they handled an outage last year, it was, sometimes begrudgingly, widely used, recommended sometimes even. Trello, on the other hand, seems like what everyone wants to use but no organization seems to want to let people use. Everyone that uses Trello seemingly, likes it

mschuster91 3y ago

Can Atlassian just for once first go and stabilize their existing product lineup before trying to shoehorn yet another thing into their offering? I mean, it's basic stuff that just isn't possible on JIRA Cloud for example, like setting a global sender address for notification emails - something perfectly possible on on-premise installations, but on Cloud you have to do that for each project and you can't even set it up as a default for new projects. Or maybe what about a first-party Terraform provider. Or a support that's actually worth the name instead of underpaid callcenter employees that seem to have to strictly follow some sort of script instead of actually being allowed to use their brains or to properly read what customers write them. That billion $ they just dumped out on this acquisition could have been invested into their existing products.

jordigg 3y ago

Loom is an excellent piece of software, but from my perspective in IT I've never been able to justify it's ROI. I've been always pushing for it to go away as soon as had to start looking at SaaS spend. Looking at the analytics only a few power users really made use of it while the biggest majority of users never used to record or maybe only recorded 1-2 videos a quarter. It was too expensive and video is very expensive to run on the cloud. Zoom released a competitor recently and that must be killing them. Other companies are also offering cheaper alternatives and egress traffic for video-centric businesses is crazy expensive. They had layoffs not so long ago, like many companies, and during my last negotiations with them they were very aggressive with pricing. Aggressive to the point of their executive team asking what amount we wanted to pay, and they actually committed to the price we offered... Glassdoor reviews and Blind comments weren't good at that time either, but that is true for most companies. I think they couldn't keep the revenue curve up-to-the-right to offer a decent return to their investors and it was turning more into an OK business. Time to sell, stay there for a year and move on to start their next thing. For Atlassian is a relevant acquisition, especially as they are also focusing more into chasing freshdesk or zendesk as a customer support platform. I wish them the best, as I said, the product itself was very well designed and engineered compared to any other alternatives out there. I think they missed to make it relevant and a must have for companies, maybe focusing more to sale to sales and customer experience/support teams which tend to have big budgets compared to other teams.

habosa 3y ago

Loom is probably the simplest billion-dollar piece of software, but it's also excellent software and I am happy they're getting paid. Screen recording before Loom was a pain. You had to open up some program, start it, save the file, upload the file somewhere, and share it. And if you had to edit the recording at all ... probably start over. With Loom it's all one click and it's ready to share the instant you hit the Stop button. At my company we make and share dozens of Looms per day and it's a key part of maintaining a remote culture.

segasuperstar 3y ago
My immediate reaction was that value-wise it was a joke, how can they be worth $1 billion? I agree with what you're saying here though, one click, ACL controlled and simple to use videos. Concur with the enablement of the remote culture. I would have thought Atlassian could clone that so simply. The Loom software is super buggy though, I have to open their site or extension or desktop app multiple times before it starts working, but when it does work the editing is just about OK. I have thought about using Google Meet to record my desktop, I've heard the editor in that is pretty good, and you can stop, start, trim/edit & share in Google Drive or share further with a link.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  > I have thought about using Google Meet to record my desktop, I've heard the editor in that is pretty good, and you can stop, start, trim/edit & share in Google Drive or share further with a link. Surely loom can't be any worse than google chrome
- Atotalnoob 3y ago
  They are worth $1 billion due to their customer base.
  - tootie 3y ago
    I think the concern is more that they have such a small moat. Their product seems too easy to copy. But given that they are first to market, did a very a good job with what they offer and have acquired a lot of customers, that is all worth a lot of money. Is "a lot" $1B? Hard to say.

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fortyseven 3y ago

That's silly, it's only like 9.99 on Steam. ;)

chungy 3y ago
$5.99 on GOG. That was my first thought as well. Hadn't heard of the Loom described in TFA before.

technics256 3y ago

If you have a mac, Cleanshot X I find is better across the board cleanshot.com

terpimost 3y ago
I wish they would have web/windows/linux version
- porridgeraisin 3y ago
  Sharex does all that and more, it's there for windows. I don't know the wine story for it though. It's a .net app
breakfastduck 3y ago
Absolutely brilliant software. I use it absolutely constantly at work, brilliant UX and it fits into macOS so well. Have yet to find anything remotely close in terms of quality for screen capture / annotation / recording.
m1keil 3y ago
+1. One of these apps that makes leaving macOS impossible.
xyst 3y ago
Such a clean app. Would probably use this if I haven’t mastered usage of Final Cut Pro. yes it’s overkill, but it’s one less tool I have to learn. I do like its ability to capture scrolling content. Would buy it just for that. Also a plus: one time fee w/ optional upgrades. Definitely a plus

zoogeny 3y ago

I applied to Loom several years ago while they were still tiny. The CEO sent me a Loom thanking me for applying and asking me to send him back a Loom describing why I was excited to work for his company. Something about that rubbed me the wrong way at the time. I didn't reply and dipped out of the interview process.

1123581321 3y ago
I like that. Much faster than writing a cover letter or application email and shows you understand what they make. I take it you weren’t that interested in their product.
WXLCKNO 3y ago
That's fine. Your options would have only been worth Checks notes Millions of dollars.
- woeirua 3y ago
  Nope. Loom was last valued at $1.5 billion in 2021, so with this acquisition a lot of people's options undoubtedly got totally wiped out due to liquidation preferences.
  - y_gy 3y ago
    This comment misunderstands how liq pref works. Liq pref is about the amount of money invested ($175M), not about the valuation. At a $975M exit and a par-for-the-course liq pref of 1.0, it is very likely that all shareholders will have made money on the exit.
    - claytonjy 3y ago
      Shareholders who got in before that last round, that is. Employees who joined in the last few years will likely have underwater options unless Loom internally repriced already-granted options.

chenster 3y ago

This reminds Buffer how simple the idea was and how well they executed it. A good product doesn't have to be complex.

simplyluke 3y ago

Interesting if not surprising to see the criticisms here. We use loom extensively at work and as a remote employee it’s one of my favorite collaboration tools. Sending a video explaining a problem while I walk through code is often much easier than getting on a zoom call, and Loom is absolutely easier and more feature-filled than other forms of screen capture.

zegerjan 3y ago
Whats wrong with the Slack version? It's on-par UX for me for recording, and wins just because it's already in Slack?
heisgone 3y ago
The issue that I have is that everyone that praise Loom are talking about how they enjoy using it to create videos. I don't hear anyone saying they enjoy consuming them. Do you?
- earthling8118 3y ago
  I can give you the opposite opinion. I hate loom. I've never made a video with it. I've only had the displeasure of meeting a few people who used it for everything. It isn't fun to use. I'd rather have a block of text and maybe some screenshots l.
deleted 3y ago
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zelphirkalt 3y ago

Future will tell, whether Loom becomes enshittified, like basically everything else Atlassian touches or produced. Lets see how much usability will be impacted by putting it behind attrocious Atlassian logins and adding new unwanted features and integrations to it.

conqrr 3y ago
It's almost a guarantee in SaaS. Look at Salesforce with Heroku, Tableau and Slack.

conqrr 3y ago

At some point, companies become big enough that innovation is a risk (Innovater's dilemma). Atlassian is likely at this stage. Ofcourse, loom's tech is nothing impressive, one could argue that only a small segment of enterprise Loom customers would be willing to convert to Atlassian ecosystem. Nonetheless, the show must go on and Atlassian has to choose action instead of inaction to please the stock market. Good exit for loom though!

faramarz 3y ago
I think it's more likely that Atlassian gives it away for free to its client base .. groups like Linear are coming after them and tools like Loom make a material difference in getting quality work out the door. we use it for outward facing and training material, but the royal honey is when you can async-align on product initiatives down to the pixel. Video is a powerful story telling tool in today's remote world. Figma on the other hand will have to sway towards Atlassian territory to add value to the tech bit of the pipeline. the dev mode has made it clear they are headed that way, on their own terms. I just wish that more founders prioritize enterprise customers and clear the way to onboard by investing in compliance (SOC-2) reporting early! it's a total showstopper and that's unfortunate for all sides.
- dalex00 3y ago
  Atlassian gives not much out for free the new whiteboard feature in confluence will also be monetizes like everything. E.g. automations for their products will cost soon meaning you need to upgrade your product to next tier. After we implemented everywhere...
eastbound 3y ago
Atlassian is not afraid of innovating, they can’t. They just hired the worst developers again and again. Good students go to Canva, dropouts go to Atlassian. Talk to partners. Everyone is pulling their hair at the new APIs. It’s architecturally bad, inside their systems. Even the architects are outputting crap! The best programmers of the company! I’ve move my data outside Atlassian to prevent loss…

pibefision 3y ago

Microsoft implemented the same functionality in Office365 (it's called Stream). I think it's a great exit to sell to Atlassian.

baq 3y ago
Timely, too; in a year everyone will have something like this
vxNsr 3y ago
I don't see where to use it or how, doesn't appear to allow you to record your screen...

paxys 3y ago

I like Loom, but once Slack launched clips and huddles there was really no reason to continue using it (nearly 100% of our usage was recording a video clip and posting it to Slack). Wonder what Atlassian has in store for the product.

a13o 3y ago
The 5 minute cap, and difficulty getting a slack video URL to paste into code review tool or bug tracking tool, is what led us away from Slack videos. If Slack stepped it up, it'd probably come down to who has the better bundle price.
Rapzid 3y ago
> Slack launched clip What?!!! I'm not sure how I haven't known about this. Been using Dropbox capture for basic stuff(obs for complicated).

itomato 3y ago

Is this another Bitbucket in the making?

Legion 3y ago

Ask me about LOOM

mayormcmatt 3y ago
So, tell me about LOOM.
- kridsdale3 3y ago
  There it is.
- bentcorner 3y ago
  You mean the sensational platform for video messaging and screen recording from the geniuses at Loom™? Ah, it's a revolutionary experience that'll transform how you communicate in the business landscape! Boasting an intuitive interface that even your grandma can use, jaw-dropping video quality, and super-speedy sharing capabilities. We're talking about top-notch encryption, folks, not to mention screen and camera recording with pixel-perfect clarity! No more tedious emails or confusing Slack threads. Simplify your life! Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom™ today!

sidcool 3y ago

Nobody likes Atlassian products but everyone uses them.

throwaway2990 3y ago

Another product for atlassian to trash!!! Awesome!

Spunkie 3y ago

I consult with a very large variety of businesses and literally my only interaction with loom in the wild is when a few LMS I'm in started randomly started replacing youtube embeds with loom embeds. Everyone hates it though because the loom embed player is hot garbage and actively distracts from the experience. I've heard much the same from most of my colleagues also going through the LMS courses. $1B seems a crazy price, but I guess overpriced garbage is right up Atlassians street.

mkjonesuk 3y ago

I use and love Loom. I am not happy about this. Their acquisition of Trello was very painful and our company stopped using it because of this. What alternatives to Loom Pro/Team would people recommend?

tqi 3y ago

If this[1] is accurate (a big if) 2023 rev is 35M, which would make this a ~30X multiple!? [1] https://getlatka.com/companies/loom https://getlatka.com/companies/loom

simantel 3y ago
1. Those numbers on Latka, ZoomInfo, etc. are often educated guesses. 2. The graph on Latka shows that $35M figure as being from 2021. 3. The 2021 fundraising announcement[0] said they grew revenue 1100% YoY that year, so the 30x multiple might be warranted. [0] https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-loom/ https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-loom/

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HL33tibCe7 3y ago

The natural cycle of enshittification of SaaS products continues

m3kw9 3y ago

If you have a mac, buy Compressor app from Apple set up Folder watch, use Zoom to start an empty video meeting to show video of yourself, minimize(shift cmd m) and float(cmd alt f) the zoom window, then use MacOS screen record(cmd shift 5) to record. I can get this screen grab setup up running in 10 seconds. You don’t need Loom for most cases

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codemac 3y ago
You can use quicktime to show your webcam + cmd-shift-5 as well.
- m3kw9 3y ago
  QuickTime if you used it has a huge window at its minimum that blocks a lot of screen, zoom allows a small one
aosaigh 3y ago
This is such an on-brand HN response. “You don’t need Loom, just do these [10 inconvenient steps] and it’s the same”. How do you share and upload those videos? Where are they hosted? Can you set a CTA on the video? Get transcripts? Find who has viewed your video? Add a custom thumbnail? Get comments on your video? Set a description? These are all baked-in things that Loom handles, not to mention one-click recording that doesn’t involve wiring together 3 different apps.
- Nezteb 3y ago
  Agreed, especially because Compressor is $50: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/compressor/id424390742 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/compressor/id424390742 At that point, you may as well just buy CleanShot X for $30: https://cleanshot.com/ https://cleanshot.com/
  - m3kw9 3y ago

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constantlm 3y ago

great exit, but rip

warthog 3y ago

Don't know why Techcrunch almost literally shit on Loom in the article - https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/12/atlassian-to-acquire-former-unicorn-loom-for-975m/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/12/atlassian-to-acquire-forme... They sold for almost 50% less than their last raise but selling a clip recorder product for US$ 1bn is still a big achievement and it is indeed a good software product. Curious on the multiples they paid though. My guess => US$ 30 MM ARR @ 30x revenue multiple

peanuty1 3y ago
I feel bad for the employees who joined at the previous valuation though.

pcurve 3y ago

Maybe it's just me, but in the video, the founder doesn't seem all that excited about the acquisition. It's almost like he's having second thoughts, but it's too late to back out.

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Command + Shift + 5 Just be sure to click Options -> (pick a mic) the first time Now what happened to iMovie ... ?

xyst 3y ago

What’s the point in this acquisition? Why do enterprise projects need short form videos (aka Tik Tok)? Atlassian products are already dog shit slow. Add in the number of plugins that admins add over the years plus processing and hosting of videos … It’s going to be a hot mess. Would hate to be the person on the project that has diminished vision or completely blind. Screen readers don’t stand a chance against QA’s short form videos with no audio or description of the bug or feature. Seems like bloat to me. Atlassian trying too hard to become the sole solution for project management.

prometheon1 3y ago
Text to speech models like Whisper are getting good enough that screen readers would stand a chance. The video itself is still more difficult to caption, but the things that would be shared in video are probably being shared with screenshots right now, so it would not be worse.

hacknews20 3y ago

I hope they don't take this private or make it an Atlassian bundle only thing, as Loom is excellent.

XavierFras 3y ago

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