[flagged]
Can't tell if this is was written by a Markov chain or by a human.
I have no idea what he is saying
Slack S-1
341–350 of 469 posts
Re: Slack S-1
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think threaded conversations become more important as an organisation's channels become increasingly noisy. Threaded conversations can partly alleviate that. They probably want to prevent organisations from disabling a feature that may assist with their scaling on slack.
The problem is that threads lead to missed messages. That’s a bigger problem than potential of noise. At least allow a user to decide if they want to see messages in threads or not.
Threaded messages arguably allow for less fragmentation into other channels / DMs, and they have the checkbox for a particularly important message to be sent to both the thread and main convo.
I'm a thread fan from the start, and I've observed many who were initially skeptical start using them heavily
Re: Slack S-1
#343Earlier 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…
You say "chat app" like that means it's easy. How is running a chat app any easier than, say, running Facebook?
> You say "chat app" like that means it's easy.
You're right, it takes a mind-boggling amount of wasted effort and negligence to turn a simple thing like corporate chat into something as bloated and broken as Slack.
Making something simple and easy is harder than just letting entropy destroy your product.
Re: Slack S-1
#344I think historical accounting practices and standards are not great at evaluating SaaS businesses. We came up with the concept of depreciation/amortization as a way to better match up expenses with revenues in a given time frame. I think we need a similar mechanism for allocating sales & marketing costs. My company spends about $1,000/year on Slack. We likely will in perpetuity, as long as we/Slack exists. Slack spen…
Not sure what you mean. LTV/CAC is a common metric in SaaS for sales efficiency.
Agreed that these are the right metrics, but they're not used in the S-1 and are unfamiliar to non-SaaS-proficient investors.
Re: Slack S-1
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would assume the smaller companies are much more efficient when it comes to R&D.
And if they don't have a breakthrough drug, they go bust and investors lose their money and employees lose their jobs.
Same thing happens to tech startups. Same thing happens to local restaurants. In fact, the restaurant failure rate is much higher than most other businesses. Restaurants go bust all the time, losing money for investors (generally smaller time investors) and employees lose jobs. It’s called life. Success is never guaranteed. Is it better for someone to have had a job for a year and lost it than that job never having been created in the first place? Businesses are formed and fail all the time. In fact, that failure process is vital: it ensures capital is being allocated towards its most efficient use. Companies not being allowed to fail is what creates stagnation as available capital is consumed by inefficient enterprises rather than being redeployed to better opportunities. It’s the very essence of a market economy.
Re: Slack S-1
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scale, redundancy/backups and security. The 10M daily active users are spread across every continent, in different time zones. All with the expectation of near real time delivery of messages, push notifications/emails and file uploads. The expectation that everything is immediately searchable and that you can search across messages and files thought the entire history of your slack usage. The expectation that there i…
A Slack team is a self-contained unit, however, if I understand correctly. It -should- be easily horizontally scalable (please correct me if I'm wrong). Each team could have its own database, its own app servers running on whatever region(s) was/were needed. So it's not like they would have some mammoth central database that requires strong scale engineering. Furthermore, you know in advance how big each team is beca…
Small slack teams are easily horizontally scalable; for a small team, the web server, the app server, and the db could probably run on a single EC2 instance, and AWS offers some rather large instance sizes.
Lets start there, though. 70k stand-alone (paid!) slack teams means 70k stand-alone systems. How do you operate, well, all of them, simultaneously? With one mammoth central database, there's one database to upgrade; if it goes down, there's one database to fix. With 70k small databases there's 70,000 problems! With 70,000 systems, how do your engineers deploy code, and how many times per day can they do it (it had better be well into the double digits)? How do you roll them back? What do you do if an upgrade goes wrong? With 70k different apps, one small problem quickly becomes 70k small problems, which is harder to manage than 1. Some things can (and I'm sure are) scaled horizontally but the isolation that grants you does not come for free.
And then, what about past that? Looking at the customers listed on Slack.com, they serve some larger enterprises, who are going to need the "expensive" level of scaling. No database is going to be able to scale to that level without team to manage it (no matter the technology), so then you need a queue as well as a db, plus a team to manage each of those, and then how do you do searching/indexing. You also can't ever take a single database node offline, so then it's a database cluster, with hot spares, and also large enterprises operate globally so then their slack team system needs to run multi-region hot as well, and then and then and then? I've got Slack open all the time on both my (work) phone and my (work) laptop as do the majority of my coworkers, which means their webservers have heavier requirements compared to Lyft, which I use for a few minutes whenever I take a ride.
Slack usage will hit a lull outside of business hours, so you'd want it to scale resources that serve that - I'll bet a non-insignificant portion of the $4M/month probably goes to resources that are only used during the business day - so in some sense, Slack is paying AWS a premium to not pay them for unneeded resources at 3:30 AM.
Slack's optimized their app for development cost (much to my laptop's sadness), it doesn't seem that far fetched that slack has also done some optimization of server side costs. future money isn't worth as much as money today is, and this fact is reflected in AWS RI offerings.
Re: Slack S-1
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slack has a huge opportunity in front of them (become the messaging platform for every business that exists). They’re investing a lot of money to acquire all of that business (salespeople, travel, etc.). That is literally one of the main purposes of capital and access to capital is why you would take a company public. And, specifically re: Slack. Unlike, say, Uber or Lyft, Slack has customers who have demonstrated th…
> Slack has a huge opportunity in front of them (become the messaging platform for every business that exists). How about: being bought by Microsoft.
I don't think Microsoft would buy Slack given the money they've dumped into developing and promoting Teams. Seems they're too far gone at this point.
Disclosure: Work at MSFT, not on Teams.
Re: Slack S-1
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
i don't have a subscription to laundry detergent, nothing stops me from buying a different brand in 6 months, whereas slack has contracts with my company, and has switching costs (we'd lose our message history).
> (we'd lose our message history). You can't export your data from Slack?
It's rough. We thought about switching to Microsoft Teams and we realized that so many decisions about our relatively young company were tucked in DMs and private channels in Slack that we couldn't leave.
Email is non-sticky (just take your emails/save them on client and leave) Files storage is non-sticky (just move your files from OneDrive to GDrive) Chat/Collaboration is sticky as mud.
Re: Slack S-1
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Put another way, you're suggesting that "public investors shouldn't have access to loss making companies, regardless of growth". That would eliminate not just tech IPOs, but a majority of publicly traded companies period . Only 2700 (out of about 7500) currently make the cut: https://finviz.com/screener.ashx?v=111&f=fa_netmargin_pos&ft... Like it or not, tolerating losses (preferably to accomplish growth!) has become…
One could argue the entire purpose of investment capital is to spend it.
Re: Slack S-1
#350"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…
Yes. Biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. It's relatively common for companies to IPO while they're still in clinical trials, which by definition means they can't earn any revenue (unless they sell some IP or research oriented products like biological models/reagents/etc to other pharma/biotech researchers on the side).
Tech companies with actual revenue have a step up in that regard.