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Slack S-1

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Re: Slack S-1

#131

Post by raldi »

drb91 wrote: post #106
raldi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry; I've just seen this attitude so many times in my career of, "Why not just create an option for this thing that would completely upend the way the product works?", which doubles the number of possible things you then need to test for, complicates the product, slows down development, adds technical debt, bloats the software, and clutters up the options screen. I'm on a couple slacks, some where local culture…

What does a good experience with slack look like? Just not getting annoyed by anything?

I can be away for a few days, catch up quickly, and add a comment to a conversation that ended long ago and know that the participants will actually see it. All thanks to threads.

Re: Slack S-1

#132

Post by phamilton »

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?

Has there ever been a non monetary benefit to going public?

Re: Slack S-1

#133

Post by mises »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #121
moreira wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm just not aware how things work in companies of Slack's size, but... what do you think $4M/mo is spent on, for what essentially amounts to a chat app? I realise there a lot of extras in Slack (attachments cost S3 storage, video calls take bandwidth, webhooks take some processing), but as of January 2019, they had 10M daily active users. $50M/365 gives us $137K per day. $137K per day just to serve 10M activ…

Much of this goes into geo redundancy too. These 10M people are not in one place. So, you need redundant highly availably deployments in many regions. This does add lots of infrastructure duplication but is also super speedy for end users. This adds to the cost big time! For example, I was working with a gaming company and they had 10+ regions around the world, all using this type of setup, just to keep latency to an…

Some of this infrastructure duplication ought to go down by that scale, as there are likely a good number of users at any given location.

Re: Slack S-1

#134

Post by drb91 »

raldi wrote: post #131
drb91 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a good experience with slack look like? Just not getting annoyed by anything?

I can be away for a few days, catch up quickly, and add a comment to a conversation that ended long ago and know that the participants will actually see it. All thanks to threads.

Catching up quickly is not something I associate with slack—mostly missing things, actually.

This is obviously a hard problem to solve without just making it back into email. Muting apps that spam notifications for someone else’s benefit would be a great start. Not allowing bots to spam new threads at you and cleaning up old threads automatically would also be great—having a ton of old threads brings the client to its knees on my dual core laptop.

Re: Slack S-1

#135

Post by zedpm »

tw04 wrote: post #104
cupofjoakim wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, these guys do have a good way to make money. Enterprise contracts are worth their weight in gold. As you could see from the quote, their revenue has increased more than their losses - which mean that they are on their way to become profitable. Arguably they could be now, if they didn't invest in growth as much.

I'd be curious if it's remotely sustainable. We started on Slack ~3 years ago. We're now moving (albeit slowly) to Teams. 18 months from now Slack will be gone entirely. I can't believe we're the only ones. And unlike Dropbox vs. Ondrive, Slack isn't markedly better in any area than Teams from my testing.

Oh no, turn back while you still can. My team is in full revolt due to a company-wide migration from Slack to Teams. Teams is worse in almost every way. We're seeing lots of missing functionality, bizarre UI bugs, random crashes, extremely slow sync, you name it. Teams is in no way a viable replacement for Slack unless your use case is one or two plaintext messages per day.

Re: Slack S-1

#136

Post by raldi »

sinatra wrote: post #83
raldi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry; I've just seen this attitude so many times in my career of, "Why not just create an option for this thing that would completely upend the way the product works?", which doubles the number of possible things you then need to test for, complicates the product, slows down development, adds technical debt, bloats the software, and clutters up the options screen. I'm on a couple slacks, some where local culture…

Thank you for turning the conversation more polite. I agree with you about options having a cost. However, if so many of your users are complaining about something, and if the complaint is about something as important as “losing messages,” then something should be done about it. It’s no longer enough to say that “but it works for some people” or to say that “options add complexity.” Our entire core team has discussed…

If your team embraces threading, you'll soon see it's far superior re: not missing messages. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758075 for some details on this; the gist is, when everyone threads, it’s easy to catch up when you’ve been away, and you automatically get notified when someone follows up on a topic you’ve been participating in.

Are you familiar with the way you can cc: the channel on a thread comment when you’re concerned people might miss it?

Re: Slack S-1

#137

Post by thegranderson »

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…

There are many industries where this happens. Biotech and drug development is particularly prolific in this regard. Often drug development companies spend tens to hundreds of millions creating a drug, only to have the whole company bought out by a large pharma company once it passes a certain testing/approval milestone. No profits for the company at all. [1]

Just because a business doesn't turn a GAAP profit doesn't mean it is not a worthwhile investment opportunity, nor that investors shouldn't have access to it so they can decide for themselves. There are many reasons why investors might want to back an unprofitable company - I won't go into them all here, as it differs dramatically by industry.

Keep in mind that a large part of the public market capital is from institutional investors who have just as much experience, if not more, as private investors.

No one has to buy shares in these companies. It is all a choice. "The public" is not some block of sorry schmucks who keep getting stuck with toxic investments pawned off by VC funds, and I'm not exactly sure why you seem to think "the public" is getting a bag dumped on them...

[1] Endocyte acquisition by Novartis for $2B, December 2018. Endocyte had ~$300m of accumulated losses and zero revenue prior to acquisition [1] Ablynx acquisition by Sanofi for $4.8B, May 2018. Ablynx had ~€370m of accumulated losses prior to acquisition

Re: Slack S-1

#138

Post by komali2 »

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?

Maybe it finally pushes the student loan crisis over the edge when an influx of unemployed tech workers are added to the tens of thousands defaulting on their loans?

Re: Slack S-1

#139

Post by anonu »

cupofjoakim wrote: post #41
maxxxxx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still mind boggling that all these unicorns haven’t found a way to make money even after being in business for years and having a mature product. It’s a strange world.

Well, these guys do have a good way to make money. Enterprise contracts are worth their weight in gold. As you could see from the quote, their revenue has increased more than their losses - which mean that they are on their way to become profitable. Arguably they could be now, if they didn't invest in growth as much.

That $50mm a year AWS bill seems pretty high - I think some optimizations there could easily cut this big expense...

Re: Slack S-1

#140

Post by jvagner »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #116
tw04 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious if it's remotely sustainable. We started on Slack ~3 years ago. We're now moving (albeit slowly) to Teams. 18 months from now Slack will be gone entirely. I can't believe we're the only ones. And unlike Dropbox vs. Ondrive, Slack isn't markedly better in any area than Teams from my testing.

The cost of migrating away from something like slack for an enterprise org is enormous compared to what it costs. Teams might have parity in a vacuum, but everyone already knows what slack is and how to use it, including people you might hire in the future.

Two years ago a company we were at had Slack and it was used vigorously. They hit a user limit and couldn't get the CEO to pony up whatever it cost to extend Slack. (This company was the kind of company that had unlimited budgets for conferences and sales calls, but could hardly ever get a CC# for a dev team need...)

They switched to MS Teams, but at least two years ago, it felt unusable. Or, the team's Slackness couldn't translate. No one used it.

Neither Slack nor MS made money in this exchange.

Maybe Teams has gotten better and more usable, but I wonder if Teams is taking off in business environments, whereas Slack definitely is more common in tech environments?

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