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Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

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Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#71

Post by plasma »

tootie wrote: post #36

It seems to me that Slack is very vulnerable. Their core product isn't all that innovative and already has credible competitors who could probably beat their price. In fact, I don't understand how they beat HipChat so soundly. I wonder if their next tack will be to start digging a moat of proprietary tooling now that they have a critical mass of adoption.

As a former hipchat customer atlassian just totally missed the mark.

The updates they put out for Hipchat during slacks rise were new emojis.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#72

Post by hvidgaard »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #31
maxehmookau wrote: post #17

Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.

And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...

Lets assume well paid developers of $150.000 yearly, 5 man for 3 months is less than $187.500 is wages. Lets be generous and say we double that to account for other expenses. It's $375.000 for a feature that will be a reasonable sales argument.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#73

Post by nwsm »

chrismeller wrote: post #63
akeck wrote: post #48

Hmmm. The story I keep hearing is companies switching from Slack to Teams, not because Teams is better, but because it's more or less integrated into O365 and has various compliance certs already. 7.1B seems a bit high when competing with MS.

Ugh. Have you tried using Teams? I’m forced to now and I want to kill cute, fuzzy woodland creatures every single day. Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.

I missed the part where you detailed any of your problems with it.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#74

Post by marcinzm »

chrismeller wrote: post #63
akeck wrote: post #48

Hmmm. The story I keep hearing is companies switching from Slack to Teams, not because Teams is better, but because it's more or less integrated into O365 and has various compliance certs already. 7.1B seems a bit high when competing with MS.

Ugh. Have you tried using Teams? I’m forced to now and I want to kill cute, fuzzy woodland creatures every single day. Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.

>Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.

But compliance may be. For example, Slack charges a lot of money and requires a lot of users for actual HIPAA compliance (as in signing a BAA, everything else is marketing fluff). Teams, from what I can tell, comes with a BAA out of the box.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#75

Post by Avshalom »

drb91 wrote: post #70
pcmaffey wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The potential for deep Github integration too.

What does a deep integration between a chat app and a vcs provider mean?

At least three more powerPoint slides about synergy when selling to bosses.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#76

Post by amelius »

everyone wrote: post #27
mechazawa wrote: post #6

How come Slack is worth $7.1B? I can't imagine they produce that much value or have a high enough revenue to warrant this valuation.

Have you been living in a cave for the last decade? This is modern business, whatever is hot and gets a lot of users, gets a ridiculously unrealistically high valuation. Also, you never need to be profitable, as long us ure hot you can just keep doing more rounds of funding.

Sounds an awful lot like a Ponzi scheme to me.

From Wikipedia:

> A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud in which a purported businessman lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors using funds obtained from newer investors. Investors may be led to believe that the profits are coming from product sales, or other means, and remain unaware that other investors are the source of apparent profits. A Ponzi scheme is able to maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment and are willing to believe in the non-existent assets that they are purported to own, and there continues to be new investors willing to contribute new funds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#77

Post by solatic »

jerf wrote: post #49
Pinbenterjamin wrote: post #16

That's a crazy evaluation, is that company really worth 7.1Instagrams? It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story. Especially since it's built on top of electron, which I'm still trying to accept as a real platform for application development, and not the '3d printer' of the software world. I hope they don't use this money to feature-swamp the app, and instead focus inward on per…

"It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story." If I tried to write down all the other corporate-focused chat products that preceded Slack, there would be no way for me to write them all down. To say nothing of the chat products that weren't necessarily corporate focused, but could easily be used in a corporation. They were not first to market; they came into a crowded space, but o…

Integrations serve as a moat. Anything that sends notifications to your chat platform, anything that adds slash-commands which become part of people's daily workflow, all of those become requirements which need to be replicated in a migration. For companies with non-trivial numbers of integrations which do non-trivial things for their users, it becomes more and more expensive to contemplate a replacement. For products, in particular, with such wide-ranging use within a single enterprise, replacement requirements will be defined by committee, and will be so long as to de-facto prevent migration.

And besides, the field of competitors is getting smaller, not bigger. See: Atlassian throwing in the towel on HipChat and Stride.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#78

Post by spyridonas »

maxehmookau wrote: post #17

Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.

I think contributing to open source and making electron better/faster/lighter will benefit everyone and i prefer it over making a native app

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#79

Post by scrumbledober »

drb91 wrote: post #70
pcmaffey wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The potential for deep Github integration too.

What does a deep integration between a chat app and a vcs provider mean?

I've already had a slack channel at most companies I've worked for that had our CI spit out information about pushes and pulls on GitHub, and I always mute those first thing.
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