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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

#501

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

Just to follow up, I work for a distributed company where everyone works remotely. It's an essential tool for us to communicate quickly and easily, when talking over skype/video chat is not necessarily suitable or necessary every time one of us has a question. For our organisation, Slack fits the purpose perfectly.

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

#502

Post by air7 »

emtel wrote: post #295

Anybody who thinks they know for sure that slack can't possibly be worth $16B should go back and read some threads from around the Facebook IPO (like this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320585 ). It's very easy to write reasonable sounding things - making accurate predictions about the future is much harder.

I really love reading threads like that (or dropbox launch etc). It's really humbling.

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

#503

Post by sureaboutthis »

Kudos wrote: post #217
sureaboutthis wrote: post #176

I hear people mention Slack once in a while on various forums but I have no clue what it is. I do not know anyone who uses it so it's not something I, or anyone I know, feels a need for--otherwise we would be searching it out. And therein lies a problem. $16B for something few people need or want? I guess I have to look up Slack and see what it is. EDIT: So I looked it up and it looks like something useful for a lot…

There's a venn diagram with an intersection of people who use Hacker News and people who don't know what Slack is, and it's literally just you. It's bizarre to me that you feel the need to share your opinion on the valuation of something you knew nothing about a half an hour ago. That said, $16B seems to be about 4x more than I would have expected.

That I've been deeply involved in the design and implementation of both hardware and software for 40 years and know nothing about it, and don't know anyone in the industry who does either, is a comment on the $16B evaluation. Companies thrive on the needs and wants of people which is why Coke and Google and Microsoft stock prices are so high and maintain those levels. I don't find want and need for Slack among anyone I know. A small space but the same people have heard of and use Coke, Microsoft and Google.

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

#505

Post by WAHa_06x36 »

tirpen wrote: post #386
netwanderer3 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we comparing Slack to IRC, a product that came out in 1988?

Why shouldn't we compare them? IRC has probably 95% of the features slack has, is completely free and has been around since 1988. Seems like a logical comparison to make.

IRC is missing a LOT of the features that make Slack actually useable for its purpose. IRC just isn't a replacement for Slack in most situations, due to its lack of things people take absolutely for granted.

One massive one being keeping history. Another is not being limited to text only, something people absolutely expect in this day and age.

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

#506

Post by nailer »

raverbashing wrote: post #479
blub wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is better than you're suggesting: * Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly. * DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's ins…

> DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that) Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack

Are you sure? Wouldn't it be a direct connection, just between two NAT gateways? With each using the ports to track which connection belonged to the host behind the NAT?

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

#507

Post by tpetry »

fasteo wrote: post #493

>>> 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 unde…

Think about thousands very small customers you simply take the money from and have no effort but they are not the target of your sales team. The numbers sound good to me.

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

#508

Post by rightbyte »

luckylion wrote: post #263
lone_haxx0r wrote: post #170

> Forrester analyst Michael Facemire says it's hard for people to understand why the platform is more useful than other chat applications without trying it for themselves. It isn't. I know Slack probably needs to justify its valuation in front of some people, but Slack is not different from Facebook and Instagram in this regard: They offer nothing unique or technologically superior. The whole point of their business…

Eh, maybe I'm in the minority here, but I've been forced to work on MS teams for a project and it's atrocious compared to Slack. Not to mention the lack of a client for linux, their web app doesn't work in chromium for no reason (it does in chrome), and the UX is just shit. Slack just works and their UI/UX is on point, everything is intuitive. Their client is slow and eats RAM, but I totally see that it's more useful…

MS Teams works well enought for me at work. All I want is having a chat window with the old messages on top to be able to send copy pasted variable names and chat abit.

Skype for Business doesn't save the conversation and is useless (it mails it to you ...), for example.

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

#509

Post by vishnugupta »

fasteo wrote: post #493

>>> 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 unde…

> 40% of their revenue is concentrated in Speaking from my experience of 6 months at a SaaS company this is about the norm.

Besides the usual 80/20 rule it gets more skewed at the top. And so even the product development was optimised to keep the top 1% happy. A ton of custom built features with hundreds of feature flags..

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

#510

Post by luckylion »

welly wrote: post #498
luckylion wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It may be an issue with their linux client (pretty much all developers I work with are on linux), though I have heard complaints from windows users as well (but it's windows and the users are from the design team, so who knows what their computers do).
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