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

141–150 of 208 posts

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

#141

Post by grandmczeb »

jerf wrote: post #95
solatic wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Integrations serve as a moat. Anything that sends notifications to your chat platform, anything that adds slash-commands which become part of people's daily workflow, all of those become requirements which need to be replicated in a migration. For companies with non-trivial numbers of integrations which do non-trivial things for their users, it becomes more and more expensive to contemplate a replacement. For product…

"Integrations serve as a moat." The depth of those integrations serve as the depth of the moat. If your integration is basically "I send and receive textual messages", which from what I see the vast majority are, you've got an integration which could be ported to a competitor in less than a week. A lot of the integration work is in the thing being integrated rather than chat-system specific things. As you use more Sl…

> Be sure to read that first sentence of mine a couple of times before replying. It does not say "integrations are always trivial to port and are thus irrelevant", for instance. If I wanted to say that, I would have.

Off topic, but when you write something like this the message you’re sending is “I’d rather insult the reader than take the time to communicate in a way that can be properly understood.” Hopefully that’s not the intention.

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

#142

Post by fizx »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #31
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.

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...

Video performance is a LOT harder than you think.

At another company, I watched an five person team, half of whom had related PhDs, the other half over a dozen years of video engineering experience, make incremental improvements to the WebRTC stack.

After a year, was it better? The metrics said it was somewhat better, but the customers still complained all the time.

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

#143

Post by swozey »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #60
mechazawa wrote: post #6

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 tot…

One of my Slack channels (not servers, no idea how many are on this workspace) has, no exaggeration, ~45k users. It's a hosted FOSS project so they're not making money on those users, though. I'm curious what the largest Slack instance is if it's not k8s.

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

#145

Post by mcintyre1994 »

deadbunny wrote: post #99
mechazawa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord has a huge image problem. I won't touch it with a 10ft stick or even mention it in a professional environment. Besides that it's very annoying that it's a complicated mess that has no real focus.

> Discord has a huge image problem. I won't touch it with a 10ft stick or even mention it in a professional environment. Because it's aimed at gamers? > Besides that it's very annoying that it's a complicated mess that has no real focus. It's a chat and VOIP system, seems to do those both very well. Not exactly complicated.

It's also been latched onto by a lot of articles about the alt-right/Charlottesville, they were apparently using it for a while before they got banned there - and Discord have been subpoenad and things. Nothing that's Discord's fault (actually I don't think it's even encrypted?) but I can see why it'd get a bad look professionally based on that sort of coverage.

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

#146

Post by valeg »

phyzome wrote: post #137
eagsalazar2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Counterpoint: I've found it to work better than Google Meet. But maybe that's not saying much. (Is there any video conferencing software that doesn't suck in some way?)

Jitsi Meet just works for me: https://meet.jit.si/

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

#147

Post by mcintyre1994 »

everyone wrote: post #12

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

Discord feels less polished to me. I find push notifications way less reliable, and often if I do get a notification the app won't refresh for a few minutes to show the message. I think there's no offline handling at all for notifications, so if you're offline when a message it sent you're never notified about it. Search is basically unusable if you want context, they only let you see a few messages after your search term. Also they don't have outgoing webhooks which make bots more awkward.

It is nice that it's free and unlimited of course, it's a no brainer compared to free Slack, but for work I'd prefer to use Slack.

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

#148

Post by lordnacho »

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.

I don't know about "just fine". I think its benefits outweigh its problems. I need to stay in touch with my team, and I need those integrations.

But even simple stuff like "send when internet connection is back" isn't there, like what WhatsApp has.

It also doesn't load very fast for something that you'd think is mostly text. Change teams and you see the spinner a lot. Also when you've come back to WiFi it seems to take ages to get your updates.

A lot of these things seem to be "fixed" by killing the app and restarting, which is something of a smell.

Also seems to use a lot of memory. Not a huge problem on my machine, but I like elegance.

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

#149

Post by StaticRedux »

fastball wrote: post #100
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...

You can think a 5-person team can build highly performant native apps for a number of different platforms in a matter of months?

Yes

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

#150

Post by Reedx »

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.

Heck, I'm still waiting for Photoshop to be able to launch and display a static 50KB image in a reasonable amount of time.
Post reply on HN