Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

Yeah. Twitter is 'just' a one-line text field and a page where you can read what other people have entered in that text field. But there's something more to its success than just that bit that any newbie web developer could clone in an afternoon.

And even though blogging, threaded forums for discussion, chat rooms, email, etc. all already existed, it still has been enormously successful despite seemingly being drastically inferior to any of them in every way.

Things don't have to be better or even good to succeed, they don't even have to be difficult to clone. A bit of luck at the right time followed by a snowball effect and they can be huge. $28 billion for a textfield? Sure, why not?

I wonder how startups come up with valuations. In this climate it seems the market is ready to fill in any valuation and convince itself that it was the right one. Seems like they could easily have gone higher

> Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own

There's a field on emails called subject.

Linux kernel is still developed using mailing list, I can imagine only a few things harder than that, still the kernel team manages to work on it just fine, without being in the same physical space.

Channels are just another way of labeling stuff...

> (even more when I'm working from home)

emails have been distributed, async and remote-aware since the 60s.

I'm really genuinely curious to understand why people keep making this point, while that's one of the most irrelevant feature of Slack.

I'm not saying email is perfect, just saying that your points are not a unique feature of slack, anyone of them have existed for decades.

> Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.

Just like channels on Slack after a while.

BTW https://www.mattermost.org/ offers the same features Slack offers, but I guess people are not switching because mattermost is not a recognized brand.

Just like people don't buy Nike shoes to ditch them for equally comfortbale but brandless flea market shoes.

It's a shame that tech people are so fashionable.

EDIT: formatting

As a long-time IRC fan (I found many important persons in my life there!), I'm also a bit salty that open protocols didn't triumph and so many people salivate about features of Slack that were already in IRC in the nineties. But I don't get the horror stories about Slack poisoning work culture, I haven't experienced them.

At my workplace, we are a team of 7 (in a research project, it's academia but I don't think our way of organizing things is too different from a small startup), we have been using Slack for like a year and we have a sane relationship with it. Yesterday I think there were like 2 or 3 messages in our Slack, no more were needed. At other points (with looming deadlines, etc.) there is more activity, but it's always activity related to work that needs to be done, and my feeling is that it mostly reduces the amount of email, and sometimes also substitutes private messaging that some of us were using for work-related issues. Which is a plus for work culture, because we keep work and leisure separated. And as there are no notifications outside working hours, I think it has actually been positive for work-life balance, compared to using email or other messaging systems.

I don't know if it's a matter of team size (I can imagine that Slack may be more prone to becoming a behemoth in a huge team?), the personalities of the people using it, or that companies/teams where Slack is problematic already had a problematic work culture in the first place. Maybe it also helps that we don't have the paid plan at my team, so since logs are not stored, we use it for immediate teamwork and we instinctively shift to email or other means for important stuff that needs to be on record or consulted later. But for whatever reason, for us it hasn't become a growing monster. I'm curious about the factors that make it a blessing or a curse.

It's pretty hilarious that first Stewart Butterfield tried to make an MMO (Game Neverending), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Flickr. Then he tried to make another MMO (Glitch), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Slack.

I hope he tries to make another MMO.