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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

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

#311

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

henning wrote: post #307
loeg wrote: post #302

It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.

I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can reall…

> I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat

Stay up? I was at a company that was on Hipchat, and we really liked it, but the amount of downtime got to be semi-unbearable. We switched to Slack and it had much better uptime.

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

#312

Post by GuiA »

henning wrote: post #307
loeg wrote: post #302

It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.

I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can reall…

One thing that can’t hurt is that Stewart Butterfield is well connected, and got all his friends to push Slack at their startups.

I was at a startup, we used a mix of Hipchat (business types) and IRC (developers). A marketing/social media guy who was buddies with Stewart joined and insisted we should all switch to this, and there we were, dogfooding Slack (this was closed beta days).

Hard to beat free user acquisition.

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

#313

Post by huis »

To me the succes of Slack also shows how invaluable it is.

Companies jumped to it very easily. Everybody just started using it. And the moment something better comes along Slack will be forgotten.

I think this is different from Facebook. Company employees come and go so they don't value what they put on Slack very much. And for companies the history on slack is also not very important.

Well that's how I see how Slack is being used inside different companies.

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

#314

Post by neumann »

CameronBanga wrote: post #247
scarface74 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Teams shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s pretty great, and comes with a lot of great tools that no unicorn has found a way to replace.

It is currently abhorrent. They do appear to be updating regularly, but so much of the UX should have been fixed at the beginning.

- Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile. - UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information - teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there - this means nobody uses teams but chats, which are only recently pinnable (!?!?) - the pages, plugins and sharepoint files is great, but too restrictive.

Compared to Slack or Zulip, it is still very behind. However, once our 70k organisation moved to office 365 and started using teams, we sheepled and didn't want the team to use a fragmented tool and bit the bullet. So yeah. Watch out for teams.

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

#316

Post by davedx »

scarface74 wrote: post #171
Roritharr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think enterprise companies switch a product they’re already using with all the integrations to another (possibly inferior) product just because of price? That’s not usually been my experience

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

#317

Post by nodesocket »

Does anybody have any idea how pricing of this will open up compared to an IPO? They are doing a direct offering (DPO), which essentially means no new shares are being allocated and there is no underwriter which typically means the price can be way more volatile on opening day since no underwriters to control and establish pricing. DPO as I understand you are buying shares directly from people who already have them.

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

#318

Post by bredren »

loeg wrote: post #302

It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.

My cofounder at gliph was convinced of the same and I do not blame him for it. We were in the heart of secure messaging / starting group chat when we ran out of money pursuing a marketplace. Justin Roiland even hosted his official Rick and Morty group chat with us.

I think to many highly technical people Slack is a “reinvented” irc. But I was ok IRC stealing mp3s from bots in the 90s. And I’m on Usenet now.

Slack is nothing like IRC.

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

#319

Post by hilbertseries »

baybal2 wrote: post #16

It makes no sense for me. It's just a web frontend on top of an irc chat. $16B for that is a complete insanity. This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales

Slack made 140m in the first quarter of this year, their valuation is based on how fast they've grown their business and how fast it continues to grow. They don't sell ads, they sell seats, they're a SAAS company. 16B is not insane for a company that has grown revenue at their pace and continues to grow revenue.

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

#320

Post by theturtletalks »

neumann wrote: post #315

Does that mean Zulip is worth $16B? Cos it is awesome and self-hostable if you want it to be.

Rocket.chat and Mattermost are also great open source alternatives. I was surprised I couldn't find an open source plugin for live chat with Slack. Rocket.chat has that built-in and I host it on a VPS.
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