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Slack raises $120M Led by Google Ventures and KPCB at $1.12B Valuation

212 points by BIackSwan 12y ago

austenallred 12y ago
Our (small) team adores slack. I didn't even realize what the pricing was when we first started - I thought it was free forever with some freemium features. Then all the sudden we hit our quota (after a month of heavy, heavy use), and paying for the full subscription was a no-brainer. The product truly is fantastic, and we'll pay for it all day long.
- warcode 12y ago
  It is free forever, as long as you don't require more than 10,000 searchable messages in the archive or over 5 external integrations.
damon_c 12y ago
In my experience and having tried everything since Google Wave, Slack is the first platform to come along that has really significantly reduced email usage while improving team communication. I predict that it is really going to be huge.
jonathanwallace 12y ago
I feel like Slack is what Campfire should've been. Or what IRC with a fast, searchable history and a decent GUI is.
stevebot 12y ago
Having used Slack I found it ammusing the way they describe it: Slack, the enterprise collaboration platform It actually is true and a great way to market. 1.2B valuation seems high, but I guess this is a lesson that you can do the same thing everyone else has done, but do it better ( or at least differently) and actually be successful. Sometimes hard to believe that.
thearn4 12y ago
$1.12B kind of blows my mind, but me and my team really do love the service.
pkorzeniewski 12y ago
Everyone praises Slack here but I find e-mail + IM completely sufficient and I work in a very large company.. Something urgent? Use IM. Something can wait? Use e-mail. It's that simple.
- Synergyse 12y ago
  The integrations, history and ambient awareness it creates are what makes it unique.
  - pkorzeniewski 12y ago
    Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well - services send you e-mails when something happens (which you can filter to different folders, you get desktop notifications and so on); you have a full history as well and at least at my company we have an "off-topic" group, which can be easily filtered out if you don't want to be bothered. To be honest a live chat seems to me like a bad idea at a company, because it just encourages people to spam. I don't know, maybe I just prefer an efficient use of simple tools.
    - stevebot 12y ago
      You get that, but not in the same user friendly way. Plus email is passive, while chat is active. I think this is the main selling point of chat. With email you do not get the same feeling as a chat room, and maybe that feeling is what drives people to use Slack, Hipchat etc.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      >Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well Things that "you get with technology X" by having to do 10 extra steps and have everybody else on the team do the same to get the same benefits do not count.
  - AndrewKemendo 12y ago
    ambient awareness This was a new term for me so I looked it up and quite frankly that sounds like a terrible overload of info.
B5geek 12y ago
I must be in the minority (based on the comments that I have read), but I hate it. The other day the PHB announces to the office: We are going to use Slack and move away from IM, Skype, etc. So I signed up. What I don't like: -you need to keep a a tab open all the time, -you need to keep an eye on that tab in case something comes up, -the 'notifications' don't work all the time (Archlinux + Firefox) It's like somebody took all the bad qualities of IRC, and shoehorned it into a web-page and all the horror that brings. The features that I don't understand: search-able logging of messages. Email and/or Pidgin already does that. Group messages: Email already does that. Transferring of files: Email and/or corporate LAN shares already do that. But it does add the necessity of stopping my workflow every 5-10 minutes so I can check to see if there are any messages that _might_ apply to me. The quicker it can be killed with fire the happier I will be. Or am I missing the point? curmudgeonly - check beard - check Unix admin - check Perhaps there is no hope for me. Next thing you know people will want to take pictures with their cellphones! =)
- vertex-four 12y ago
  > you need to keep a a tab open all the time Chrome lets you create apps that open in separate windows.[0] Then it's precisely as bad as any other IM app. > you need to keep an eye on that tab in case something comes up If your team members don't @ you when something might be relevant to you, sure. However, if they don't, you can just check every hour or so and get back to them. That's the beauty of Slack - it sits somewhere between IM and email, not everything has to be instant (because everything's saved and you can read it at your pace) but it has the ability to be used as such when enough people are around. Eleven Giants, the team working on repairing Tiny Speck's previous game, uses Slack like this. Nobody's ever all going to be on at the same time, but everyone can join discussions. > the 'notifications' don't work all the time (Archlinux + Firefox) Never had this issue - I'd blame you using a "bleeding edge" distro.
  - fyolnish 12y ago
    Yes I think you have the philosophy of the web nailed perfectly. Let's all have a chrome tab running continuously
javery 12y ago
The most interesting things to me is that Campfire was around before this and Hipchat before that. It goes to show that execution is everything, Slack has completely crushed it from a feature and integration standpoint and the polish is amazing. We switched from Hipchat and we didn't really have a good reason - it just felt better. If Campfire was growing $1MM a month I am pretty sure 37signals would now be called Campfire and not Basecamp.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >and the polish is amazing Polish? It looks and feels like a ho-hum single page app (which it is).
  - dasil003 12y ago
    Oh please. Ho-hum? Name 5 web apps that with more impressive UX.
    - ParadoxOryx 12y ago
      Google Inbox, for one :)
      - untog 12y ago
        Provided you're using Chrome, the only browser it supports.
      - shostack 12y ago
        As an active Slack user who started testing out Inbox--there is zero comparison. Inbox has some slick items for sure, but is nowhere near as intuitive as Slack.
      - youssifa 12y ago
        And yet, Google led the round.
    - coldtea 12y ago
tzakrajs 12y ago
How Atlassian of them.
rabino 12y ago
I'm so happy for them. Great team and great product.
yarone 12y ago
Multiple folks have told me that Slack is the very first app that they check when they wake up in the morning. And then they use it for hours every single day. To me, that's an incredibly powerful fact. Not many apps comsume user attention like that.
- lbotos 12y ago
  While that's true, I mean I _have_ to as that where the communication for my team happens. It's not like Slack did anything particularly inventive. They just happened to be "not HipChat" (Which we used to use but Slack just had that "cool new" factor)
  - jdimov 12y ago
    That's exactly the point. "Just" being a "not Google" just might make you a trillionaire.
- kbar13 12y ago
  s/Slack/<insert any IM service here>/g Your statement is still true.
massel 12y ago
Serious question, can someone explain why a team using Hipchat should switch to slack?
- tonyhb 12y ago
  The major benefit of slack over hipchat is slack comes with integrations by default. IE: instead of having to use Zapier or such to hook into Trello slack can handle it for you. HipChat only has an API you push to, whereas Slack can pull from other services. We tried it and kept with HipChat. I found Slack's interface/text to be less readable than HipChat. It might look better, but for reading information and usability HipChat won. Our entire team is happy with our choice.
- jamiequint 12y ago
  search actually works, which is a big win
- hanley 12y ago
  HipChat integrations can be frustrating/lacking and I often find myself resorting to Zapier. The integration with JIRA is a joke and a huge pain to setup/manage for large workflows, which is especially surprising since HipChat and JIRA are both part of Atlassian. I do like the newest version of the HipChat Mac app a lot though. I'm not sure the integration frustrations merit the 4x cost increase in switching to Slack though. Hard to justify that unless your team is very small.
jscheel 12y ago
For the people who say group messaging is fine in email: are you all masochists? Seriously, if I have one more 45-email thread between 3 different people, I'm going to smack somebody. There is a time and place for email, but group chat is not it.
OoTheNigerian 12y ago
HipChat slacked (I know..;) ). They had this IM for business covered. Then The Slack people came in and took the integration thing seriously. HipChat seems to have felt the competition and now they are taking it seriously. I use HipChat with my distributed team and it works VERY well. HipChat has Android and Windows native clients and have now set up a serious API. The Windows app need some work though. HipChat is free and you can get all and more of what Slack offers at a VERY affordable cost of $2/month. HipChat also uses standardized protocol of XMPP. Sqwiggle now looks like it could be very attractive to slack with their video technology. Except that raise a lot of money soon, I'm predicting an acquisition. PS: I have no relationship with HipChat. I am just a happy user :)
- jusben1369 12y ago
  We switched from HipChat to Slack (my devs just made the "executive decision" one morning last April and we were done!) As a "Biz" guy I liked HipChat more. I thought it was cleaner and simpler to use and initially had better support for Android. And then when they added video/voice support (after we stopped using it) I cried a little as that's the only reason I still keep Skype open. Still I suspect Slack will use these $$'s to solve voice/video and I love the backstory so it's likely the right long term option for us.
  - adieth 12y ago
    I don't understand why so many people use Slack, while it is completely lacking voice and video. Looking at HipChat and Slack now, I would select HipChat because of the video and screen sharing features.
brianstorms 12y ago
IRC FTW. Slack gets big, gets acquired, integrates with Outlook, SAP, etc., becomes Outlook & SAP, nobody ever got fired for using Slack, etc., etc., Stewart becomes a billionaire, yadda yadda. Meanwhile, IRC.
- dasil003 12y ago
  Why would I forego the use of a tool that gives me dramatically more productivity right now than I could get even spending 100 hours configuring and managing an IRC server on the prediction that some years from now Slack is going to suck? I understand using IRC because of privacy concerns or you have very specific workflows, or just because you like managing your own services. But the threat of future changes is not a credible reason to avoid Slack. When it starts to suck, you just switch.
  - philsnow 12y ago
    It takes less than an hour to set up an IRCd, even with SSL. Slack has a bunch of advantages over irc, though: clients for many platforms, connections go over HTTPS (non-issue for firewalls, whereas IRC connections are sometimes non-trivial), cross-platform notifications, inlining of some content (slack calls this "unfurling"). Their trump card, however, is the simple third-party integrations support. In ~30 seconds, I can write an integration that e.g. watches the git repository on a machine and sends a message to a specific slack channel when the HEAD changes. Yes, you can do this with an irc bot as well, but: you have to get that irc bot (maybe it's a library, a binary, whatever) to where you want to run it, and you have to write a few lines of code. Whereas with Slack, you can just curl an https endpoint from bash. There's no need to deploy anything, it's all there, and it's simpler to use. I've seen less-neck-beardy teammates throw together slack integrations that have helped out quite a lot. Slack lowers the bar to not just team chatting, but making the team chat work for the team's environment. In that it's a bit like emacs. It lets the team change it to fit their usage.
- Domenic_S 12y ago
  Connect to slack over IRC! https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec...
ravivyas 12y ago
What I really like about Slack is that it reduces the amount of office email. I also love the number of integrations they have. For me Slack + Trello really work for an enterprise. I know they are looking for a Windows Phone guy to build their WP app, good time to join them I guess.
nc 12y ago
Wonder if they'll offer to buy MetaLab now.
kingrolo 12y ago
Also, the Slackbot is the friendliest bot I've come across.
chatmasta 12y ago
Slack has been around since February 2014. An eight-month-old company raising $120M is damn impressive, no matter how you spin it. This is just another testament to b2b software. They only have a couple thousand customers, but that's enough to get them a $1.12B valuation. If my mental math is right, that's roughly 200k per current customer? This is probably a strategic play on the part of GV/KPCB, moving into the enterprise market where they already have investments. They will leverage partnerships with other portfolio companies to multiply Slack's revenue, likely bringing that valuation in range closer to $XX,000 per customer -- far more reasonable in Enterprise. Nice job Slack!
- seanlinehan 12y ago
  ~$15k per current customer
  - chatmasta 12y ago
    Sounds like a bargain.
- hobofan 12y ago
  Slack has been in beta since August 2013 [1] and Tiny Speck exists since 2009. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/12/slack-exits-beta/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/12/slack-exits-beta/
blumkvist 12y ago
Anyone remember Yammer?
cjbarber 12y ago
Wow. Just goes to show that this is definitely a great time to raise money! Personally, I think Slack is smart to take the cash, although obviously it's going to require some serious discipline from them to make sure that it only helps them rather than hinders them. I'm not an employee/investor/etc but I've been convincing freinds to apply to work at slack recently, I think if you are obsessed with productivity tools or communication tools, Slack, Asana or Quip are all companies worth looking at. There's a compiled set of info on working at slack [1]. Disclaimer: I compiled it! Back to my first point - now they have a ton of cash to hire a ton of people - very curious to see @slack in 6-12 months. [1]: http://www.breakoutlist.com/slack/ http://www.breakoutlist.com/slack/
gtirloni 12y ago
First thought: "Why is Google VC investing in Slackware?" Made my heart rate accelerate I little bit.
general_failure 12y ago
I will add this to the list of things that I thought can never be worth so much :-( /me just do something already
burpee 12y ago
I don't really see how this is worth a 1.12B valuation - even with this amount of users. I also think that the pricing for Slack is over the top. I used Flowdock https://www.flowdock.com/ https://www.flowdock.com/ for about a year for a distributed team, before Slack even existed. From what I can tell Slack is a direct copy of Flowdock from top to bottom in regards to features, while Flowdock charges $3/mo/user.
- misuba 12y ago
  Slack is massively better at dealing with documents.
  - arnauddri 12y ago
    dealing with documents is a billion dollar feature?
    - csallen 12y ago
      Companies aren't valued on features. They're valued on how much money investors think they can make, which is usually a function of how fast they can acquire users, which is often greatly affected by their execution on simple features.
    - ccallebs 12y ago
      For enterprise (large, bureaucratic organizations), I imagine that it would be.
  - burpee 12y ago
    I don't really see the difference. Care to elaborate?
thinkingkong 12y ago
I know you should take money when you can, but part of me is wondering if this is indicitive of some kind of "winter" coming for VC funding. If slack is growing that quickly, why not wait another 6 months and drive for a better valuation?
- llamataboot 12y ago
  The growth seems baked into this (really high) valuation to me.
  - bostonvaulter2 12y ago
    There's a lot of money in replacing (a significant portion of ) email with an actual better solution.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mwarkentin 12y ago
I've been using Slack by myself as a replacement for email notifications from various services for my side projects and open-source projects. Works quite well!
bsjolund 12y ago
Nice to see a decent Flowdock competitor, but I still don't see a reason to switch.
- lucisferre 12y ago
  We switched for largely arbitrary reasons. I do really like the Slack experience, I'd say I prefer it in some ways. But Flowdock was also great, no real complaints there at all.
  - yesimahuman 12y ago
    A sign that the switching costs are maybe not that big. We went from campfire to hipchat to slack. And each time we were happy to move on despite a history of chat messages (old documents aren't that useful since anything important is in Dropbox). Interesting phenomenon.
dkrich 12y ago
I just don't see how SaaS at this scale can ever be profitable. Asana, Slack, and the like have to support large teams while the enterprise sales cycle is extraordinarily expensive. If you're Oracle and can charge $5k a seat plus consulting fees, then sure, I understand it. If you're an also-ran SaaS business charging $8 a user, you're never going to be profitable. All of these are just different spins on the same communication features. There's nothing that's really defensible about any of them.
- marcog1 12y ago
  Asana engineer here. With such a large market size, we can scale the sales process to make it inexpensive. We only have a couple sales people. User operations, i.e. keeping customers, is larger but still in all less than 10.
lazzlazzlazz 12y ago
There are no discernible improvements over HipChat. I don't understand what the fuss is about. We're in a bizarro-world.
rdl 12y ago
I basically hate every one of these services that I've ever used. Crashy, resource-intensive clients. At work we use HipChat which is "better than skype", but still pretty crap. In stark contrast to the rest of the Atlassian suite which is basically good. IRC, in the form of irssi+screen on some kind of unix host, is however awesome. There's no great mobile solution, and OTR crypto should be available on top. What's amazing to me is so many companies in this space and so much money and all the products suck.
- ottumm 12y ago
  I believe you can use IRC clients to connect to both HipChat and Slack.
  - rdl 12y ago
    XMPP clients (e.g. Pidgin/Adium). But they block OTR (at least HipChat does), and you lose most of the functionality.
    - heymishy 12y ago
      isn't the point to block OTR. a core concept of both of them is knowledge capture and searchability which can't be done properly if your only having part of the conversation.
      - rdl 12y ago
        I have no desire to have knowledge capture and searchability when I IM a coworker with a password.
d0m 12y ago
I'd love to know more about why did Slack were able to get so much traction and raise that much money compared to Flowdock/Groove.io/Hipchat. I've used Flowdock in the past and tried Hipchat too. I've also been a huge IRC fan when I was younger. I don't see that much of a difference between those and Slack.. Maybe: - More intuitive for people who don't already know IRC. - Really cross-platform - Well integrated with various tools people love. - Very good "on-boarding" flow. But still, the difference in term of traction is massive, am I missing something? Personally, I think we switched because I was a bit frustrated about the status quo. IRC was too complex for non-tech and didn't have a good cross-platform integrated solution. Hipchat app just felt so clunky and ugly.. same with Campfire, it felt really old. I've used and liked Flowdock but I thought it was just too much with widgets all over the place and smart inbox, where what I wanted was "just" a "IRC" I could use with colleagues. Thoughts?
- notatoad 12y ago
  Is Slack actually as popular as it seems to be? I feel like i hear a lot more about HipChat in various forums/reddit/HN than I do about Slack, but i hear a lot more about Slack on blogposts and news articles. Is it actually being used more, or is it just being written about more?
- pbiggar 12y ago
  The difference in traction is insane! Slack has 15,000 companies paying them in a few weeks after launch. In the article it says they have $1m/mo revenue - that's incredible for such a young company. Investors are making a bet that this is indicative that slack are going to take over the entire enterprise communication space.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  Also, mobile integration. Your not going to easily get push based notifications for irc on your iphone as far as I know.
fourstar 12y ago
The issue with slack is that they have these NUX notifications all over the place. If your product is that complicated, there's probably a deeper issue.
inthewoods 12y ago
Is anyone on this thread using Slack (or Hipchat et al) outside of development? I've seen it be useful (along with Hipchat) with development and, to a lesser extent, design (UX/UI) - but outside of that no one seems interested. Just curious if others have the same experience. I was talking to a VP of Sales from another company that had adopted Flowdock and asked her what she thought of it - her response: "I hate it." Saw the same reaction to Salesforce Chatter. With $120m, I hope they bring group video chat to Slack and a dedicated windows client.

212 points by BIackSwan 12y ago

Our (small) team adores slack. I didn't even realize what the pricing was when we first started - I thought it was free forever with some freemium features. Then all the sudden we hit our quota (after a month of heavy, heavy use), and paying for the full subscription was a no-brainer. The product truly is fantastic, and we'll pay for it all day long.

warcode 12y ago
It is free forever, as long as you don't require more than 10,000 searchable messages in the archive or over 5 external integrations.

damon_c 12y ago

In my experience and having tried everything since Google Wave, Slack is the first platform to come along that has really significantly reduced email usage while improving team communication. I predict that it is really going to be huge.

jonathanwallace 12y ago

I feel like Slack is what Campfire should've been. Or what IRC with a fast, searchable history and a decent GUI is.

stevebot 12y ago

Having used Slack I found it ammusing the way they describe it: Slack, the enterprise collaboration platform It actually is true and a great way to market. 1.2B valuation seems high, but I guess this is a lesson that you can do the same thing everyone else has done, but do it better ( or at least differently) and actually be successful. Sometimes hard to believe that.

thearn4 12y ago

$1.12B kind of blows my mind, but me and my team really do love the service.

pkorzeniewski 12y ago

Everyone praises Slack here but I find e-mail + IM completely sufficient and I work in a very large company.. Something urgent? Use IM. Something can wait? Use e-mail. It's that simple.

Synergyse 12y ago
The integrations, history and ambient awareness it creates are what makes it unique.
- pkorzeniewski 12y ago
  Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well - services send you e-mails when something happens (which you can filter to different folders, you get desktop notifications and so on); you have a full history as well and at least at my company we have an "off-topic" group, which can be easily filtered out if you don't want to be bothered. To be honest a live chat seems to me like a bad idea at a company, because it just encourages people to spam. I don't know, maybe I just prefer an efficient use of simple tools.
  - stevebot 12y ago
    You get that, but not in the same user friendly way. Plus email is passive, while chat is active. I think this is the main selling point of chat. With email you do not get the same feeling as a chat room, and maybe that feeling is what drives people to use Slack, Hipchat etc.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well Things that "you get with technology X" by having to do 10 extra steps and have everybody else on the team do the same to get the same benefits do not count.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  ambient awareness This was a new term for me so I looked it up and quite frankly that sounds like a terrible overload of info.

B5geek 12y ago

I must be in the minority (based on the comments that I have read), but I hate it. The other day the PHB announces to the office: We are going to use Slack and move away from IM, Skype, etc. So I signed up. What I don't like: -you need to keep a a tab open all the time, -you need to keep an eye on that tab in case something comes up, -the 'notifications' don't work all the time (Archlinux + Firefox) It's like somebody took all the bad qualities of IRC, and shoehorned it into a web-page and all the horror that brings. The features that I don't understand: search-able logging of messages. Email and/or Pidgin already does that. Group messages: Email already does that. Transferring of files: Email and/or corporate LAN shares already do that. But it does add the necessity of stopping my workflow every 5-10 minutes so I can check to see if there are any messages that _might_ apply to me. The quicker it can be killed with fire the happier I will be. Or am I missing the point? curmudgeonly - check beard - check Unix admin - check Perhaps there is no hope for me. Next thing you know people will want to take pictures with their cellphones! =)

vertex-four 12y ago
> you need to keep a a tab open all the time Chrome lets you create apps that open in separate windows.[0] Then it's precisely as bad as any other IM app. > you need to keep an eye on that tab in case something comes up If your team members don't @ you when something might be relevant to you, sure. However, if they don't, you can just check every hour or so and get back to them. That's the beauty of Slack - it sits somewhere between IM and email, not everything has to be instant (because everything's saved and you can read it at your pace) but it has the ability to be used as such when enough people are around. Eleven Giants, the team working on repairing Tiny Speck's previous game, uses Slack like this. Nobody's ever all going to be on at the same time, but everyone can join discussions. > the 'notifications' don't work all the time (Archlinux + Firefox) Never had this issue - I'd blame you using a "bleeding edge" distro.
- fyolnish 12y ago
  Yes I think you have the philosophy of the web nailed perfectly. Let's all have a chrome tab running continuously

javery 12y ago

The most interesting things to me is that Campfire was around before this and Hipchat before that. It goes to show that execution is everything, Slack has completely crushed it from a feature and integration standpoint and the polish is amazing. We switched from Hipchat and we didn't really have a good reason - it just felt better. If Campfire was growing $1MM a month I am pretty sure 37signals would now be called Campfire and not Basecamp.

coldtea 12y ago
>and the polish is amazing Polish? It looks and feels like a ho-hum single page app (which it is).
- dasil003 12y ago
  Oh please. Ho-hum? Name 5 web apps that with more impressive UX.
  - ParadoxOryx 12y ago
    Google Inbox, for one :)
    - untog 12y ago
      Provided you're using Chrome, the only browser it supports.
    - shostack 12y ago
      As an active Slack user who started testing out Inbox--there is zero comparison. Inbox has some slick items for sure, but is nowhere near as intuitive as Slack.
    - youssifa 12y ago
      And yet, Google led the round.
  - coldtea 12y ago

tzakrajs 12y ago

How Atlassian of them.

rabino 12y ago

I'm so happy for them. Great team and great product.

yarone 12y ago

Multiple folks have told me that Slack is the very first app that they check when they wake up in the morning. And then they use it for hours every single day. To me, that's an incredibly powerful fact. Not many apps comsume user attention like that.

lbotos 12y ago
While that's true, I mean I _have_ to as that where the communication for my team happens. It's not like Slack did anything particularly inventive. They just happened to be "not HipChat" (Which we used to use but Slack just had that "cool new" factor)
- jdimov 12y ago
  That's exactly the point. "Just" being a "not Google" just might make you a trillionaire.
kbar13 12y ago
s/Slack/<insert any IM service here>/g Your statement is still true.

massel 12y ago

Serious question, can someone explain why a team using Hipchat should switch to slack?

tonyhb 12y ago
The major benefit of slack over hipchat is slack comes with integrations by default. IE: instead of having to use Zapier or such to hook into Trello slack can handle it for you. HipChat only has an API you push to, whereas Slack can pull from other services. We tried it and kept with HipChat. I found Slack's interface/text to be less readable than HipChat. It might look better, but for reading information and usability HipChat won. Our entire team is happy with our choice.
jamiequint 12y ago
search actually works, which is a big win
hanley 12y ago
HipChat integrations can be frustrating/lacking and I often find myself resorting to Zapier. The integration with JIRA is a joke and a huge pain to setup/manage for large workflows, which is especially surprising since HipChat and JIRA are both part of Atlassian. I do like the newest version of the HipChat Mac app a lot though. I'm not sure the integration frustrations merit the 4x cost increase in switching to Slack though. Hard to justify that unless your team is very small.

jscheel 12y ago

For the people who say group messaging is fine in email: are you all masochists? Seriously, if I have one more 45-email thread between 3 different people, I'm going to smack somebody. There is a time and place for email, but group chat is not it.

OoTheNigerian 12y ago

HipChat slacked (I know..;) ). They had this IM for business covered. Then The Slack people came in and took the integration thing seriously. HipChat seems to have felt the competition and now they are taking it seriously. I use HipChat with my distributed team and it works VERY well. HipChat has Android and Windows native clients and have now set up a serious API. The Windows app need some work though. HipChat is free and you can get all and more of what Slack offers at a VERY affordable cost of $2/month. HipChat also uses standardized protocol of XMPP. Sqwiggle now looks like it could be very attractive to slack with their video technology. Except that raise a lot of money soon, I'm predicting an acquisition. PS: I have no relationship with HipChat. I am just a happy user :)

jusben1369 12y ago
We switched from HipChat to Slack (my devs just made the "executive decision" one morning last April and we were done!) As a "Biz" guy I liked HipChat more. I thought it was cleaner and simpler to use and initially had better support for Android. And then when they added video/voice support (after we stopped using it) I cried a little as that's the only reason I still keep Skype open. Still I suspect Slack will use these $$'s to solve voice/video and I love the backstory so it's likely the right long term option for us.
- adieth 12y ago
  I don't understand why so many people use Slack, while it is completely lacking voice and video. Looking at HipChat and Slack now, I would select HipChat because of the video and screen sharing features.

brianstorms 12y ago

IRC FTW. Slack gets big, gets acquired, integrates with Outlook, SAP, etc., becomes Outlook & SAP, nobody ever got fired for using Slack, etc., etc., Stewart becomes a billionaire, yadda yadda. Meanwhile, IRC.

dasil003 12y ago
Why would I forego the use of a tool that gives me dramatically more productivity right now than I could get even spending 100 hours configuring and managing an IRC server on the prediction that some years from now Slack is going to suck? I understand using IRC because of privacy concerns or you have very specific workflows, or just because you like managing your own services. But the threat of future changes is not a credible reason to avoid Slack. When it starts to suck, you just switch.
- philsnow 12y ago
  It takes less than an hour to set up an IRCd, even with SSL. Slack has a bunch of advantages over irc, though: clients for many platforms, connections go over HTTPS (non-issue for firewalls, whereas IRC connections are sometimes non-trivial), cross-platform notifications, inlining of some content (slack calls this "unfurling"). Their trump card, however, is the simple third-party integrations support. In ~30 seconds, I can write an integration that e.g. watches the git repository on a machine and sends a message to a specific slack channel when the HEAD changes. Yes, you can do this with an irc bot as well, but: you have to get that irc bot (maybe it's a library, a binary, whatever) to where you want to run it, and you have to write a few lines of code. Whereas with Slack, you can just curl an https endpoint from bash. There's no need to deploy anything, it's all there, and it's simpler to use. I've seen less-neck-beardy teammates throw together slack integrations that have helped out quite a lot. Slack lowers the bar to not just team chatting, but making the team chat work for the team's environment. In that it's a bit like emacs. It lets the team change it to fit their usage.
Domenic_S 12y ago
Connect to slack over IRC! https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec...

ravivyas 12y ago

What I really like about Slack is that it reduces the amount of office email. I also love the number of integrations they have. For me Slack + Trello really work for an enterprise. I know they are looking for a Windows Phone guy to build their WP app, good time to join them I guess.

nc 12y ago

Wonder if they'll offer to buy MetaLab now.

kingrolo 12y ago

Also, the Slackbot is the friendliest bot I've come across.

chatmasta 12y ago

Slack has been around since February 2014. An eight-month-old company raising $120M is damn impressive, no matter how you spin it. This is just another testament to b2b software. They only have a couple thousand customers, but that's enough to get them a $1.12B valuation. If my mental math is right, that's roughly 200k per current customer? This is probably a strategic play on the part of GV/KPCB, moving into the enterprise market where they already have investments. They will leverage partnerships with other portfolio companies to multiply Slack's revenue, likely bringing that valuation in range closer to $XX,000 per customer -- far more reasonable in Enterprise. Nice job Slack!

seanlinehan 12y ago
~$15k per current customer
- chatmasta 12y ago
  Sounds like a bargain.
hobofan 12y ago
Slack has been in beta since August 2013 [1] and Tiny Speck exists since 2009. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/12/slack-exits-beta/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/12/slack-exits-beta/

blumkvist 12y ago

Anyone remember Yammer?

cjbarber 12y ago

Wow. Just goes to show that this is definitely a great time to raise money! Personally, I think Slack is smart to take the cash, although obviously it's going to require some serious discipline from them to make sure that it only helps them rather than hinders them. I'm not an employee/investor/etc but I've been convincing freinds to apply to work at slack recently, I think if you are obsessed with productivity tools or communication tools, Slack, Asana or Quip are all companies worth looking at. There's a compiled set of info on working at slack [1]. Disclaimer: I compiled it! Back to my first point - now they have a ton of cash to hire a ton of people - very curious to see @slack in 6-12 months. [1]: http://www.breakoutlist.com/slack/ http://www.breakoutlist.com/slack/

gtirloni 12y ago

First thought: "Why is Google VC investing in Slackware?" Made my heart rate accelerate I little bit.

general_failure 12y ago

I will add this to the list of things that I thought can never be worth so much :-( /me just do something already

burpee 12y ago

I don't really see how this is worth a 1.12B valuation - even with this amount of users. I also think that the pricing for Slack is over the top. I used Flowdock https://www.flowdock.com/ https://www.flowdock.com/ for about a year for a distributed team, before Slack even existed. From what I can tell Slack is a direct copy of Flowdock from top to bottom in regards to features, while Flowdock charges $3/mo/user.

misuba 12y ago
Slack is massively better at dealing with documents.
- arnauddri 12y ago
  dealing with documents is a billion dollar feature?
  - csallen 12y ago
    Companies aren't valued on features. They're valued on how much money investors think they can make, which is usually a function of how fast they can acquire users, which is often greatly affected by their execution on simple features.
  - ccallebs 12y ago
    For enterprise (large, bureaucratic organizations), I imagine that it would be.
- burpee 12y ago
  I don't really see the difference. Care to elaborate?

thinkingkong 12y ago

I know you should take money when you can, but part of me is wondering if this is indicitive of some kind of "winter" coming for VC funding. If slack is growing that quickly, why not wait another 6 months and drive for a better valuation?

llamataboot 12y ago
The growth seems baked into this (really high) valuation to me.
- bostonvaulter2 12y ago
  There's a lot of money in replacing (a significant portion of ) email with an actual better solution.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mwarkentin 12y ago

I've been using Slack by myself as a replacement for email notifications from various services for my side projects and open-source projects. Works quite well!

bsjolund 12y ago

Nice to see a decent Flowdock competitor, but I still don't see a reason to switch.

lucisferre 12y ago
We switched for largely arbitrary reasons. I do really like the Slack experience, I'd say I prefer it in some ways. But Flowdock was also great, no real complaints there at all.
- yesimahuman 12y ago
  A sign that the switching costs are maybe not that big. We went from campfire to hipchat to slack. And each time we were happy to move on despite a history of chat messages (old documents aren't that useful since anything important is in Dropbox). Interesting phenomenon.

dkrich 12y ago

I just don't see how SaaS at this scale can ever be profitable. Asana, Slack, and the like have to support large teams while the enterprise sales cycle is extraordinarily expensive. If you're Oracle and can charge $5k a seat plus consulting fees, then sure, I understand it. If you're an also-ran SaaS business charging $8 a user, you're never going to be profitable. All of these are just different spins on the same communication features. There's nothing that's really defensible about any of them.

marcog1 12y ago
Asana engineer here. With such a large market size, we can scale the sales process to make it inexpensive. We only have a couple sales people. User operations, i.e. keeping customers, is larger but still in all less than 10.

lazzlazzlazz 12y ago

There are no discernible improvements over HipChat. I don't understand what the fuss is about. We're in a bizarro-world.

rdl 12y ago

I basically hate every one of these services that I've ever used. Crashy, resource-intensive clients. At work we use HipChat which is "better than skype", but still pretty crap. In stark contrast to the rest of the Atlassian suite which is basically good. IRC, in the form of irssi+screen on some kind of unix host, is however awesome. There's no great mobile solution, and OTR crypto should be available on top. What's amazing to me is so many companies in this space and so much money and all the products suck.

ottumm 12y ago
I believe you can use IRC clients to connect to both HipChat and Slack.
- rdl 12y ago
  XMPP clients (e.g. Pidgin/Adium). But they block OTR (at least HipChat does), and you lose most of the functionality.
  - heymishy 12y ago
    isn't the point to block OTR. a core concept of both of them is knowledge capture and searchability which can't be done properly if your only having part of the conversation.
    - rdl 12y ago
      I have no desire to have knowledge capture and searchability when I IM a coworker with a password.

d0m 12y ago

I'd love to know more about why did Slack were able to get so much traction and raise that much money compared to Flowdock/Groove.io/Hipchat. I've used Flowdock in the past and tried Hipchat too. I've also been a huge IRC fan when I was younger. I don't see that much of a difference between those and Slack.. Maybe: - More intuitive for people who don't already know IRC. - Really cross-platform - Well integrated with various tools people love. - Very good "on-boarding" flow. But still, the difference in term of traction is massive, am I missing something? Personally, I think we switched because I was a bit frustrated about the status quo. IRC was too complex for non-tech and didn't have a good cross-platform integrated solution. Hipchat app just felt so clunky and ugly.. same with Campfire, it felt really old. I've used and liked Flowdock but I thought it was just too much with widgets all over the place and smart inbox, where what I wanted was "just" a "IRC" I could use with colleagues. Thoughts?

notatoad 12y ago
Is Slack actually as popular as it seems to be? I feel like i hear a lot more about HipChat in various forums/reddit/HN than I do about Slack, but i hear a lot more about Slack on blogposts and news articles. Is it actually being used more, or is it just being written about more?
pbiggar 12y ago
The difference in traction is insane! Slack has 15,000 companies paying them in a few weeks after launch. In the article it says they have $1m/mo revenue - that's incredible for such a young company. Investors are making a bet that this is indicative that slack are going to take over the entire enterprise communication space.
mahyarm 12y ago
Also, mobile integration. Your not going to easily get push based notifications for irc on your iphone as far as I know.

fourstar 12y ago

The issue with slack is that they have these NUX notifications all over the place. If your product is that complicated, there's probably a deeper issue.

inthewoods 12y ago

Is anyone on this thread using Slack (or Hipchat et al) outside of development? I've seen it be useful (along with Hipchat) with development and, to a lesser extent, design (UX/UI) - but outside of that no one seems interested. Just curious if others have the same experience. I was talking to a VP of Sales from another company that had adopted Flowdock and asked her what she thought of it - her response: "I hate it." Saw the same reaction to Salesforce Chatter. With $120m, I hope they bring group video chat to Slack and a dedicated windows client.