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

Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 224 posts

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#111

Post by nroach »

w8rbt wrote: post #39
mattmanser wrote: post #10

Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s chief executive, said in an interview that it would take time for the market to understand his company since it had created a new category of software, unlike soda or cars We've had public business software companies for decades, they all created a new "category" of software, why does he think his is something new? Fundamentally speaking, how is Slack any different to the first email prog…

Slack is nothing at all like email. It's proprietary, non-federated and has built-in data discovery/spying mechanisms to record every click/keystroke made by users.

Can you supply some references for the keystroke assertion?

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#112

Post by bdcravens »

w8rbt wrote: post #106
squeaky-clean wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and slack is not the first instant messaging program. /snarky quip about your age and IRC/ How many corporations use G suite for their email? How many roll their own email systems and use thunderbird? To the average user, email is a proprietary non-federated system filled with tracking.

Sorry, I don't mean that as snark. Many people born after 2000 have known nothing but Gmail as email and are surprised to learn that other email systems/providers exist.

That's nothing unique to age. I regularly talk to people born before 1960 (and 1970, and 1980....) who don't know that email is separate from it being on a website (about the only difference is that they know of Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc)

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#113

Post by w8rbt »

nroach wrote: post #111
w8rbt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is nothing at all like email. It's proprietary, non-federated and has built-in data discovery/spying mechanisms to record every click/keystroke made by users.

Can you supply some references for the keystroke assertion?

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/360002079527-A-guid...

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#114

Post by SeeDave »

jmull wrote: post #110
SeeDave wrote: post #104

I don't know enough about the Slack product or business model to comment authoritatively, but I'm really confused how they're losing money (and so much of it) and I sense a bit of "weirdness" around unit economics/user conversion/pricing. I've long thought that they've essentially built beautiful native/mobile/web clients for IRC-type chats and provide hosting/IRCOp services. Charging per-seat to enterprise seems lik…

It's over 100000 paid customers, not paid users. E.g., your revenue number is way off... the article says their revenue for the quarter was $145 million. So I guess the average revenue per customer was approaching $1500 (well, unless I dropped a zero or three somewhere, which is possible). For Slack customers are organizations with potentially multiple users. Likewise, I think your 1:130 number is perhaps comparing a…

Thanks for the clarification! I was really scratching my head there based on the apples to oranges comparison of 'customers' to 'users' and you were right... my revenue estimate was indeed way off.

Upgrading Slack from 'WTF' to "Let's see how this plays out and if it's priced accurately' because $30m in losses on $145m in revenue for cloud enterprise chat with a long-tail of free-tier users seems pretty promising!

Thanks again!

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#115

Post by pcarolan »

Mindstormy wrote: post #11

I just wish they had not acquired Screen Hero. That was a beautiful standalone product that I wish I could still use.

Agreed. I'd be happy if they brought their video chat up to the standard Screen Hero set. It was one of the best pieces of software I remember in recent years.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#116

Post by nathanaldensr »

kaushikt wrote: post #49
collyw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got a big pushback after deciding that they (wrongly) thought that they were a content provider platform and not a payment platform and started banning users with political views they didn't like.

Genuine question: How could a company confuse of what they mean to their users by such a huge margin? A content provider vs payment platform. Woah!

They aren't confusing it. It's part of the lie these companies tend to construct--if they say they are something, over time, they hope everyone believes it. "We aren't just a (even though they are), we're a !"

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#117

Post by anbotero »

mattmanser wrote: post #10

Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s chief executive, said in an interview that it would take time for the market to understand his company since it had created a new category of software, unlike soda or cars We've had public business software companies for decades, they all created a new "category" of software, why does he think his is something new? Fundamentally speaking, how is Slack any different to the first email prog…

Thanks! I mean it, THANK YOU!

We were using HipChat at a previous company (2013, I think), and I never understood the switch to Slack. I was like: Wait, but what's the difference? Everybody knew about Slack, and no one about HipChat.

I also don't think they introduced a new category of software, they just spent an absurd amount of additional money in marketing. That's it.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#118

Post by pcarolan »

Slack's long-term value prop isn't chat, it's the platform. If you've used any of the great bot apps it hosts (PTO Ninja for example), it's easy to imagine a future where these kinds of apps replace whole swaths of bloated Saas-ware. I'm excited to see more of these and a competitive eco-system emerge within Slack the way Apple built the app store. Slack should invest heavily in building a platform for developers if it wants to grow, if it can pull this off it's going to look a lot more like Salesforce.com in 5 years where whole industries are built on its back. This is also the moat they have against MS Teams. Microsoft hasn't been as successful in building wildly productive developer ecosystems since the Windows 9X days.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#119

Post by ilikehurdles »

Slack is back up at or above where it was at end of trading hours yesterday. It plunged after-market, opened at $26, and is back near $31 again now. NYT should just start using AI to write negative articles about tech companies when their stock swings more than 5% and put their journalists to better use.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#120

Post by ilikehurdles »

scarface74 wrote: post #64
danenania wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A business that’s doing great can have numbers that look like this if they’re investing heavily in growth. In that case, they’re losing money deliberately—if they wanted to, they could optimize for profits and be making money, but at the cost of growing slower and presumably sacrificing greater profits in the future. If you’re a shareholder, you probably don’t want that. I don’t know whether Slack is in this position…

That’s always the excuse. It’s an outlier when it happens.

Slack's Denver office very recently came online and I know a ton of colleagues who were hired in their sales department.
Post reply on HN