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

Slack S-1

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 469 posts

Re: Slack S-1

#301

Post by not_a_moth »

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…

I see the counterargument, but we are still pushing companies onto the public that are losing copious amounts of money. Part of me wonders if we aren't witnessing the irrational exuberance before the (cyclical) fall.

Re: Slack S-1

#302

Post by cosmie »

GordonS wrote: post #282
cosmie wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're doing quite a bit of TV advertising[1]. Production and flighting costs on commercials, at a global scale, isn't going to come cheaply. [1] https://www.ispot.tv/brands/Zyh/slack/

I wonder how effective TV advertising would really be for something relevant to such a small proportion of the population.

Based on the commercial contents, they're targeting pretty much any white-collar employees. So the target population isn't as small as it appears at first glance.

Their operating model also leads to a pretty unique way of internal adoption. At my last company (a smaller one), we had a paid Slack account and it was our official means of internal communication.

At my current company, a large Fortune 100 company, email is still the predominant form of internal communications. With Skype and Teams available, but with a frustrating enough user experience that everyone falls back to email. But there are a lot of pockets that unofficially use Slack, with some using the paid form (and expensing it under their budget) and others using free ones. Our central IT is finally giving in looking at getting an official subscription to centralize usage under a single Slack account (for auditability, information security, employee attrition concerns, and ease of user support).

By targeting end users directly in those commercials and enabling internal adoption without interfacing with IT (i.e. free accounts, web app for those that can't install desktop apps, etc), they're able to gain adoption and momentum in a guerrilla fashion that snowballs into eventual enterprise contracts.

Re: Slack S-1

#303

Post by ssnistfajen »

will_brown wrote: post #62
dcosson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t understand this take at all. The public is free to just not buy the stock if they don’t want. You think the problem is that investors are leaving too much potential for growth on the table when companies IPO? They should wait even longer and keep more of that growth private?

I think a company going public should not operating at $150M losses using VC money...letting them cash out and profit by selling to the public. I also think there are other fundamental benefits to the economy. Yes the public is free not to buy...just as non-accredited investors would be free not to invest in unregistered securities yet regulations are still in place for a reason to protect would be investors. It does…

To sell to the public requires someone willing to purchase the shares first. That's how the market works. If someone invests in Slack despite the conitnued losses, it means they see value in the company based on existing metrics.

Barring companies from public listings based on some arbitrary numerical threshold is very unreasonable. Even more so when only the losses are emphasized in your previous comments while ignoring the revenue growth. That alone creates a very one-sided and biased view of Slack's financial situation.

Re: Slack S-1

#304

Post by komali2 »

mfatica wrote: post #223
komali2 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If they are unemployed it's likely their own fault.

Well hold on, I was just idly speculating, but I don't like this kind of thinking. There's a hundred and one reasons people can't leave a city, or the obstacle to leaving is too great.

Off the top of my head, not wanting to uproot kids into a new school system, partner's job, disability that makes it extraordinarily difficult to move (away from whatever ADA stuff you've got set up at your apartment and commute flow you've got set up), need to stay near sick family, need to stay regional to a very specific doctor or healthcare facility, and that's just needs. A strong desire to stay in a local area due to history or just preference should be valid as well.

I see this reasoning used to attack non-tech workers all the time and it bothers me.

Re: Slack S-1

#305

Post by Spivak »

mbesto wrote: post #290
dd36 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Guess what? You can actually see in an S-1 what it costs. S&M = $233,191 for 2019 More than half their revenue is spent acquiring new customers...which, with a high likelihood, will net revenue over a N+1 year timeframe. This is an investors wet dream... I pay $1 now and I only need $.15 to operate that $1 every year for the next 7 years...that's a helluva return. In other words...you can turn off the S&M tap and the…

I think your point still stands but some of that S&M can never be cut because of churn and is highly susceptible to interference from competitors.

Slack doesn't have that much lock-in and a lot of people have their sights on that market -- "Cheaper than Slack and bundled with Office365/G Suite" is an extremely tempting offer.

Re: Slack S-1

#306

Post by ska »

dcosson wrote: post #299
ska wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pull yourself up by your bootstraps stuff isn't the issue here, it's risk management. Accreditation is not in place to define who is informed and smart enough to make the investments, it is defining who can afford to take the loss, and who at least has the resources to do it properly.

There are lots of other ways for people with limited money to lose it, and there always will be. Casinos, lottery tickets, credit card debt, frivolous purchases, etc. I can’t think of any reasonable argument why allowing a free-thinking adult to, say, put a bit of savings into a friend or relative’s new startup is so much worse than the rest of these that it needs to be illegal.

It's the imbalance of power. I don't think accreditation is perfect, but it is fairly reasonable. It is really, really easy to take advantage of naive investors.

Sure, there are probably examples of sophisticated investors who don't meet the criteria. But the numbers are tiny, and probably much smaller than the numbers who think they are, but are in fact not.

Don't forget, you are still allowed to lose your life savings at "regular" investing. And Casinos have different regulations constraining their ability to fool punters...

Accreditation was introduced as risk management, after all. Any time you do something like that you can have a few outliers who are negatively affected. But if the policy is basically sound, overall it is a net win. I think that is the case with accreditation. It's not there to stop you from investing $10k in your friends startup. It's to stop companies from bilking $10k from thousands and thousands of people. Could your friends & family case stand to be eased up a bit? Probably. Does it account for much in the overall scheme. Probably not.

Bear in mind the difference between intent and efficacy. All of the things you mention also have regulation or legislative constraints that in theory are also supposed to make it harder for people to naively get themselves in trouble. Why should investment be different?

For what it's worth, I also think it should be easier to invest small amounts in higher risk ventures - but that counterbalance should be to put limits on the structuring those ventures are allowed to do in order to offer it. Keep everything relatively simple and transparent, keep the terms and structure easy to understand without having to pay a decent lawyer 2k every time to review...

Re: Slack S-1

#307

Post by codedokode »

moreira wrote: post #37
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…

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…

Cannot this be a method to take money out from company? I.e. Slack as a company pays $50M/year and Amazon pays back 20% of this as a "reward"?

At such scale it should be easier to have its own infrastructure rather than pay Amazon's overpriced bills.

Re: Slack S-1

#308

Post by fxfan »

Do traders track RAM firms using electron-primary-app-firms? Or use one to hedge against the other ;). Perhaps add Intel too in the mix somewhere!

Re: Slack S-1

#309

Post by fragmede »

linuxftw wrote: post #197
scrollaway wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

It's not an unfair point, given how big MVP culture is here.

Unfortunately, "sending encrypted nightly diffs to an email address" comes off very much the same way as the infamous dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Having a search feature, and doing useful backups isn't over engineering, they're features that users are opt-ing in to paying for, to the tune of $400 million/yr.

Re: Slack S-1

#310

Post by bparsons »

The wave of IPOs this month is incredible.

It could either drive the bull market for another 18 months, or create the appearance of a panic by private investors looking to finally pull the chute before they hit the ground.

Post reply on HN