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Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

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Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#41
post #11
post #4

As somebody who happily advocates Matrix[1], I'd be ecstatic if Slack would be bought by some giant and thus slowly made obsolete :) [1] http://matrix.org

You're not a very good advocate. You didn't even give a single reason someone should look into Matrix.

Does reasoning ever work in marketing, though?

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#42
post #37

Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO. Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something. Turns out there's…

I don't know, to me $9B seems like a lot of money for a glorified IRC client built on web tech. Sure, you don't pay for the tech, but in the end you can do a lot with that kind of money. Elon Musk sold his first two businesses to get the funds to start what he really wanted to do. We don't know where Oculus would be without FB, i would argue they are better off because they are creating a new market and are in a capi…

A glorified IRC client built on web tech... that everybody uses. Tech is only one small part of a business. Slack provides real value to millions of people, $9B certainly doesn't seem an unreasonable valuation to me.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#43
post #20

The power of slack isn't in their technology, it's in their marketing. There have been a thousand IRC clones. Few have gained any traction at all. I suspect under new management it will falter, but at the same time I also think that it's a terrible idea not to sell if the opportunity arises.

That and they have a lot of integrations which means it's hard for people to switch to something else other than slack because they will lose their plugins.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#44

Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO. Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something. Turns out there's…

It makes sense to sell if Slack will have more value as part of a larger company, compared to being by itself. Acquisition typically makes it easier to integrate into that company's offerings, at the expense of making it harder to maintain all of the independent integrations that were in Slack's interest when it was independent.

It makes a lot of sense for Amazon to offer some kind of managed corporate communications platform to customers who are already heavily invested in AWS, but in the long term, it would probably hurt Slack's core integration strengths.

What would probably be best for Slack is to build out an on-premises enterprise version, which could then be deployed on your cloud of choice. It gets Slack most of the benefits of acquisition by a cloud provider, without the downsides.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#45

Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO. Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something. Turns out there's…

The problem with selling isn't the money, the problem is what do you do with the rest of your life. If you sell, that is most likely your peak. This is what zuck and the Snapchat guy was thinking. If they sell, that's it, they are done. Life is over as they know it.

I'm sure most entrepreneur types run off the "thrill of the chase", and a big exit would momentarily dilute the initial mission. But you are waayyy overstating that effect.

You've suddenly got a massive amount of capital to execute on the things you've been dreaming up along the way but have never been able to do before. Zuck sure had a company of thousands of employees to look after. And even if your mission was always just to exit... get a new vision.

Do I really need to invoke Elon and his first acquisitions here?

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#46

Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO. Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something. Turns out there's…

I love Slack, but there's always the question that is it worth the monthly fees and related overhead. So far the answer is yes, but for example Microsoft is already trying to push competing offering via Office 365. If Google and Amazon follow the same path with their groupware offerings, this may hurt Slack sales. And it's not just about the price and quality of product, but also about the convenience. Do you deal with one vendor or do you have 10 different SaaS subscriptions you need to deal with.

One interesting option would be for Slack and Dropbox to merge. Don't know if this kind of deal could ever work out financially, but I think the combination would be quite interesting.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#47

Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO. Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something. Turns out there's…

I mean, I'd definitely take the money.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#48
post #40

I would think Discord was a better fit for Amazon. 1. Great fit with twitch. 2. Seems like it could be "forked internally" and reskinned to compete with slack in the business space too.

Discord is the better app at this point. Even for business use. But Slack from an acquisition POV must be different. They have revenue, traction, and that all important paying subscriber base. It's like everyone has always said. Slack is just a chat app. It's not about the app, but rather, what they achieved with it. I love discord so much part of me wants Amazon to buy Slack just so it would kill it (or MS or Verizo…

Having not really used Discord, what about it is better to you?

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#49

Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO. Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something. Turns out there's…

> He no longer controls Oculus, and hence can't impact the world

That makes absolutely no sense. Palmer Luckey has a vast fortune thanks to selling, he can easily impact the world depending on what he chooses to do with it.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#50
post #20

The power of slack isn't in their technology, it's in their marketing. There have been a thousand IRC clones. Few have gained any traction at all. I suspect under new management it will falter, but at the same time I also think that it's a terrible idea not to sell if the opportunity arises.

> The power of slack isn't in their technology, it's in their marketing.

Exactly, because their technology is complete crap.

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