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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

#491

Post by nabla9 »

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.

Productization - The act of modifying something, such as a concept or a tool, to make it suitable as a commercial product.

Making big money requires productization. Sleek UI and interface that the end users see, plus marketing and selling.

Even when someone is the first with tech and prioritization, it does not mean they succeed in the long term after the field matures. I don't have high hopes for Slack in 5-10 years. Neither do I see Dropbox or Netflix justifying current valuations in the same time period.

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

#492

Post by FartyMcFarter »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #121
kareemm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the lesson is that a decent solution to a painful problem and great sales and marketing are a good recipe for success.

It is a recipe for market share. Profitability and a realistic valuation is yet to be seen.

If the owners get rich by cashing out on an IPO, that sounds like a "recipe for success" to me.

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

#493

Post by fasteo »

>>> More than 88,000 Paid Customers, including more than 65 companies in the Fortune 100; and

>>> We had 575 Paid Customers >$100,000 of ARR as of January 31, 2019, which accounted for approximately 40% of our revenue in fiscal year 2019.

If my math is right, 40% of their revenue is concentrated in I also saw that this is a direct listing and not an IPO. Again, I can only see this as a risk, basically because no underwriter will push the stock to investors. Is this so ?

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

#494

Post by welly »

skribbj wrote: post #472
welly wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious as to what specifically you think Slack gets wrong? Honestly, I can't find fault with it. It's such a basic and uncomplicated piece of software, I'm not sure how they could get anything wrong.

I just think it doesn't actually fit any purpose. For quick chats irc is faster and more accessible, and for long thoughtful discussions Slack is lacking a lot of features so that you might as well use email. A lot of discussion from this post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227115

How is IRC in any way faster or more accessible than Slack for quick chats? Does IRC fit a purpose? If so, what? And how does it do anything better than Slack?

Slack is certainly no email replacement, and nor will I ever use it for such but in my experience and for the purposes I use it for, it is far, far more featured than IRC, unless you're using some uber IRC client that I'm unaware of.

I'm genuinely trying to understand out how anyone would think IRC is better than Slack and I speak as someone who used IRC from the early 90s up until only a few years ago when the communities I'm part of upped sticks and moved over to Slack.

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

#495

Post by sagichmal »

raverbashing wrote: post #465
bborud wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. Which means that the professional in me wants to see a decent client before I'm happy. What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.

Whenever I read those "slack sucks", "jira sucks" rants I can't help but think "kids these days" are spoiled Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service? Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers. "Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it…

I would literally and unironically prefer to run a company on mIRC/corporate IRC servers and Bugzilla than Slack and Jira.

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

#496

Post by city41 »

keyle wrote: post #342
city41 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in my experience they don't actually fix the bugs. For literally years the Slack app would get into a zombie state if your network changed in any way: switched WAPs, got on/off the VPN, switch from wifi to ethernet, etc. The app would still think it had a network connection but it actually didn't. The only way to fix it was with a hard refresh. To this day I still reflexively do a ctrl-r whenever my network ch…

Interesting, I'm on MacOS and in a similar environment (switching vlans etc.) and the socket just reconnects fine both on the web version and the 'app'.

It’s possibly fixed now. I first encountered this in 2016. Many coworkers complained of it and Slack always acknowledged it was an issue they were looking into whenever I reported it.

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

#497

Post by ricklamers »

mullingitover wrote: post #449

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.

I think this might actually be a really nice insight: they adapted by shifting their focus based on user/customer feedback/learnings to the extent of completely changing the core of what they are doing/making.

This level of adaptability might explain part of their success. Rather than naively sticking to your original vision, identifying where you have the opportunity to create value and changing direction based on that insight.

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

#498

Post by welly »

luckylion wrote: post #487
welly wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious as to what specifically you think Slack gets wrong? Honestly, I can't find fault with it. It's such a basic and uncomplicated piece of software, I'm not sure how they could get anything wrong.

> Curious as to what specifically you think Slack gets wrong? Personally: responsiveness. Slack's native app on linux is slow. Switching channels has a noticeable delay, switching Workspaces takes seconds if you haven't used the workspace for a while. Starting the program takes ~8s on my machine (three workspaces, i7 with SSDs and 32G RAM). For most IRC clients or Telegram, startup times are about as fast as Slack ch…

Haven't noticed any issue with responsiveness with the official Slack client but my boss was kind enough to set me up with a pretty beefy Macbook Pro with more RAM than I'd ever need to use.

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

#499

Post by bschne »

mettamage wrote: post #471
mullingitover wrote: post #449

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.

I feel naive for asking: how would you come up with Flickr as a spinoff for an MMO? A chat application, yea seems fair, but Flickr? I am seriously withholding my urge to spam question marks on this page as they are dancing around my head.

Caterina Fake talked about this on Tim Ferris' podcast [1] and Gimlet's "Without Fail" together right, they applied for a government start-up grant when building the MMO and didn't get it. However they had accidentally chosen to automatically resubmit the application a year later.

Around the time the MMO failed, they received the grant from the second application. They had something vaguely similar to photo-sharing chat in the game, related to discussing inventory items, and decided to transition to that as a photo-sharing IM client and use the grant to get it off the ground.

> As part of the game, they’d developed this interface where players could create an inventory of objects that they would pick up. That inventory looked like this sort of shoebox of photos. You could drag those photos into group conversations for other people to see and you could annotate them. And you could share the photos with other people. And that was the idea that Caterina and the people on her team wanted to transition to.

(from 2.)

As an aside, I highly recommend listening to the full interviews, as she has an interesting background and some good perspectives on tech in general. She also just launched a podcast that considers the ethics of some new tech developments [3].

---

[1] https://tim.blog/2019/02/21/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts...

[2] https://gimletmedia.com/shows/without-fail/rnh444/the-accide...

[3] https://shouldthisexist.com/

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

#500

Post by Falkon1313 »

sjg007 wrote: post #31
wayoutthere wrote: post #12

I agree they’re a great product org, but not sure I agree they’re a $16B company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I’m not sold on their long term viability. It’s just too easy for new IM platforms to take root inside a company once the old one gets too noisy. Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product befo…

Messaging apps are cyclical. I remember icq! Slack should become part of Google.. that would help Google widen its user base and perhaps a robust video conferencing system can piggy back on top of it.

Google might already have a messaging app and might still have video chat.
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