Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.
Yes. Working in a fully distributed team, irc+pictures is great.
It's on you to manage your interruptions (it's easy to kill them totally, or to customize what you see). If you just take it all, then yeah, I can see that being a living hell. So like, don't do that.
Some people at my company get interrupted by slack all the time, and they complain about it.
I disable all notifications except for @-mentions and DMs (and then I only have desktop notifications; mobile is disabled). If I'm expecting to not want interruptions at all, I go to DnD mode for a bit.
And yet, when I tell people this, they just somehow claim they can't do what I do for some hand-wavy reason, and continue to complain.
Absolutely. It’s allowed my 10 second questions to take 10 seconds, instead of 10 seconds of talking after 10 (non-contiguous) minutes of trying to guess when the person will be at their desk.
I definitely don’t feel pressure to answer Slack messages when I’m actively working on something, though. I imagine it’d be pretty bad if we had that kind of environment.
Maybe no more than any other chat application (Slack has been the nicest of those which we have tried though), but my workplace, which was born around office messaging, has recently started to push towards more voice communication and I feel like that has brought a decrease in productivity.
Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.
But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.
Yeah it's a total hog of attention. At the company I just left, you could walk through our office and 90% of people were just talking on Slack. What a waste of engineering time.
We were pretty invested in ChatOps which I thought was great. Being able to issue commands in any sort of war room situation with a group of people was definitely helpful for that sort of triaging. Of course, the downside being that depending on Slack to be up to do effective operations isn't super appealing to me.
Of course people have been doing this with IRC forever, but Slack is a definite improvement on this front over Skype.
Oh, yes. 100%. I can't imagine how we would work in the last two major companies I worked at without it. Everyone is on slack, great place to ask simple questions, create a channel to discuss an issue, add images and video, and provide feedback when you are ready.
Here's a small tip for others that might help this problem:
Don't use the application versions of any of your apps. Instead, open up the web version of all of them and keep all their tabs in one browser window.
For example, my "notification window" includes my gmail, slack, outlook, and the web client for my mobile texts. I keep the window minimized until I have a need for it, and keep the vibration off on my phone during work hours.
Don't forget, it is YOUR choice to have Slack open. Nobody is forcing you to. It might be an unspoken rule to do so, but I value productivity more. In the event someone has something important to say (rarely the case), come up or call me (or PM me on IRC).
Anecdotal but most companies I’ve worked with that use Slack, 1. Don’t give devs company phones (and no one should ring my personal cell) 2. Have remote people they communicate with frequently (ask the remote people how slack has included/enabled them more than ever) 3. Only use email for non-urgent, one-way, or external messaging (although bringing high-value 3rd parties into Slack has been great in my experience)
No matter your concerns about Slack, once you’re in a company using it you have no choice but to embed yourself completely.
Honestly I feel the same way about email. I work in an office culture where rapid email replies are strongly encouraged. But as a project-based worker, that kills my momentum. I've generally gotten away with semi-ignoring it by checking email morning, mid-day, end of day, and strongly encouraging people to call me in the interim with anything truly urgent.
Set standards on when people use the group notifications is a start. But in general just having standards that people agree upon for channel message priority is the way to go.
yes, I work with coworkers at Caltech, UW, University of Arizona, NCSA/UIUC, France, Chile, NASA, UK, as well as coworkers distributed across a large campus. Some of my coworkers work in a clean room and it's a lifeline for them.
Also, it's good when you want to work from home.
I suppose if you work in an 8 person office in the same building it's not necessary.
Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free.
I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert have already been converted. I expect CAC to go up and payer conversion to stagnate at best. I don't see how they can 2-3x their revenue this year (unless there are drastic, risky changes).
In addition, the slow iterations on the mobile and desktop clients, and the meteoric rise of Discord are enough cause for concern. I don't see how this investment would have legs.
How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on?
I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.
Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels.
But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to different communities from the same account. Some examples:
I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows.
FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views of history).
And you still cannot leave a channel in Discord. You can mute, but that's not the same thing — it still clutters your sidebar, and still downloads contents from it.
Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot messages you get over time.
Discord bots are out of control. They remind me of the days of IRC and eggbot scripts and eggbot hosts: every channel went out and bought a cheap VPS or eggbot host to run their scrappy little bots. Except somehow worse and incredibly annoying.
I don't think Discord is ready, or even trying to be ready, for enterprise use. Not yet!
Obviously downloading contents from muted channels is not an issue. Also you can both mute and hide the channel which effectively leaves it. And obviously slack bots are just as powerful as discord's so it's just a matter of servers electing to add crazy bots or not. Everyone bitches about giphy... these are some real stretches if these are your actual complaints about enterprise readiness, rather than data/admin policies, account segregation, etc. Do you have a vested interest somewhere?
For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable.
Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.
The historical context of discord, is that every gaming group would have some sort of chat app (mainly IRC, more recently hipchat, yammer, slack) as well as a push-to-talk voice app (ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble, ...). Discord is merely combining the best of both (slack, and all its api support, with built in voice channels).
Nobody has to use voice. In many communities, most don't. But as the above said, it's a super frictionless way to talk if needed and is a lot less formal than "starting a call/meeting". You just publicly hop into one of a dozen visible channels and anyone else can hop in with you to discuss an issue or just hang out mostly-not-talking.
It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt-out mechanism outside of leaving your desk and camping in a conference room.
Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...
TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines.
> How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community.
At NuCypher switched to Discord from Slack.
It's not particularly tailored, but certainly cultural influenced. There are maybe a feature or two that make more sense for gaming, but it's very useful for business.
The Discord voice features are particularly useful and are in use every day at NuCypher.
Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
> I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional.
I don't even know if I know what that means in 2019. As far as appearance, Discord is much more fun. Is that what you mean?
Slack doesn't seem particularly professional to me.
> Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?
It's not as disastrous as this person makes it seem. It's a rest call you can use to have slackbot do or say whatever you want for integration purposes. You can customize the name of the bot as well as its icon, which would allow you to "impersonate" someone.
The slackbot has limitations in that it looks different from a regular user and will identify it as slackbot if you click on it, as well as tell you who created the webhook to allow the integration.
We switched from Slack to Discord in our community and I prefer it. It feels faster to me, the Slack app on a Mac got really slow after a while. I wish Discord added Telegram style voice messages and it would be perfect. To be totally honest I still think forums like phpbb where much better but they didn't really transitioned to the mobile world. I miss them.
I'm guessing the answer is "yes", but have you taken a look at their S-1 filing? There is tons of addressable market out there for them, and their paying cohorts (year-by-year) have been accelerating in next-expand ARR (page 68):
I do agree that product iteration has been slow. That's been a big problem for Slack, and it's my biggest speculation on their valuation. As someone who has seen inside the company (don't work there), their engineering teams have a ton of technical debt they've been making their way through and trying to set right.
My gut feeling, without doing much proper analysis, is that further growth will come not so much from adding more paying users as selling more services to the existing, extremely locked in, userbase.
It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.
I'm biased because I like Slack, although I haven't tried Discord so I'm only comparing it with the usual competitors that are terrible, but it does feel very sticky to me. It's replaced email for my JIRA and Google Drive notifications, it's replaced Google Hangouts for most of my team chat and 1:1 video calls. And I'm not even using all the plugins many of my colleagues are using yet.
They really seem to have gotten a lot of Google Wave ideas to catch on and have even kept some IRC bits. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Congrats to the team on this massive valuation. Makes a lot more sense to me than Snapchat at $19B...
Another area it's very sticky is 'SlackOps' - i.e. putting your devops commands and notifications into Slack.
Having done this at my previous startup it's very, very nice (in my opinion), but also, enough setup work that even supposing you were tempted to change to another platform you'd be reluctant to.
I’m starting to see Slack show up in all sorts of places far beyond software development teams. Accounting firms, non profits, and even a home inspector I worked with... I can’t imagine they’re even close full market penetration.
I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.
Some, off the top of my head:
fpv.slack.com
donkeycar.slack.com
machinelearning.slack.com
makers-kitchen.slack.com
openrc.slack.com
3dprinting.slack.com
learnjs.slack.com
amateurrobotics.slack.com
virtualreality.slack.com
hwstartups.slack.com
(If you want an invite to any of these, email me. Address on my profile.)
Does anybody know if there is a curated list somewhere of popular or good Slack communities that are open to the public?
This is why being able to aggregate multiple channels into a single window would be a huge win. Right now you have to flip between multiple "tabs" to find anything.
No me neither, totally agree. Both are channels for growth. I just mean I see the expanding existing users channel dwarfing the acquiring new customers channel in terms of speed of growth. At this point I see it being significantly easier for them to 2x an average user's subscription through more services than 2x their entire userbase.
I agree they’re a great product org, but not sure I agree they’re a $16B company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I’m not sold on their long term viability. It’s just too easy for new IM platforms to take root inside a company once the old one gets too noisy.
Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product before something shinier comes along.
Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded.
They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.
The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options.
Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.
Wouldn't the Slack bot integration provide a better moat. If they can get orgs using a lot of bots for CI reporting, etc switching gets more difficult at least. Not sure how many teams get that tightly integrated with bots though.
They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark.
There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.
My very-large project switched chat apps in one weekend (backed by a few weeks of prep by IT team). We had JIRA integration on day one, and one or two missing things within a week. It wasn't that big a deal.
I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.
I'm not sure they'll be able to compete against a worse but integrated solution like MS teams long term. No doubt it's worse but the bundle is cheaper with when you're already paying for Windows and Office. Same story with G Suite.
MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.
I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.
Why do you make it sound like some shady back-door deal? Our grey-beard entirely Linux using ops staff would drop Slack for MS teams at the drop of a hat to get that money back in the budget. You can only waste so much money when the entire office demands Office.
Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. Until someone can break hard dependency people have on Office products MS suite will always come out cheaper than Office + $other_thing.
My company is already paying for Teams as part of our O365 Installation. We won't use it, simply because of the network effect the Shared Channels have created.
We have shared channels with Integration Partners, Suppliers, Enterprise Customers... These are extremely valuable ways of communication once setup, especially with simple file-transfer thrown in, etc. Leaving Slack would mean slamming the door in the face of these entities, something we're simply not ready to do for the cost-savings that ditching Slack would mean.
I don’t know a single enterprise client that enables external Slack users. People are far too careless with what they share in IM (like private SSH keys and IP addresses), and Slack history is a juicy target for hackers diving for secrets.
Enterprise users usually just use it for internal messaging.
If that's what's best for your company, great. For others, competing against MS Teams means that they will face an uphill battle on the sales side - to put it mildly. In terms of the cost savings aspect once MS reaches feature parity-ish, there will be significant pressure on the CIO to consider a migration away from Slack. Both of these pressures raise valid questions about the valuation and future of Slack.
Microsoft isn’t Oracle. They put Teams in the bundle and slowly break whatever they are replacing. In this case Skype.
If you’re big enough for Microsoft to care about you, you already have embedded SEs compensated based on OneDrive and Teams adoption. Your IT middle management pushes teams.
Your CIO is getting the cyber pitch based in the insecurity of your O365 implementation. The fix is to buy Azure AD or the next bundle (EMS), or maybe the E5 O365/Windows subscription.
Messaging apps are cyclical. I remember icq! Slack should become part of Google.. that would help Google widen its user base and perhaps a robust video conferencing system can piggy back on top of it.
The product is compelling enough that Microsoft is trying to position their clone as the lynchpin of everything in O365 that isn’t mail.
It’s a platform that is attractive to all sorts of players. Apple has a huge enterprise business that they completely ignore. Google, Cisco, other enterprise plays are easily imaginable.
Companies switched to slack because hipchat didn't work very well. Slack works pretty well. It would be much harder for there to be internal political motivation to change unless someone does something significantly better which I cannot imagine.
Slacks biggest paying customers are enterprises using it for internal chat. Not very sticky overall since enterprise customers are used to vendors constantly raising prices.
A chat client that takes multiple hundreds of MBs of RAM and sucks battery life prodigiously should be, if not illegal, at the very least a violation of unwritten international norms.
I've never experienced this very common criticism of slack on here. When I occasionally check, Slack is using around 500mb or RAM. A lot for a chat app? Sure. But it has little to no affect on either my 16gb or 8gb machines.
RAM alone isn’t the problem. The issue is that is so laggy and slow. Poor algorithms on 500mb of bad data structures can bring any modern machine to its knees.
For me it’s a usability thing—I tend to lose track of SPA tabs, often by closing the window or not being able to differentiate them from content tabs. I do use web apps but I vastly prefer using my machine’s window manager and window buttons/lists.
I don't know about "well deserved". They did it by holding people's data hostage. It's one thing to make your messages unsearchable or otherwise available in the UI until your pay, but holding your data completely hostage until you pay up isn't exactly a noble way to go about things. Even Facebook isn't this obnoxious about getting you a copy of your message history.
Free is there to be a sales demo without deadlines with a casual shrug for people who aren't going to pay, I wouldn't ever use slack if it wasn't my intention to play and slack wouldn't miss me.
I never used Slack out of choice either. I've used it because I was forced to due to others' decisions. So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.
Is that still the case? That there is no way to export message history? I'm trying to find a way to publish messages from my Slack channel to my website in real-time so that I can give visitors a look at what they are signing up for. Similar to how Pieter Levels has nomadlist.com/chat/ set up (if anyone knows how he does that, please let me know).
It was as far as I was able to tell when I checked many months ago. I've seen no indications that anything has changed, but would love to hear otherwise...
"Corporate Export On the Plus plan, Workspace Owners can apply to access a self-service tool called Corporate Export. This type of export includes content from public and private channels and direct messages. If Corporate Export is enabled for your workspace, Standard Export will not be available." https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo...
They will be “successful” once they become profitable. Until then, they still haven’t proven that they have a business model where they can charge customers enough to cover expenses.
It makes no sense for me. It's just a web frontend on top of an irc chat. $16B for that is a complete insanity.
This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era
At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales
Anyone could build Facebook, the value is the existing userbase. I would think that slack would be one of the easiest tools to replace because its only used within organisations so you can get everyone to switch at once.
The entire slack userbase could vaporise within weeks if slack made a wrong move. Slack doesn't really bring anything special to the table.
I agree, but in a less disparaging manner. I'd say rather, the barrier to entry is super low, many competitors exist, and some arguably better. I don't feel they have runaway velocity like say, FB achieved early on when in a similar boat.
Dropbox took on a problem users have (how can I sync my files between multiple computers?) and provided a great solution to it.
Slack takes a problem users have ("my coworkers keep bugging me with stupid questions") and makes the problem worse, because now your coworkers can see that you're online and demand instant answer :)
Slack is also very popular with open source and hobbyist communities. People often seem to assume that it's used only at work, which I guess makes some amount of sense given that the vast majority of paying customers are probably workplaces. Slack would already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.
We tried HipChat for a whole day before bouncing. It was so bad. Had hilariously poor UX, using commands like \code to get a single line of monospaced text, iirc.
Weirdly enough, I had heard that HipChat used to scale better than Slack. Supposedly Uber used to use the former rather than the latter because once an org hit a certain threshold in thousands of users, Slack was no good. This was years ago, however.
Uber did use HipChat instead of Slack, but mostly because Slack was uninterested in standing up servers for Uber. My understanding is that Slack basically ran a single server instance for each Slack team.
Atlassian bent over backwards for Uber, but just enough to make it functional. It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone.
Uber eventually replaced it with a (forked) Mattermost cluster.
The thing that really struck me about Slack was its level of polish, esp compared to other software around the time of its release.
The overall level of polish on similar apps has risen since then so that’s less of a differentiator, but I still refer to Slack as a great example of polish and consistency in product, with mostly great UX as well
I wish them all the best. But I do hope they stay small in spirit and nimble.
One of my favourite things about slack is /feedback and the fact that someone will get back to me within 24hrs. There is no product of this scale that has such a low barrier to feedback/questions/bug report.
My company is in the middle of switching from Slack to Microsoft teams. The water cooler talk is that we're paying Slack $1000-$2500 per year per user.
It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games. Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales.
I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that we're paying that much, tbh.
We started using slack just for our dev/eng teams at work, and the interest grew to some of our customer side teams and non-technical teams, but management have been reluctant to expand Slacks licensing. Then we realized Teams is included with our MS licenses, so now we're giving the non-dev/eng side of the company that. It's only a matter of time before someone with a little sway asks "Why are we paying for this when we have Teams?" the murmurs have already begun, it just has to hit the right ears, so the days are numbered.
Both my current company and the one prior to that did the same switch.
We all preferred Slack but the cost was just ridiculous and no one could justify it. Teams came for 'free' with all the other Microsoft stuff we were already paying a licence for.
Why/how is your org paying that much per user? I was under the impression that Slack topped out at well below that figure even for all the enterprise bells and whistles. I assume there are additional services/features that I’m not aware of? On-premise or dedicated hardware? Special data location requirements?
When i moved companies, i went from Slack to Teams also. Dont notice the difference really. Our company did it because of the same reason they use outlook.
I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but Slack could already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.
And how many of the free users are the same people? I am active on 7 or 8 slacks (all free) with at least 5 or 6 different emails. Sure they can easily link my from my device, but do they when they can inflate numbers?
The thing that drives me nuts is the pricing model. Why don't they just let users pay for themselves? Then I could be paid on all of the slacks that I use for $10/mo or whatever they charge.
Even if we ignore the time value of money, Slack needs to quadruple its revenue and turn it all into profit to justify a 16B valuation. I can see it happening since so much is being integrated into it from 3rd parties, but it's a very tall order.
Slack isn't a consumer company, they are an SaaS enterprise company. Most SaaS enterprise companies trade at far lower multiples. A decent comp for Slack would be Dropbox, which has $1.4B and rough valuation of ~$10B
Solid revenue and solid growth. I was not saying Slack has no monetization, but getting from 400M to 16B is 40X growth. To expand that quickly would require monetizing your existing users most of whom use the free tier. How does Slack really plan to do that?
> For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, the company reported losses of $138.9 million on revenue of $400.6 million. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million the year prior. [1]
My question is where the hell is that money going?
That money is all the cash flow in some entire minor industries. It’s the GDP of some minor lower/mid-economy nations’ cities. Their losses are equal to half the entire GDP of Palau.
Maybe I’m detached. But I don’t understand the cash flow in chat apps today. It’s absolutely bizarre amounts of money for something that can and will easily be replaced in a few years, as always happens.
Overpaid executives. I worked for a darling in the security space that has not posted a profit ever in it's 7 years post-IPO (they could at this point, but choose not to). Yet the company paid the CEO, multiple years I was there, over $300M annually. The current CEO makes a "base" $128M and has incentives of over $400M dangling in front of him. Yet any time the company misses guidance do you know what they blame? Paying the "field" (sales and field engineering) too much in commission and stock grants. Yet if you roll up all executive and board grants on an annual basis you're north of a Billion (with a B) in pay. Yet... No analyst has the nerve to ask that question point blank on the earnings call.
Beyond executives and the board? Marketing. I'm now at a much smaller F round startup that blew $350k+ on the RSA conference and another $150k+ on expenses for said show. The return on that is miniscule.
Where does the money go? I feel like most startups I've been in have been very good at funneling the funds exactly where they want it. Profitable doesn't seem to be the goal anymore, but more of to sink as much cash into executive pockets as quickly as possible.
>No analyst has the nerve to ask that question point blank on the earnings call.
Ooooh, I need to Google to see if this has happened. Obviously investors and analysts would prefer to have those talks privately to avoid alienating anyone important, but it has to have happened sometime.
Slack targets the same market that made Microsoft big: the corporate sector. For big companies, even recurring licensing costs for Slack are trivial, and it gives the managers of the bigger companies a feeling of importance to be able to negotiate big bulk discounts. In this corporate sector market, all you need to do to get rich is to be the established player, which Slack very much seems to become.
As for the easily being replaced part, Slack will just buy up any competitor while its small. Just like how Facebook did it with Instagram and Whatsapp. Facebook is deemed uncool by the younger generation but not Instagram and Whatsapp.
Why is it so bizzare? Do you think that Palau has enough people engaged in producing goods or services that deserve more than their current GDP?
I think comparing the valuations of a US company HQ'd in one of the most expensive cities in the world, that has created a tool that is used by nearly all organizations around the world for communication is well worth the crazy valuation.
I’m not talking about their supposed $16b value. I’m wondering where the money they’re actually spending is going.
They’ve lost nearly $150 million in a year. How? What does that money even go to? Even paying their devs incredibly generous wages and benefits, server costs, advertising, deals with businesses, etc, I can’t imagine the losses being that big. It’s insane amounts of money to burn through.
That doesn’t seem like that big of a number for a large corporation that Slack is now. Tesla had a net loss of 700mm[1] last quarter. Their business is more capital intensive for sure but still. Just looking at a 150mm net loss and saying it’s a big number doesn’t tell you much.
Since when has a company making poor over-priced decisions ever justified a better valuation? It's the complete opposite.
If Airbus decided to pay twice as much for planes would you say they should be valued higher?
While there is intangible benefits that come from deciding to setup shop in one of the most expensive cities on Earth I'm far from convinced a messenger app company couldn't thrive elsewhere.
What they offer is not unique nor difficult to create. Doubt they'll ever manage to pull in $1B a year to justify that price, the required business model for it would have their customers looking elsewhere overnight.
It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got Twitter!), but Microsoft is investing in React Native for Windows which could prove really interesting. Hopefully Microsoft doesn't settle for just making Electron better.
I don't even think they need to make a native app; I use plenty of Electron apps day to day, like VSCode, Atom, GitHub Desktop and they're all fine.
Slack however is borderline unusable. Ghost processes, background workspaces silently closing and not delivering notifications, processes pinned at 100% CPU, silent crashes, pauses while typing, and even sometimes character drops.
I've tried it on three laptops from two vendors all with 16gb of memory, 100% SSD and an i7.
I've got Mac user friends that tell me they've never had any of the above issues, and I believe them. I've used it on a Mac, though not as a daily driver, and it's fine.
It just feels to me like Windows is a second tier platform for Slack, where they're fixing the bare minimum to not lose market share.
I think from an app developer's perspective, web-based apps are definitely the way to go. That's because it's so incredibly difficult to build a good web, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android app. I'm hopeful that one day making good native apps will be as easy and accessible as web development.
Do Microsoft and Apple really want native apps? I've got the opposite impression: they've tried very hard to herd desktop apps into Apple Store model. Third party vendors, like Adobe, are also forcing clients to adopt subscription schemes.
Those are still native apps. I believe parent is comparing to bloated Electron crap that requires an entire Chromium instance to put a GUI on what is basically IRC and text editors.
Sorry I wasn't clear. The underlying problem is piracy. Big players like Adobe can still use the subscription model. For most vendors, the easiest choice is going the web route.
Deployment is another PITA that makes App Store model desirable for the vendors. For Apple and Microsoft it's even better because they get a cut, they curate their platforms and have the upper hand over vendors lest they become competition.
I would replace "the future" with saying that it's much more profitable for vendors and less convenient for users, so it's being adopted as fast as vendors can overcome users's resistance.
It is actually much more convenient for users. They can switch computers/phone/OSes and have the same experience. The same is not true with native apps.
It's more convenient for some applications, but it's not the case yet for many applications. Evolution of browsers will probably favour web platform for everything except the more close-to-the-metal ones.
I don’t want the same experience cross platforms. I don’t want the “Mac experience” when I am using Windows (see iTunes) or the “Windows experience” when I am using a Mac (old versions of Office).
No, what you want is the same experience. Which is what the web gives you. What you are describing is native apps trying to replicate the same experience and failing because they are native.
Edit: Native apps require more maintenance which adds to the delta in experience. If a single app is created (web) there is no delta.
Yup, you used a web app to post your comment. Apple dropped Flash for native web HTML5. Is the future really to develop an app that can only run in 4 places (Windows, mac, ios, and android) dominated by three major companies?
Not really comparable, the web already has massive adoption, just needs to get better at high-performance client apps. And with WebAssembly + PWAs, and WebGPU in development, it's getting very close.
> Forrester analyst Michael Facemire says it's hard for people to understand why the platform is more useful than other chat applications without trying it for themselves.
It isn't.
I know Slack probably needs to justify its valuation in front of some people, but Slack is not different from Facebook and Instagram in this regard: They offer nothing unique or technologically superior. The whole point of their business is hoarding users to the point that it's the "default" app in their given context.
I'm not saying it's bad. If they didn't do it, someone else would have done it anyway.
Slack is a great product (vs email or public chat alternatives). I wish them the best expanding their user base.
Are they worth 16B? None of the armchair investors here know their financials (addressable market size, user growth rate, expected ARPU etc). Until a careful analysis done, I would caution you against coming to a quick conclusion.
Why do you say that it's good vs email? In my mind they're for different purposes.
Slack for urgent matters, email for asynchronous communication that isn't quite as urgent. Email is also better for things that the recipient may want to refer back to in the future.
Regardless, I wish that my co-workers would stop sending a message only saying "hi, name" and then waiting for me to stop working to respond before they type their actual question. "not only am I going to interrupt you, but I'm going to make you acknowledge the interruption before making you wait while I SLOWLY type the actual incomplete question".
<Grumble, grumble, I hate when people misuse Slack>
One aspect of many SaaS companies that I am concerned about is their exposure to economic downturns. Slack charges on a per-user basis, so if their average customer reduces their workforce by 10%, Slack's revenue reduces by 10%.
Is this another one of those companies whose S1 says "We're not profitable and may never be"?
Why is that the right time to go public? Once the company has an obligation to move towards profitability, doesn't that expose its investors to the risk of another startup subsidizing the same product or service with VC money, undercutting the new established brand?
Like if slack wants to become profitable they probably need to push more people to the paid version of the app, but then won't another company just make a clone and convert some VC cash into a runway with which to poach slack's userbase, and eventually file an S1 saying "we're not profitable and may never be"?
I'm struggling to understand why this keeps working, because no one seems to have a problem with it at all.
Zoom works perfectly every single time. I've managed to make Slack's audio call feature work only rarely. I wish Slack had decent shared whiteboard, screenshare, and audio/video conferencing but that is a hard problem and they are currently not able to deliver. Zoom does flawlessly.
This valuation depends on the continued incompetence of Google and Microsoft, who both offer Slack competitors as part of their productivity packages that most of Slack's paying customers already subscribe to. Their offerings are so bad that people pay money to Slack not to use them.
I hear people mention Slack once in a while on various forums but I have no clue what it is. I do not know anyone who uses it so it's not something I, or anyone I know, feels a need for--otherwise we would be searching it out. And therein lies a problem. $16B for something few people need or want? I guess I have to look up Slack and see what it is.
EDIT: So I looked it up and it looks like something useful for a lot of remote workers that need constant, instant contact with people working on the same stuff at the same time. To me that's a pretty niche market. If I thought the phone or email wasn't good enough, I might pay $5/month for such a service. But irc works pretty good still today.
There's a venn diagram with an intersection of people who use Hacker News and people who don't know what Slack is, and it's literally just you. It's bizarre to me that you feel the need to share your opinion on the valuation of something you knew nothing about a half an hour ago.
That said, $16B seems to be about 4x more than I would have expected.
I would encourage people to read the Pets.com 10-Q to understand what the dot com bubble was like from a corporate finance perspective, because there are deeper lessons than "Some companies with substantial Internet operations IPOed."
Slack, unsurprisingly because it sells software, has positive gross margins rather than negative gross margins; they're healthy at ~80%. They appear to be able to turn $1 of sales and marketing spend in Year 1 into > $1 of software revenue in year 2. Their churn rate on a dollar basis is 43%. Excuse me, -43%; a cohort of SaaS customers paying $100M in year 1 will pay $143M in year 2 due to growth in number of seats more than offsetting churning accounts.
There is no price at which a rational person should want to own Pets.com. There is, very clearly, a price at which a rational person should want to own Slack.
I don't think people who say this were even around at the time of the dotcom bubble. There were public companies adding "tech" to their names and seeing their values rise 10x in a day. THAT was a bubble.
Venture capitalists are cashing their investments by IPOs - sure sign that the next financial crisis is starting soon :) Dotcom Bubble 2.0 is ready to burst.
EDIT: I do not imply that venture capitalists poses some insider knowledge. It is not necessary. It's just the fact that when bullshit companies with bullshit product, that generate losses instead of profit get valued at $16B (other recent examples include Lyft and Uber) it means that economy is in crazy state, and it does not take much to induce panic. My guess is one of these unicorns will fill for bankruptcy soon, thus pushing the market over the edge.
Yet, I have no real evidence that points me to its truth. The thinking seems to be predicated on VCs having inside knowledge or excellent speculative skills. That might be true, but presumably they're not the only strong speculators.
Are we seeing other major players move out of tech? We're certainly not seeing massive liquidation in general.
Is 16B really too high of a valuation when Atlassian is double the market cap at 32B? Both have similar products (collaboration/productivity) and are extremely sticky.
Atlassian has a wider suite of products. I would say HipChat is the Slack alternative. Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello. And Atlassian is more developer centric whereas Slack is monetizing enterprise users.
Actually hipchat was quite nice to use, fast and responsive for awhile, and I loved some of their built in emoticons. I think they didn't really maintain it and keep it up to date with the competition.
Atlassian products are more mission-critical. Most companies actually need some tool that does what Jira or Bitbucket does. They don't really need Slack.
I've worked at companies both with and without Slack. Something like Slack might be mission critical for a remote-first company, but comparing the two situations, I've actually noticed better communication without Slack than with it.
We use slack at the three companies I currently work on and it's mostly a distraction and a place to quickly share files. It's good for some shared notifications. My most active slack is one I have with friends.
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