Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 208 posts

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

#111

Post by [deleted] »

lesss365 wrote: post #107
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's used by companies to not only communicate, but also used by management level employees to pry on conversations/gossip. Personally know of a well known company where a group of managers used Slack for snooping on those they manage(d), and subsequently fired those they found criticizing them/higher-ups. Not saying that this is surely what makes it valuable, but could see a management team deciding to use it as a m…

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by rkrzr »

If self-hosting is an option for you, I can highly recommend looking into Mattermost as an open source Slack replacement.

We have been using it for the last 2 years and it has been working pretty much flawlessly for us. Upgrading it is really painless too, since it is just one Go binary that automatically applies DB migrations when it detects that you moved to a new version.

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

#116

Post by filoleg »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #110
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.

Their video offering is laughably bad but I'd bet that isn't because of electron. Otherwise I'm surprised people hate the electron app so much, on my 2014 mbp it works just fine.

Agreed. To support that point, Discord's videocall functionality is probably the best I've seen, despite using electron as well.

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #110
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.

Their video offering is laughably bad but I'd bet that isn't because of electron. Otherwise I'm surprised people hate the electron app so much, on my 2014 mbp it works just fine.

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by ruffrey »

akeck wrote: post #48

Hmmm. The story I keep hearing is companies switching from Slack to Teams, not because Teams is better, but because it's more or less integrated into O365 and has various compliance certs already. 7.1B seems a bit high when competing with MS.

I have used slack, hipchat, irc, and many other chats over the years for dev teams. Joined a new small company and we are struggling really hard with MS Teams.

Teams is unique in how it "ticks all the boxes" but has enough small flaws and unfinished implementations that it makes for a really, really awful tool. There are fundamental problems with the software. To name a few:

- The notifications are wildly inconsistent - sometimes I'll get 5-6 email notifications for a single message that I already saw, sometimes I'll get email + app notifications for messages I am currently viewing, sometimes I'll get no notifications via email or app, for stuff that happened when I was offline. - The way every message is like a new "post" and there can be replies - this is a unique idea, but just really bad to use in practice. When people reply to a post, it gets bumped to the bottom, so posts end up out of order. Also, all the replies to the post automatically get collapsed, making it really annoying to find anything. - The mac app decided to stop displaying new messages (for WEEKS) in certain channels including our service errors channel - I finally gave up and can only use it on the web. - the O365 file integration regularly crashes the browser and mac app. We share a lot of spreadsheets and this just sucks. Sharepoint sync on the mac breaks all the time. It spins and fails to track updates. - O365 collaboration in the browser is brittle, especially disappointing compared to where Google Docs was 5+ year ago. - The Teams search cannot find documents by name. - The messages seem to be backed by email files in sharepoint, which makes a mess in sharepoint (not that it isn't kinda a mess already).

After using the google suite at many companies for many years, and having the standard on-prem microsoft stuff, I have to say Teams is not a viable solution for a software team. Teams "ticks all the boxes" but the execution can't compare to Slack.

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

#119

Post by throwawaymath »

phailhaus wrote: post #106
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...

> And honestly, how hard can it be? Excuse me? You think 5 people can 100% replicate Slack natively within "a few months"?

That's not what they said. A significant fraction (probably the majority) of Slack's functionality is server-side, not client-side. Even if the client were to be rewritten from scratch, you would not need to replicate 100% of Slack.

But you also don't need to re-implement the entire client. You need to do a significant architectural change for performance improvements, not a complete overhaul. Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not that's feasible for five engineers already familiar with the codebase to do within a few months. Your incredulity at the idea is unwarranted.

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

#120

Post by phailhaus »

throwawaymath wrote: post #119
phailhaus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And honestly, how hard can it be? Excuse me? You think 5 people can 100% replicate Slack natively within "a few months"?

That's not what they said. A significant fraction (probably the majority) of Slack's functionality is server-side, not client-side. Even if the client were to be rewritten from scratch, you would not need to replicate 100% of Slack. But you also don't need to re-implement the entire client. You need to do a significant architectural change for performance improvements, not a complete overhaul. Reasonable people can d…

No, it's pretty warranted. The 100% I was referring to _was_ just for the clientside. To rewrite that natively (since today it's in js on Electron) is not going to take a couple of months with five engineers.
Post reply on HN