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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

#681

Post by yfiapo »

djsumdog wrote: post #666
notjustanymike wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the places I worked had 2 or 3 whales. 55 whales is actually pretty good.

I've noticed this too. I worked for companies that had one big customer; possibly branching out with two or three others. But if that one big customer ever went away, the company would probably collapse. They really should have just been bought and made a subsidiarity: https://penguindreams.org/blog/tech-culture-shock-from-ameri...

I've worked for a company with a whale client like that (maybe not total shutdown bad but pretty close). The argument for why they never bothered to just acquire the startup was their fear of ruining the agility of the startup. That seemed like a reasonable concern as they were a massive, heavily regulated company.

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

#682

Post by Zenbit_UX »

dopeboy wrote: post #648
ashelmire wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a great ad for Slack, but I don't think it's true. I've never had any issues with any other chat app. Many people still use Facebook chat and IRC and the functionality is basically identical between each of the new chat apps (well, except you can do way more with IRC).

I want to respectfully challenge this - many people do still use those tools and still will. But the user experience in Slack is objectively better, especially with large rooms with frequent content (as the OP mentions). I lived in IRC in the late 90s and early 2000s. IRC is fantastic and open and federated. But if I want to get things done with a team, I'll pick Slack everytime.

Objectively better than the garbage the GP mentioned but objectively worse than Telegram.

After using Telegram for work at my previous job, switching to slack now with a new company is jarring. Their absolute dogshit electron apps constantly hog system resources and take forever to load. Also Telegram is free and has a far better audio and video chat and again, free...

I find it mind boggling companies pay for chat. Both discord and Telegram provide all the same features, incl bots and do so for free, what gives?

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

#683

Post by Cshelton »

neumann wrote: post #314
CameronBanga wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s pretty great, and comes with a lot of great tools that no unicorn has found a way to replace.

It is currently abhorrent. They do appear to be updating regularly, but so much of the UX should have been fixed at the beginning. - Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile. - UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information - teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there - this means nobo…

Yeah, we use teams and have had none of those issues. In fact, I'd say it is better than Slack now, which is what we used before switching to Teams last fall. Plus Teams is in the whole Microsoft enterprise bundle already. Slack's biggest challenge will be Teams. Or their enterprise market share will boil down to, enterprises not using Microsoft, .. so Google...

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

#685

Post by osrec »

notjustanymike wrote: post #611
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…

Most of the places I worked had 2 or 3 whales. 55 whales is actually pretty good.

Interesting... I guess you could see a lot of SaaS companies as outsourced software development teams for the whales.

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

#686

Post by bkrishnan »

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…

Can someone please explain how a valuation of $16B is arrived at? I mean, from the math above, they have approximately 250K ARR?

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

#687

Post by chipgap98 »

bkrishnan wrote: post #686
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…

Can someone please explain how a valuation of $16B is arrived at? I mean, from the math above, they have approximately 250K ARR?

They have 575 companies paying them more than 100k each

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

#688

Post by bytematic »

antirez wrote: post #488

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

Twitch.tv uses it

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

#689

Post by adwww »

osrec wrote: post #685
notjustanymike wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the places I worked had 2 or 3 whales. 55 whales is actually pretty good.

Interesting... I guess you could see a lot of SaaS companies as outsourced software development teams for the whales.

That is exactly how my current employer feels half the time.

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

#690

Post by trose »

osrec wrote: post #685
notjustanymike wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the places I worked had 2 or 3 whales. 55 whales is actually pretty good.

Interesting... I guess you could see a lot of SaaS companies as outsourced software development teams for the whales.

yep, if you owe someone a little money they have control. If you owe someone a lot of money, you have control. The whales use SaaS companies to develop things they dont want in house and demand features because they know they're one of the biggest customers.
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