For those wondering how/why Slack took off so fast, read this: https://qz.com/335321/slack-is-everywhere-growing-fast-and-s...
Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
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Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
#62What are they planning to do with the 160M? Didn't they just raise 120M in October?
Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
#63This is pretty surreal for me. I tried out Slack briefly when they first allowed the public to request accounts. Made a mental note "cool", and moved on. The next year or so I started to see a lot more teams/companies that were getting on the Slack hype-train, and now this. Huge props to the team on this valuation but I'm still quite confused.
We're in a serious bubble right now, IMHO. This valuation is based purely on the fact that all the other hip companies are using it, along with the fact that it is a good product.
Valuations should be based on actual financials, but when it comes to tech right now they rarely are. Which is the definition of a bubble, IMHO.
Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
#64My favorite thing about Slack is how they've thought of all the little things. My go-to example is that when they send you a notification email, it includes links to silence further emails with a single click. Obviously, this isn't a big "feature." It's not going to show up on their marketing materials. Nobody will ever say "hey, you should try out Slack because they let you silence emails." But it's this sort of UX…
Isn't this a legal requirement? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscrib... Technically the law is only that you have to honor them within 10 days, but I've seen a bunch of sites with one-click unsubscribe nowadays.
It is a legal requirement to allow users to unsubscribe from your email newsletter, yes. What Slack does that is really cool is at the bottom of their notifications email they have:
Snooze these notifications for: an hour, eight hours, a day, three days, or the next week. Or, turn email notifications off. For more detailed preferences, see your account page.
"hour", "eight hours", "three days", "next week" are all links that silence the notifications for discrete periods of time. Pretty neat.
Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
#65My favorite thing about Slack is how they've thought of all the little things. My go-to example is that when they send you a notification email, it includes links to silence further emails with a single click. Obviously, this isn't a big "feature." It's not going to show up on their marketing materials. Nobody will ever say "hey, you should try out Slack because they let you silence emails." But it's this sort of UX…
Isn't this a legal requirement? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscrib... Technically the law is only that you have to honor them within 10 days, but I've seen a bunch of sites with one-click unsubscribe nowadays.
It's not just unsubscribe. They let you turn off emails for an hour, a day, etc. Really convenient if you're generally interested in notifications, but just need a little break.
Another example: when you change your password, Slack will send you a special link to sign-in on mobile so you don't have to type out your new password on a tiny keyboard.
Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
#66Do platforms like Slack really offer a great benefit to a business? Maybe I'm being cynical, but it seems that if you had a dysfunctional organisation then this is not a silver bullet, and if you had a well functioning organisation you would manage just fine with old fashioned tools like email and Dropbox. > Support for private groups and 1:1 direct messaging gives you complete flexibility. Private things stay privat…
> Do platforms like Slack really offer a great benefit to a business?
Yes. The main alternative I've seen at a couple largish corporations is Microsoft communicator/lync. Lync has some good video/screensharing stuff, but slack is more reliable and provides a great search history feature, which is the killer feature IMO. Also, the mac client is much less buggy than what MS offers. I know these sound like tiny features, but Slack is there when you need it and stays out of your way when you don't, which is priceless when you're trying to get stuff done. Communicator always had a knack for crashing when I was trying to search history or in the middle of a chat.
For those saying IRC is a good alternative, I've yet to see a deployment as useful and easy to use as Slack. Obviously IRC is cheaper, but I doubt most bigcorps are too price sensitive for messaging systems.
Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
#67Can someone with more experience comment on the terms of the investment itself? Why would people invest in this company if they haven't even begun to spend the $120M of their series D money yet?
For those of us outside of Silicon Valley who don't have the same funding climate, what's it like?
Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
#68My favorite thing about Slack is how they've thought of all the little things. My go-to example is that when they send you a notification email, it includes links to silence further emails with a single click. Obviously, this isn't a big "feature." It's not going to show up on their marketing materials. Nobody will ever say "hey, you should try out Slack because they let you silence emails." But it's this sort of UX…
Isn't this a legal requirement? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscrib... Technically the law is only that you have to honor them within 10 days, but I've seen a bunch of sites with one-click unsubscribe nowadays.
A notification from Slack, a service you use, is not unsolicited commercial email of any kind. From the Wikipedia link:
> It [CAN-SPAM Act] exempts "transactional or relationship messages."
Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
#69A series E seems fairly late stage of a round for how young the company is...
As it says in the article, this was about taking money while the VC market is hot. It's easy to get massive amounts of cash at crazy valuations right now, so companies are raising what they can and putting it in the bank for a rainy day.... or when bubbles burst.
Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
#70For those that are confused about the value of Slack – It's not just about text chat. It's about comprehensive search and combatting organizational forgetfulness and knowledge drain. If we put it on Slack, it's archived "forever" and a team member a few years from now can start with a Slack search before re-inventing the wheel. This is especially evident with the integrations. If just the relevant slice of data is fe…
> It's about comprehensive search and combatting organizational forgetfulness and knowledge drain.
They are far from achieving that vision. I agree that company-searchable chat (and email) is valuable, but I doubt it will ever replace proper internal documentation--any other approach is far too noisy, and without a lot of context it's impossible to know if correspondence about an issue from two years ago is still relevant today.