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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

#701

Post by wuliwong »

0xffff2 wrote: post #673
mehrdadn wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not referring to employment communications or personal communications. There are other categories where I've had no choice but to use the same communication channels others were using despite the content of my communications being emphatically mine. Are you just trying to be infuriating?

> I'm not referring to employment communications or personal communications. What are you talking about then? All of my communications are either personal or employment related, almost by definition.

I actually had the same question. Maybe community or neighborhood groups or volunteer activities? I'd probably just call all that personal but I could see a distinction.

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

#702

Post by baby »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #634
baby wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. About the breaking the law thing though: it's a B2B. Most "breaking the law" companies seem to be B2C.

Advertising companies like Facebook make their revenue by selling to advertisers, not individuals- they are emphatically a B2B company.

I would argue that this is not totaly true. Everyone can advertise on Facebook (I did it myself without a company).

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

#703

Post by Kinnard »

Sahhaese wrote: post #529
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.

The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

I don't know about that. There's a flurry of open protocols being built on Blockchain and maybe there's a golden age ahead . . .

> "Historically many key protocols, such as TCP/IP and HTTP, have come from researchers. Subsequent iterations of these protocols were often handled by nonprofit organization that tried to wrangle with more or less success the various commercial interests that sprang up around this protocols (the companies that were making and selling software and hardware based on them). The more money was involved the harder this became.

> "Now, however, we have a new way of providing incentives for the creation of protocols and for governing their evolution. I am talking about cryptographic tokens . . .

> "I can’t emphasize enough how radical a change this is to the past. Historically the only way to make money from a protocol was to create software that implemented it and then try to sell this software (or more recently to host it). Since the creation of this software (e.g. web server/browser) is a separate act many of the researchers who have created some of the most successful protocols in use today have had little direct financial gain. With tokens, however, the creators of a protocol can “monetize” it directly and will in fact benefit more as others build businesses on top of that protocol. Given this new incentive I expect a lot of resources to be devoted to protocol innovation."

~ https://continuations.com/post/148098927445/crypto-tokens-an...

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

#704

Post by Quinner »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #634
baby wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. About the breaking the law thing though: it's a B2B. Most "breaking the law" companies seem to be B2C.

Advertising companies like Facebook make their revenue by selling to advertisers, not individuals- they are emphatically a B2B company.

They're both. They're selling a service to consumers, which they buy with their personal data. They then use that data to sell to advertisers in the form of better targeted ads.

They didn't even run ads for the first three years of their existence.

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

#705

Post by doomjunky »

vishnugupta wrote: post #509
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..

The 80/20 rule is basically the power law which is one of my favorite laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

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

#706

Post by solidasparagus »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #682
dopeboy wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I haven't used Telegram much, but as far as I can tell, Telegram has almost none of the features I pointed out as the core strengths of Slack.

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

#707

Post by bkrishnan »

chipgap98 wrote: post #687
bkrishnan wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks! That makes a lot more sense.

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

#708

Post by solidasparagus »

ashelmire wrote: post #643
solidasparagus wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack didn't clone text chat. They took the best parts of text chat, Facebook (reactions), Reddit (threads, edits) and terminals (simple UI for applications) and merged them into a single tool. I'm currently using HipChat and the difference is night and day. Slack makes large, busy chat rooms coherent in a way that just isn't possible with other text chats. And because of that, it opens new completely new possibiliti…

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).

After months of trying, I still haven't figured out how to have two coherent support conversations in the same public room/channel at the same time outside of using Slack.

If you know how to do this, please share.

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

#709

Post by rightbyte »

staybythebay wrote: post #604
Myrmornis wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. You need to explain a claim like that. On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?

Maybe people are generally jaded to to the slowness of cross-platform Javascript apps, but if you take a step back you can really see how bad it is. I had people at my last job who had to quit Slack because of how hot it was making their laptops, and how much memory it was using. At my current job, Slack is definitely one of my most rate limiting applications for how quickly I can get things done. Scrolling in chat,…

Ye. It's silly how single page text search is now a hard problem to get done right with JS text edit fields.

It's the same thing with the Swarm review CI tool. If you diff a big enought file, but still quite small for a conputer, it get slow or crashes.

Also the same thing with MS Teams. The prior conversion are not loaded at startup and if you scroll it shows place holders instead of the text for some seconds.

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

#710

Post by oblio »

kuschku wrote: post #671
oblio wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except for ##2 killer features##, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible ##if you implement it yourself##. That's what normal people see when they read your message.

Going to irccloud.com, creating an account, and connecting is "implementing it yourself" how again? And IRCCloud has all that in a single solution. Even if you want to self-host, there are solutions — get any server, run docker run \ -v /path/to/folder/where/you/want/to/store/the/config:/config \ k8r.eu/justjanne/quassel-docker:v0.13.1 and connect with quassel or quasseldroid to that server (the setup wizard guides y…

Well, irccloud.com must be doing something wrong if they're using a pre-existing protocol, have solved its problems and yet Slack is the company worth billions.
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