9 ms·
Is Slack Really Worth $2.8B? A Conversation with Stewart Butterfield
- applecore 11y agoAmazing insights in this article. This will prove a remarkably prescient interview.
- jeffreyrogers 11y agoYeah, people are focusing too much on slack in particular and less on what the interview reveals about how VC and the tech industry actually operates. I'm really impressed by the way this guy thinks. These are things I haven't heard from other people.
- dmitrygr 11y agoBetteridge's law of headlines says no
- georgemcbay 11y agoSimple economics says Slack is worth whatever they can find a sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hinvestor or buyer to value them at.
- fredkbloggs 11y agoDon't confuse price with value. A corporation is worth the discounted present value of all the dividends it will ever pay. That figure may not be knowable, but it does exist and in this fevered dream world can safely be assumed to be zero for almost everyone. The price, however, can be pretty much anything, reflecting what at least one person is willing and able to pay for it.
- jeffreyrogers 11y ago> A corporation is worth the discounted present value of all the dividends it will ever pay. Only if you can't cash out at the higher price first :), but joking aside I think your point is an important one that gets overlooked a lot when people talk about tech companies.
- meric 11y agoIt'd probably be a bit more than zero. You can buy the company, fire all the engineers, set the price to $10 per user immediately, watch 95% of users leave, remaining 5% paying $10 per year, and then discount and sum over that cash-flow, and you could probably end up with a value of several hundred thousand dollars in the minimum.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- bandrami 11y agocan safely be assumed to be zero for almost everyone No no no. Those Aerons go for $50 each on Craigslist.
- hurin 11y agoUnlike switching VM's or databases, switching from one front-end for a pseudo-irc-client to another is essentially simple, the migration is probably significantly less painful, there are no proprietary formats in the way (.pdf .dwg). The actual costs / complexity involved in building a similar product are magnitudes less than the high valuation would suggest. So I'm not sure how much early success is really worth in this market.
- serve_yay 11y agoWell then I guess they'll just have to keep being better than their competitors. A shame, really.
- aetherson 11y agoAre they better than their competitors? In what way? I've been using Slack in a pretty casual way recently as my company switched to it. It seems, you know... fine. Like it has the same features that all the other messaging products have. What's the compelling feature of Slack?
- dshanahan 11y agoWe just left HipChat for Slack and love it. The file sharing includes previews, the drag and drop to upload immediately is great. Search includes the content of uploaded files. Search on HipChat is a joke, IMO. It's more fun to use, and more intuitive for non-technical people.
- baddox 11y agoThey're not. Between Slack and HipChat it's a wash. Both work reasonably well and have their own quirks. I'm more cognizant of Slack's quirks at the moment, because that's what I currently use. For instance, most URLs don't work on iOS Slack, because ampersands get HTML escaped into &. I sent feedback, and someone quickly responds that they know about and they intend to fix it.
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- synaesthesisx 11y agoSSShhhhh.....people need to stop questioning these high valuations, seriously. People might suspect a tech bubble, or something...
- staunch 11y ago> "I don’t feel like there are any serious vulnerabilities in the business." No one in technology should ever find themselves uttering these words. It's like asking for it. If the tech world remains relatively unchanged Slack is easily worth $3 billion. All they need to do is get a few million workers on there chatting away and they've got ~$10/month * millions, which is hundreds of millions per year. They should probably sell to Microsoft and let them take on the risk at this point. There's a good chance the tech world will change around them and the whole thing will come tumbling back down to earth. Or they could try to become the new Microsoft.
- serve_yay 11y agoAfter seeing what happened to Flickr (both the product and the team) after Yahoo bought it, combined with Slack's crazy growth, makes me think a sale is unlikely. Especially to a big company like MS.
- ianstallings 11y agoI disagree about the MS part. I think Slack would probably do very well there. The enterprise market is where Slack is going, and MS is fully entrenched there. They also have a very developer-centric culture that some people enjoy.
- hurin 11y agoI don't necessarily see why MS would purchase Slack instead of delivering their own solution. Unlike Skype it's not really key to have a large-user base on the service, all that matters is that your entire business is running the same solution - and Microsoft already makes and sells other related enterprise tools which gives them an advantage both in terms of sales and integration. Perhaps it's even more surprising that they haven't already delivered a competing solution.
- npkarnik 11y agoYammer is a team communication solution Microsoft already bought, but is way worse at synchronous communication (chat) than Slack, but also better at at asynchronous communication (threaded conversation, like on Facebook). Microsoft would want to buy Slack for the same reason they spent $$$ on best-in-class products like Yammer, Sunrise, rebranding Acompli as Outlook. Slack's revenue is incredible for a startup, but a drop in the bucket for MSFT (for now). More immediately, Slack represents an entry point for Microsoft to upsell Slack's customers to other Office365 services and Azure services.
- unoti 11y agoMy team just gave up on Slack today, because push notifications seem too unreliable when we're on our phones. Paradoxically, we've found it works better when the app is not running than it does when it is running. Most of us are using Android phones. I couldn't find anyone else having the same problem, and I couldn't find any answers googling around, other than the obvious "turn on push notifications"-- push notices were definitely on. We may go back to Slack at some point, if we can get it to work effectively for us.
- secabeen 11y agoSlack only sends a notification if you're offline or away: https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201895138-Notifications-overview https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201895138-Notifi... The assumption is that if you're actively in the channel, you saw the item already and don't need a duplication notification on your phone for the item you just read.
- clarky07 11y agoTo expand on this, the desktop clients keep you active for much longer than say the web client. I was also having these issues so I asked for a clarification from their support. I stopped using the desktop client for this reason and now I have a separate window open for the web client. Push works much better for me now.
- chambo622 11y agoWhat the other reply said is true, Slack by default only sends mobile notifications when you're 'away.' In addition, by default, it waits 5 minutes before sending notifications (this can be changed). The v2 Android app is currently in beta - I've been testing it for several weeks. It's lightyears ahead of the current release version which is admittedly pretty faulty (no caching means that resumes are very slow). I've also found notifications to be more reliable. Perhaps give it another try once they ship the v2 Android app.
- s_kilk 11y agoWe've found the same. Sometimes the notifications come through when they should, sometimes they all come in a flood many hours after they should have.
- ianstallings 11y agoSlack's valuation will make a lot more sense once they delve into the video chat and conferencing world, making their way further into the enterprise. People need to understand that investment is a vote of confidence in the team, not just the product. What can this team accomplish with that investment? That's the question.
- zmmmmm 11y agoSlack is one of those curious tools that seems to take off despite doing nothing particularly new or innovative. We started using it due to some colleagues who raved about it. I haven't come across a feature yet that we've used that hasn't been part of IM / IRC clients for more than 15 years. The main feature of it seems to be that it's new, so when you first start using it only the 5 other people that you are collaborating with right now are on there, so it starts off feeling more productive and focused than other tools. But then, I thought the same thing about Twitter (how is this not worse that every other IRC / IM service I've ever used?) and look what happened there.
- jonahx 11y agoWhile you're right in a broad sense, I think in fairness slack has a lot of polish where others tools don't -- they get a lot of UX details right that seem "obvious" because they are getting them right. But they're actually far from trivial.
- nitrogen 11y agoOne thing they get really wrong is embedded code snippets. The formatting, chrome, and UX around snippets is not as good as HipChat.
- _asummers 11y agoIf you gist the snippet beforehand, the experience is almost identical. This is obviously an extra step, but then your snippet isn't 100% tied to Slack. I have an app installed that gists my clipboard with a keyboard shortcut, and copies the link to my clipboard, so it's just an extra key chord.
- tragic 11y agoEh, it gets the basic monospace-preserve-whitespace stuff right. It's good enough for me 99% of the time, and if it isn't, I normally want to be debugging somewhere other than a chat app. What Slack does very well is giving a good enough experience for programmers to do shop-talk, and ample opportunities for chatbot yak-shaves, it's also perfectly well usable for non technical people. I work for $ENORMOCORP, and after a couple of brave pioneers among the tech people, now everyone's falling over themselves to get their teams a Slack instance. (As others have said here, the ability to have multiple instances is pretty fundamental to this dynamic - we have team-specific Slacks, product specific, project specific and what have you. I certainly would not want some more 'old fashioned' colleagues seeing that NSFW bollocks people keep wiring into the tech specific chatbots...) This strikes me as a pattern with some potential for growth - tech people driving adoption among non-technical colleagues. I reserve judgement on whether that's $3bn worth of potential.
- PublicEnemy111 11y agoThe problem with trying to kill email is that you're never going to have everyone migrate off of it. It's going to have to be some type of layer on top of IMAP that then moves to a more sophisticated protocol. Google has done such a great job with NLP/AI/ML that spam from facebook, twitter, etc. are all put into a separate tab that I only see when I want to. When I click on an email about a flight, it gives me updates on the status of the flight. Gmail also makes it seamless to share docs. I could make a clean interface for email groups using the Gmail API and have the same product as slack. What am I missing here?
- paulsutter 11y agoSlack is really a nice application. People have been saying email overload is a problem for years, and Slack has really put a dent in it for work/office use. Yes it's a simple app, but so is email, and simple done better is genius. [1] http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html (pg, 2008, see number 28)
- tuke 11y ago"no" (And go use Flowdock.)
- error54 11y agoSlack is good but it's nothing revolutionary that would merit the valuation. My main argument against their crazy valuation is that there's no lock in so it'd be easy for teams to move on to the "next big thing." Also, see http://getkaiwa.com/ http://getkaiwa.com/
- sakri 11y ago> Acquisitions would be one. We might have to defend ourselves against predators. Soooo time to create a Slack clone and sell it to Slack for a few million?
- crafty78 11y agoIs it me or does Microsoft just need to get a decent persistent group chat in office365/lync/skype for business along with a decent api for integrations. As small business/startup running office 365 the reason we started with slack was due to the lack of persistent chat rooms in office365. (yammer is just not usable and not sure who it's aimed at!)
- brazzledazzle 11y agoLync's lack of persistent rooms is such a downer.
- antihero 11y ago> Replace e-mail Ah, because I would only ever want to talk to people within my specific team...
- UUMMUU 11y agoWe recently switched from Hipchat to Slack and at first I hated it, now I'm only mildly disgruntled because I did a few modifications: 1. Bubble when I get a direct message. 2. Leave all but about 3-4 groups. 3. Tell images to not default display (have to click on them) 4. Star important channels (The star is next to the #channelname at the top and it's only visible when hovered) That big star on the top right is not to star a channel. 5. and probably most importantly was to switch to the compressed mode so all the chat spaces are as tightly compacted as possible.
- suvelx 11y agoI had my admin enable the IRC gateway and I just use that now. Uploaded files are a little awkward (but that's mostly because I have to switch between multiple google enterprise accounts during the course of a day). Put the 'SLACK' user on ignore and most of the annoying integrations disappear. That said, I still hate the thing.
- zobzu 11y agocloudirc seem like a decent middle ground when tech ppl can use/setup irc incl. bots and integration s while others just use the web/mobile ui from irccloud. also this way you own the data/service for the most part.
- ssmoot 11y agoWe switched from Hipchat (buggy in the beginning, smooth and ideal at the end) to Hall (a buggy, slow, awful mess) to Slack (also slow, but not buggy, and awful UX). Hipchat gets notifications right. Slack and Hall seem to have (in)sane defaults, and not quite right customizations. The web-view of Slack is slow and stupid. It's picky, but I loved the vim/sed style substitutions in Hipchat. Slack FTL. But the biggest annoyance by far: In Hipchat you could reorder your chats however you felt like. In Slack they're fixed. And team chats are arbitrarily (feeling) broken up into groups and channels. Which is a completely useless distinction for most I think. Hipchat had @all and @here. Which seem pretty self explanatory. Slack has @group, @channel, and... I guess that's it. No version of @here AFAICT, and depending on what sort of "room" you're in, the @all equivalent changes. The iOS app also makes something that looks like a room picker and instead makes it some other menu I forget. And notifications will happily occur on my laptop, computer, iPhone and iPad all at once if I don't catch it at my desk in time. Here's a hint: If you decide to notify my phone, don't notify anything else at that point. No cat picture or CI build notification deserves Def-Con 5 treatment. But it has themes? And useless giphy integrations? Honestly I don't get the love at all. Form over function at it's worst. I really dislike it. :-p
- shah_s 11y agoSlack is a great product but I do not think it's worth $2.8B. Hipchat has a much bigger company behind it and people switched to Slack pretty quickly because for the most part it is a better product. The reason for that switch is because the cost of switch is relatively minimal. Any competitor can come in and take that away from Slack. They are only worth this much if the tech landscape is static, which we all know it isnt. Just my 2 cents.
- jingo 11y agoButterfield: "It is because people say it is."
- khorwitz 11y agoThere seems to be a booming market for Slack integrations lately. This is great because Slack just = text, and so building prototypes can be fairly easy. Our product (http://focusr.co http://focusr.co) actually started purely as a Slack integration, and evolved into something else.
- stillsut 11y agoFor over a decade, the most important question for any enterprise data tool was: Does it import/export to Excel? The potential value of Slack is to ask that same question about any B2B software an exec is considering. Slack's a "king-maker", not a king.
- amelius 11y agoThe value is not in the actual product, but in the lock-in that this solution creates. I find this outrageous, and I hope that soon a better and open chat/communication standard will emerge.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- memossy 11y agoThe funny thing is that Atlassian, whose HipChat had a few years lead on Slack, was only (?) valued at $3.3bn last year for their whole suite of products https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7554904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7554904