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Slack S-1

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Re: Slack S-1

#231

Post by YjSe2GMQ »

fratlas wrote: post #13
amrrs wrote: post #2

Lyft, Uber, Zoom, Beyond Meat and now, Slack Is there any benefit of Public at this point of time? or Just a trend to grab as much as Wallet share from the average investor?

I've been seeing a lot of calls about this incoming downturn (especially HN), does anyone have any articles/analysis they can point me to? Would love to read up on the state of it.

"The Single Greatest Predictor of Future Stock Market Returns": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14948078

And here's the live (well, lagging a few months, but this is a very slow signal anyhow) version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14950203

Re: Slack S-1

#232

Post by wsdfsayy »

kemenaran wrote: post #210
wsdfsayy wrote: post #192

I remember at Uber we had tried Slack for a few months and it could not scale to that number of employees (at the time around 5000 worldwide)...

Doesn’t Uber use Mattermost these days? https://mattermost.com/blog/how-uber-uses-mattermost-to-enha...

yes they have their own internal chat app now this was a few years ago

Re: Slack S-1

#233

Post by est31 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #171
est31 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber has a big competitive moat, which is willingness to burn money. They've got a lot of it, and any competitor which can't raise as much money for that purpose as Uber has will lose out. It's simple, in any area that a small competitor of Uber operates they just artificially lower prices and do it until the competitor runs out of money. The company with more money wins. Slack... sure you can just spin up a rocket.c…

"Uber has a big competitive moat, which is willingness to burn money. " that's a very bad long term strategy :-)

Most of the time, there won't be anyone trying so most of the time they will make money instead of burning it. As long as they are burning less on average than they are doing in profits they turn a profit in total.

The business model already exists e.g. in the form of American cable companies. They offer crappy services for super expensive prices, but the moment a competitor gets into town and invests heavily, they invest as well and outbid them. This way they ensure that no competitor can make profits and grow beside them in that specific town. So they are safe. Add in government mandated monopolies and "you get counties abc, I get counties def" type deals between cable companies and regulators looking the other way. Same will likely happen for Uber vs Lyft.

Re: Slack S-1

#235

Post by dd36 »

rayiner wrote: post #64
will_brown wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any other industry where a company can go public having lost $500,000,000 over the last 3 years? I get it their “market share” is increasing every year and the loses are staying the same...and even that is not the full picture of a path to profit. But if the company could turn a profit, then why not do it privately, show that and then go public? My guess like Uber and Lyft...they can’t turn a profit, and for…

Is there any other industry where developing an instant messaging system can result in $500 million in losses despite $700 million in revenue?

My thought as well. What on earth about Slack costs hundreds of millions to operate?

Re: Slack S-1

#236

Post by leowoo91 »

douglasfshearer wrote: post #12

Slack has a 5-year, $50M/year minimum commitment with AWS. From the document: > In April 2018, the Company executed an amendment to its existing agreement with Amazon Web Services (“AWS”). The amended agreement was effective as of May 1, 2018 and continues through July 31, 2023. The Company has minimum annual commitments of $50.0 million each year of the agreement term for a total minimum commitment of $250.0 million…

How is that possible since even instagram spent around 10k per month for few million users? Am I missing something?

Re: Slack S-1

#237

Post by lordnacho »

megous wrote: post #100
screye wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see that happening. Loss making unicorns go public -> investor pressure builds to reach profitability -> none of them can deliver on promises in the short term -> public does not want to own these stocks anymore -> causes a frantic selling spree -> market crashes.

Why would the market crash, and not just these few bad comapanies? What's systemic about the overhyped IRC clone or just another taxi service getting their fair value judged by public markets, that would cause a market crash?

The portfolio effect:

A lot of funds pile into the techs. They lose money. Their customers pull their money. They have to sell not just the techs, but the rest of their portfolios too.

Re: Slack S-1

#238

Post by blotter_paper »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #200
will_brown wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who want to invest in ICOs, Ponzi schemes...others want to rape, murder...why should anyone’s opinions be forced on these people?

ICO’s and Ponzi scheme involve misrepresentations to the investor and/or theft

#NotAllICOs

Re: Slack S-1

#239

Post by parasubvert »

Silhouette wrote: post #203
scrollaway wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4.2M / month on AWS is a hefty bill but it's not unheard of. Slack is, I suspect, paying for all the marked up extras such as various expensive regulation compliance addons, at-rest encryption, multi-AZ+multi-region backups and mirrors and what not. There's also probably a huge amount of stuff they use on their side to run their own tooling and analytics on their clients; costs that won't necessarily rise per user. T…

The thing I find curious is that businesses of this scale are still using cloud hosting. Is it cost-effective or otherwise better in some way to outsource your infrastructure instead of hiring an in-house IT team to manage your own hardware and connectivity at this level?

Generally, cloud is still better for many. Managing datacenters at scale is hard. It also takes time to build up capabilities in house, while cost of delay is usually far greater than cost efficiencies wrung out of infrastructure. Cloud is often a euphemism for “supported hosted software that happens to come with hardware”. Not that different from Dreamhost managing PHP for you , just richer and higher scale. Why build a cheaper internal capability over 6 months when I can have a slightly more expensive service NOW that I don’t have to worry about? This is why we have 3rd party transportation companies, telecoms, power plants, etc.

Netflix still uses cloud hosting for most things. Some like Dropbox have found a way to DIY. On the other hand, Gitlab tried to move to in house kubernetes on bare metal, and reversed that position

Re: Slack S-1

#240

Post by veritas20 »

will_brown wrote: post #35
neom wrote: post #11

"Our revenue was $105.2 million, $220.5 million, and $400.6 million in fiscal years 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively, representing annual growth of 110% and 82%, respectively. Our growth is global with international revenue representing 34%, 34%, and 36% of total revenue in fiscal years 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively. We continue to invest in growing our business to capitalize on our market opportunity. As a re…

Is there any other industry where a company can go public having lost $500,000,000 over the last 3 years? I get it their “market share” is increasing every year and the loses are staying the same...and even that is not the full picture of a path to profit. But if the company could turn a profit, then why not do it privately, show that and then go public? My guess like Uber and Lyft...they can’t turn a profit, and for…

I think that your intentions are good, but approach may be off a bit. I agree that the SEC does protect investors and markets, but I do not agree that a company should be in the black before they IPO.

I think that your main concern is the public market funding VC capital returns. If so, then a more reasonable approach to prevent public market exploitation may be to require a lock up period for investors for a certain amount of time (not sure how you would determine this...) similar to how employees are often beholden to lock up periods post IPO.

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