Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

51–60 of 208 posts

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

#52
post #9

How much of that valuation is your data?

If you want to commit corporate espionage. . . just become a Slack employee? I hope they have very, very good security and encryption measures on all levels.

Not really unless they changed their systems recently. They were mostly a php stack last I heard and they even got hacked in 2015 [0] which is why my last company refused to use them.

[0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

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

#53

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…

Comparing Slack (B2B) to Instagram (B2C) doesn't seem correct to me. Slack wasn't the first-to-market (there's been Hipchat), but to my understanding, Slack was radically better, that's why it became so successful. As for using Electron for its desktop app: do end users really care?

Yes, I have stopped using both, the Slack app and the rocket.chat app at work since I was definitely seeing the effect of them in my RAM usage.

I don't use an application tray in my desktop, so having browser windows open for the chats is basically feature-equivalent and saves me RAM

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

#54

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

I use both and I find Discord to be much better, I don't understand why they don't release a "corporate" paid version that would basically be the current version but with a different skin and without all of the gamer nonsense.

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

#55

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…

I always count these by Star Wars franchises. Is slack worth the rights to almost two Star Wars sized franchises? No. It's not.

depends on which ones!

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

#57
post #52
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to commit corporate espionage. . . just become a Slack employee? I hope they have very, very good security and encryption measures on all levels.

Not really unless they changed their systems recently. They were mostly a php stack last I heard and they even got hacked in 2015 [0] which is why my last company refused to use them. [0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Being a PHP stack has nothing to do with their security.

Also, almost every large company has had a data breach at one point or another. What counts is how they respond to that issue and mitigate for the future.

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

#58

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…

Comparing Slack (B2B) to Instagram (B2C) doesn't seem correct to me. Slack wasn't the first-to-market (there's been Hipchat), but to my understanding, Slack was radically better, that's why it became so successful. As for using Electron for its desktop app: do end users really care?

I care. It's slow and terrible for accessibility.

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

#59
post #3
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…

> for the Asia region. Depending on where you are in Asia, this is a hard one. I run a company with geo-distributed systems, and even having a few Asian-base servers it is still difficult to reach the whole region. You almost need to have datacenters in every country to make it work effectively. Not saying it's an excuse…it is $7B after all. That buys a few servers in many different regions. :) Edit: To continue my t…

Which is nonsense I get 50mbit sec to a server I host in Chicago from Hong Kong. 165ms latency.

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

#60

How come Slack is worth $7.1B? I can't imagine they produce that much value or have a high enough revenue to warrant this valuation.

Their base product is bringing in $5/month/user, and they'll often get dozens to hundreds to thousands of users for each company that joins, whose employees are usually already using the free version of slack, as a sort of grassroots movement within companies. It's been the primary means of asynchronous communication for the last ~5 customers I've worked at, and I've been in slack channels of 30 to 300 users - in total, an easy 500 paid accounts, and that's just from my network.

Anyway yeah it's a risky investment and a precarious valuation, there is plenty of competition out there right now, yet somehow nothing seems to be able to come out as better than Slack. Maybe if a party actually spent those millions in investment funds to create good non-Electron apps.

Post reply on HN