Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#171

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 2:24 AM UTC

Roritharr wrote: post #23

wayoutthere wrote: post #12

I agree they’re a great product org, but not sure I agree they’re a $16B company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I’m not sold on their long term viability. It’s just too easy for new IM platforms to take root inside a company once the old one gets too noisy. Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product befo…

Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded. They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.

The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options.

Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#172

Post by jay_kyburz » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 2:24 AM UTC

robodale wrote: post #141

scarface74 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is a $16 billion dollar company on paper but still not profitable and showing no signs of profitability. It’s not like Slack is printing money.

They will be if they inject ads in between your messages (free version only). "Rid Belly Fat NOW! Click Here!"

Haha, and that will be the last slack message I ever read.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#173

Post by quickthrower2 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 2:26 AM UTC

Well done! :aussie_conga_parrot:

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#174

Post by fpvracing » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 2:27 AM UTC

enjo wrote: post #90

davnicwil wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut feeling, without doing much proper analysis, is that further growth will come not so much from adding more paying users as selling more services to the existing, extremely locked in, userbase. It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.

I’m starting to see Slack show up in all sorts of places far beyond software development teams. Accounting firms, non profits, and even a home inspector I worked with... I can’t imagine they’re even close full market penetration.

I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest-based, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#175

Post by TallGuyShort » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 2:31 AM UTC

davnicwil wrote: post #76

tetrisgm wrote: post #44

Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free. I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert…

My gut feeling, without doing much proper analysis, is that further growth will come not so much from adding more paying users as selling more services to the existing, extremely locked in, userbase. It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.

I'm biased because I like Slack, although I haven't tried Discord so I'm only comparing it with the usual competitors that are terrible, but it does feel very sticky to me. It's replaced email for my JIRA and Google Drive notifications, it's replaced Google Hangouts for most of my team chat and 1:1 video calls. And I'm not even using all the plugins many of my colleagues are using yet.

They really seem to have gotten a lot of Google Wave ideas to catch on and have even kept some IRC bits. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Congrats to the team on this massive valuation. Makes a lot more sense to me than Snapchat at $19B...

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#176

Post by sureaboutthis » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 2:32 AM UTC

I hear people mention Slack once in a while on various forums but I have no clue what it is. I do not know anyone who uses it so it's not something I, or anyone I know, feels a need for--otherwise we would be searching it out. And therein lies a problem. $16B for something few people need or want? I guess I have to look up Slack and see what it is.

EDIT: So I looked it up and it looks like something useful for a lot of remote workers that need constant, instant contact with people working on the same stuff at the same time. To me that's a pretty niche market. If I thought the phone or email wasn't good enough, I might pay $5/month for such a service. But irc works pretty good still today.

IRC isn't worth $16B

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#177

Post by fpvracing » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 2:33 AM UTC

lewisl9029 wrote: post #119

fpvracing wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable. Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.

It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt-out mechanism outside of leaving y…

I will check it out and thanks!

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#178

Post by bastawhiz » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 2:34 AM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #151

hombre_fatal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried HipChat for a whole day before bouncing. It was so bad. Had hilariously poor UX, using commands like \code to get a single line of monospaced text, iirc.

Weirdly enough, I had heard that HipChat used to scale better than Slack. Supposedly Uber used to use the former rather than the latter because once an org hit a certain threshold in thousands of users, Slack was no good. This was years ago, however.

Uber did use HipChat instead of Slack, but mostly because Slack was uninterested in standing up servers for Uber. My understanding is that Slack basically ran a single server instance for each Slack team.

Atlassian bent over backwards for Uber, but just enough to make it functional. It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone.

Uber eventually replaced it with a (forked) Mattermost cluster.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#179

Post by lern_too_spel » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 2:35 AM UTC

This valuation depends on the continued incompetence of Google and Microsoft, who both offer Slack competitors as part of their productivity packages that most of Slack's paying customers already subscribe to. Their offerings are so bad that people pay money to Slack not to use them.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#180

Post by narag » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 2:36 AM UTC

dstaley wrote: post #160

narag wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do Microsoft and Apple really want native apps? I've got the opposite impression: they've tried very hard to herd desktop apps into Apple Store model. Third party vendors, like Adobe, are also forcing clients to adopt subscription schemes.

What does a subscription have to do with native apps though? All of Adobe's apps are native apps even though they require a subscription license.

Sorry I wasn't clear. The underlying problem is piracy. Big players like Adobe can still use the subscription model. For most vendors, the easiest choice is going the web route.

Deployment is another PITA that makes App Store model desirable for the vendors. For Apple and Microsoft it's even better because they get a cut, they curate their platforms and have the upper hand over vendors lest they become competition.