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Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

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Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#41

Post by beager »

pentae wrote: post #2

Amazing how they are a $7b company with hundreds of employees and the issue of it still taking minutes to upload an image from the mobile app is happening years after they acknowledged it for the Asia region. We pay hundreds a month for Slack and they are worth 7b but with all their money and hundreds of employees they just can't figure out how to get a photo to upload in a reasonable time. Just can't figure out how…

It's a reasonable case to be made that the wide adoption of Slack despite its issues contributes to their perceived valuation. This tells me that:

1. Slack has tapped into an energetic market 2. People will use the product even if it sucks, or can be compelled to use it by their company's management and IT. 3. There's money on the table for anyone who can build Slack-like services at a better level of quality.

There's also a spiritual similarity in this gripe to the gripe about Apple being a $1T company despite their descent into software and dongle hell—people are buying it despite its flaws because the marketing and the appeal is overwhelming.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#42

Post by faitswulff »

everyone wrote: post #12

Has anyone considered using Discord instead of Slack? They seem very similar.

I've recently made this switch. If just for the sheer performance difference (mostly startup time), Discord is worth it. The free search, file uploads, and audio/video chat really makes it, though.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#43

Post by growtofill »

tootie wrote: post #36

It seems to me that Slack is very vulnerable. Their core product isn't all that innovative and already has credible competitors who could probably beat their price. In fact, I don't understand how they beat HipChat so soundly. I wonder if their next tack will be to start digging a moat of proprietary tooling now that they have a critical mass of adoption.

Atlassian tried to beat them with Stride and failed.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#44

Post by bumholio »

This is one of those recent tech success stories that just leave me scratching my head. I simply can't understand the value Slack is bringing and why would anyone pay for an absolutely metoo product. They are either deviously smart or the market is in full bubble mode.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#45

Post by beager »

maxehmookau wrote: post #17

Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.

Or one that doesn't drop 5 seconds of call audio when I open a new tab in Chrome. Yes, really.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#46

Post by anderspitman »

namibj wrote: post #22
wut42 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's Matrix and Riot. it's still a bit rough on the edges but overall it's very cool projects.

He asked about slack, not Whatsapp. ;)

Riot has inline Markdown, so I'd argue it's actually superior to Slack for serious work.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#47

Post by debacle »

growtofill wrote: post #43
tootie wrote: post #36

It seems to me that Slack is very vulnerable. Their core product isn't all that innovative and already has credible competitors who could probably beat their price. In fact, I don't understand how they beat HipChat so soundly. I wonder if their next tack will be to start digging a moat of proprietary tooling now that they have a critical mass of adoption.

Atlassian tried to beat them with Stride and failed.

HipChat, flowdock, yammer, etc.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#49

Post by jerf »

Pinbenterjamin wrote: post #16

That's a crazy evaluation, is that company really worth 7.1Instagrams? It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story. Especially since it's built on top of electron, which I'm still trying to accept as a real platform for application development, and not the '3d printer' of the software world. I hope they don't use this money to feature-swamp the app, and instead focus inward on per…

"It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story."

If I tried to write down all the other corporate-focused chat products that preceded Slack, there would be no way for me to write them all down. To say nothing of the chat products that weren't necessarily corporate focused, but could easily be used in a corporation. They were not first to market; they came into a crowded space, but one where nobody seems to have quite put all the pieces together the way the market wanted, and proceeded to dominate.

If I would have any concern about Slack as an investor, it would be that they don't have a terribly great moat, in part precisely because there are so many companies sitting on a code base that has 90% of the hard technical work done. Personal chat products had a certain amount of stickiness because you had to be on the service that your friends were on. A corporation can simply move wholesale by executive fiat, and the bigger the customer, the bigger the savings number will be and the less connected the buyer will be to the people demanding Slack in particular. I would expect Slack to be facing some pricing pressure in the medium-to-long term as the abundant field of competitors starts essentially copying from Slack what works and starts tweaking their products to fit.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#50

Post by lkrubner »

Pinbenterjamin wrote: post #16

That's a crazy evaluation, is that company really worth 7.1Instagrams? It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story. Especially since it's built on top of electron, which I'm still trying to accept as a real platform for application development, and not the '3d printer' of the software world. I hope they don't use this money to feature-swamp the app, and instead focus inward on per…

"it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story"

Can you say why you feel this is a first-to-market story? When they started my first reaction was "This market is too crowded and they will have a tough time gaining traction." At that time, I used Basecamp for project management, and so I thought Campfire was excellent for team chat.

I also worked at one company that used Yammer, and that seemed fine.

Also, obligatory, I worked at a company where the tech team used IRC.

Back in 2004, I worked at a company where the dev team used Yahoo chat. It was surprisingly good. We would be logged into video chat for hours, talking over problems with each other.

I like Slack, but I've never understood why developers made such a big deal with it. I wonder if it caught some generational shift? It arrived on the scene just as the economy was recovering from the Great Recession, and it caught the eye of the next wave of founders who were building startups in the new era. But I don't think it is an example of first-to-market. It is actually more interesting than that. It is an example of late-to-market-but-still-successful. That's rare. But I still don't understand why it has been so successful.

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