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)...
Same thing happened with freeCodeCamp
Slack S-1
221–230 of 469 posts
Re: Slack S-1
#222Slack 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…
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…
$0.01/AU/day isn't crazy. I'd actually argue its low, compared to some of the other enterprise or social media bills we've seen.
You can't just say "I could serve 1000 users on a $240/year VPS, they should be able to serve their 10M users on around $2M/year!" Things don't scale like that. The complex dynamics of the world can't be represented by linear extrapolation. Moreover, there's a balance that needs to be struck between the complex process of "spending less on cloud" and the complex process of "developing the product". Everything costs money.
Re: Slack S-1
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Outside of silicon valley there's an extraordinary amount of unfilled tech positions. If they are unemployed it's likely their own fault.
Re: Slack S-1
#224"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…
..supply and demand. Theres demand for extremely high growth companies, especially if they seem to have a some path to profitability. Private investor demand, and public market/IPO demand too.
Re: Slack S-1
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your example demonstrates my point. Your CEO made a terrible decision in making you switch. Your co spent much more paying people to migrate to something worse than it would have spent just ponying up for the license.
Agreed. But if Teams comes with Office365, Slack may have trouble getting CEOs to pay more per-user monthly fees. And I pay for both Office365 and G Suite at my business, and Google just invited me to Currents. I know better than to dump something like Slack for any new (like, first 3 years) Google product, but... Slack's getting some real competition.
This is the first I heard of Currents, but Google naming their Yammer-clone replacement for G+ after an already-failed Google product is really setting themselves up for success.
Re: Slack S-1
#226"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…
I either wildly underestimate the cost or the scale of building slack, am I reading that right that they've spent well in excess of a billion dollars in the last few years?
Re: Slack S-1
#227Slack 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…
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…
You say "chat app" like that means it's easy.
How is running a chat app any easier than, say, running Facebook?
Re: Slack S-1
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why? Their revenue is growing faster and they aren’t running out of money.
At that scale, I suspect there are some ~$10k engineering-time efforts that could save them $1m a year in costs, if they already have the people on staff with the expertise. In my limited experience, a lot of opportunities like that get missed because: - an optimization is considered lower priority than feature work and bugs, so never gets staffed - it's considered risky even when it's not - it's difficult to quantif…
Head count is not infinite. I don't agree with the GP's claim that they aren't running out of money (if they don't show a profit, they are running out of money, by definition), but developer time is a limited resource that must be carefully allocated.
They have a very hard problem on their hands of estimating the revenue growth new features will bring, and compare them to costs savings from better code. I don't think anybody here has enough data to decide on this - it's not impossible that nobody there has enough data either.
Re: Slack S-1
#229Lyft, 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.
Sure, here's a 2009 HN thread all about the impending market crash:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=712198
And one from 2011:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2868728
And here's one from 2012:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3947923
Here's one from 2014:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338411
And here's one from 2016:
Re: Slack S-1
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool, 10000 more of those boxes and you can rebuild slack "in a weekend for $35k/month". Don't mind the lawsuits when you lose your customer data and forgot to pay for backups for "cost optimization" reasons. Don't mind the complaints when your uptime is barely one-nine. Don't mind the customer cancellations when your 1000-user VPS doesn't actually scale to 20k concurrents. And don't mind the HN snark when you releas…
I think you're being overly negative. I think you can do a lot with a little. Does a chat app need to be fully searchable? I don't think so. Does it need backups? I don't think so. These are features users could opt-in for if it was that important to them. Could be something simple as sending encrypted nightly diffs to an email address. The whole world doesn't need to be over engineered to have a useful product.
> Does a chat app need to be fully searchable? I don't think so. Does it need backups? I don't think so. These are features users could opt-in for if it was that important to them.
They do, that's why people pay for it.