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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

#161

Post by russdpale »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #158
fastball wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Start with Mac, find some good metrics that indicate that a lot of your users are on Mac and go from there. (parse your user agents for instance) Once it's proven itself, you can try Windows and some other options as needed (probably mobile).

You don't even need good metrics. Just write some software that doesn't run like shit. That is the only metric that is needed.

If you build it, they will come. Especially if they don't have a choice. So build the new, deprecate the old.

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

#162

Post by russdpale »

phailhaus wrote: post #120
throwawaymath wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With a 7b valuation, I'm pretty sure they can hire some talented people, don't you?

I agree it will take longer, but Slack owes it to their customers to hire people and put out a better product.

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

#163

Post by chrismeller »

nwsm wrote: post #73
chrismeller wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. Have you tried using Teams? I’m forced to now and I want to kill cute, fuzzy woodland creatures every single day. Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.

I missed the part where you detailed any of your problems with it.

Hold on to your butts...

1. Click the icon to open it. Flip to another app. Multiple times during startup it will steal focus as I'm trying to do other things.

2. Flip back to another app during #1? It'll sit at "Loading Teams..." for. F'ing. ever. You won't get any notifications during this phase. You will not show up as online.

3. When it does load, I'm always 2 months back in chat conversation and have to spend 2 minutes scrolling down to the current time to see if there's anything new.

4. There is no way to skip to latest...

5. Notifications don't integrate with anything, they are custom. They are quirky and peculiar. There have been times that _none of them_ come through - no badge, no notification, no mobile push notification, no nothing - if I hadn't flipped to the app I would have no idea I got any messages at all. And yes, these are direct messages that I have notifications turned on for.

6. Uploading files is annoying as F. Drag and drop into the message. I have to click into the message input box to even start adding any other text (seems like an obvious transition to me)... when it finishes uploading you might get kicked back out of the text box because it wants to ask if this is the same file as you uploaded before.

7. When focusing on the app I'm never, read _never_, placed into the input box, even if I just saw a notification (miraculously!) that I'm trying to reply to. (Skype also has this same problem.)

8. Defaults to emailing you _for every F'ing thing under the sun_. It's an F'ing chat app, why are "you're missing the conversation!" emails the default?

9. Navigation is a clusterF. Three layers of vertical panes of navigation (ala Slack). Then add on top of that horizontal navigation _in every single one_. And not just a fixed number of tabs as navigation, you never have any idea what it's going to look like because...

10. "Integrations" is just BS. All they mean in Teams is a new tab you can add to the horizontal navigation in #9.

11. Any of their logic regarding recent conversations, recent groups, etc. and what should be displayed in the left navigation is crap. I've only got one team that I use, but I have to expand that single team to get the other "chats" in it? You've got thousands of pixels of vertical real estate here, why do I have to constantly expand the _one thing_ in the list?

12. The "wiki" has no navigation by default, you have to try and figure out (amongst the 15 different layers of navigation) where to expand to find the pages in it. Hardly a wiki, and even the editing tools are quirky and annoying - things disappear and reappear at random.

And that's just off the top of my head. This is seriously the _worst_ chat app I have ever used in my life. Some random team at MS took Skype and decided to take the worst UX features of it and make a Slack clone. The fact that they started pushing this to businesses as part of 365 should involve mass firings.

Edit: Formatting and a word... and a number.

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

#164

Post by Reedx »

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.

Aren't the bots and integrations of those already moat-like?

Even if a lot of those exist elsewhere and you're not using custom bots, hooking everything back up is a pain point. Along with having to export/import data, getting everyone to sign up and get used to a new service, etc. I think it's probably going to take something that's not just a little better, but significantly better and different.

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

#165

Post by eschutte2 »

hvidgaard wrote: post #72
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...

Lets assume well paid developers of $150.000 yearly, 5 man for 3 months is less than $187.500 is wages. Lets be generous and say we double that to account for other expenses. It's $375.000 for a feature that will be a reasonable sales argument.

Slack pays much more than $150k.

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

#166

Post by chrisco255 »

russdpale wrote: post #160
peterwwillis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. A completely rewritten from scratch product would probably take 1 year to finish. 90% complete can be ready in a few months, but the last 10% takes much more effort. Then there's the QA division you need to build out to test it on the platforms and OSes you need to support your enterprise customers. Then there's the management structure to track the project. Then there's keeping it up to date with the existi…

Electron apps are for amateurs and small start up teams. Once you are into the 7b valuation range, you need to put on big boy pants, and make big boy software that runs as advertised. No video functionality even needs to exist for it to run terribly. I have never used the video feature, and it causes my entire 4-5 year old system to chug. I can't even consider using it on an old linux machine. People shouldn't have t…

VS Code is an Electron app written by the $800B Microsoft. Maybe you've heard of them?

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

#167

Post by chrismeller »

marcinzm wrote: post #74
chrismeller wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. Have you tried using Teams? I’m forced to now and I want to kill cute, fuzzy woodland creatures every single day. Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.

>Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better. But compliance may be. For example, Slack charges a lot of money and requires a lot of users for actual HIPAA compliance (as in signing a BAA, everything else is marketing fluff). Teams, from what I can tell, comes with a BAA out of the box.

Slack charges what, $12/user/month for the full version with compliance and auditing included? Yeah, that's $12 more than you were spending, but companies that care about compliance really shouldn't be that cash-focused (I know, I know).

It's hard to deny Teams when it's already bundled with 365 that we're spending $25/user/month on, but if anyone has ever used both it becomes _immediately_ obvious that it's worth the money. That's the whole approach MS is going for, and something that's very very hard for Slack to combat.

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

#168

Post by baddox »

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.

I'm still very curious what combination of variables leads to these complaints about Electron apps. I have never experienced any of these issues, and I have heavily used Electron apps like Slack, Discord, and Visual Studio Code for years on both high-end and modest Apple computers.

Electron apps appear to be one of the biggest pain points for people in tech and the HN community, and I find it so bizarre that I relate to exactly zero of those complaints.

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

#169

Post by peterwwillis »

russdpale wrote: post #160
peterwwillis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. A completely rewritten from scratch product would probably take 1 year to finish. 90% complete can be ready in a few months, but the last 10% takes much more effort. Then there's the QA division you need to build out to test it on the platforms and OSes you need to support your enterprise customers. Then there's the management structure to track the project. Then there's keeping it up to date with the existi…

Electron apps are for amateurs and small start up teams. Once you are into the 7b valuation range, you need to put on big boy pants, and make big boy software that runs as advertised. No video functionality even needs to exist for it to run terribly. I have never used the video feature, and it causes my entire 4-5 year old system to chug. I can't even consider using it on an old linux machine. People shouldn't have t…

Nobody at the executive level is determining what application platform to use. The bigger your company gets, the farther away they are from this decision. In fact, from an executive level, the fact that people are using the app despite complaints shows they are doing something right.

The alternative for users is to go with a competitor that competes with everything Slack provides, in addition to improved performance. There are at least two such competitors out there, but people put up with Slack, even though they don't have to.

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

#170

Post by paxy »

acconrad wrote: post #127

I'm new to venture deals (just read the book of the same name) and I have a question: Slack seems to be in peacetime: aggressive growth, buying things like HipChat. If they're dominating the market, why would they need to raise money?

> In previous rounds, Slack’s CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield has said that the company raises “opportunistically.” That is, it doesn’t have to raise money because it’s already making money and still has some in the bank, but as long as VCs are knocking, it’s worth taking the funding if it’s coming in at good valuations because you never know what might lie ahead.
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