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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

#721

Post by jdm2212 »

Myrmornis wrote: post #717
marbletiles wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully". But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than…

I use Slack every day in the Desktop Electron app and the iOS app. Firstly, lack of accessibility is lack of accessibility. Beauty is a distinct concept. Your comment reminds me of the sign on the Berkeley/Oakland border that reads "Animal rights are human rights". Both are highly desirable, but that does not make them synonymous or coextensive. OK, It's never occurred to me that I wanted a conversation in a differen…

Just my two cents, but I have to kill and restart the Slack app every morning because if left alone too long it starts eating 100+% of CPU and then becomes unresponsive (while still pegging the CPU). No other vanilla Electron app I've used does that.

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

#722

Post by gexla »

coldtea wrote: post #414
gexla wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back. If it affects younger workers more than others, then that's because they haven't learned this skill yet. It's one of many things which people new to the workplace have to manage. Some of the other more obvious emotional…

> Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back. That's close to saying "bullets don't kill people, the hole in their vital organs does". The thing is, text-based communication tools are problematic compared to face-to-face communication, even in people who know how…

In a professional setting, you can fall back on the rules of the workplace. My boss might be angry, but I don't need to read that he's angry. I just need to keep doing my job. Or I get fired. I'll survive either way (losing a job and finding a new one is part of the game.)

I don't need to care about the emotional states of the people I work with. There's base-lines of professional conduct and courtesy. If I reasonably follow those, then I'm good.

And what if your boss is just an asshole? What if the reading you take of the person on the other line isn't just a misunderstanding? This person really is being a jerk, then what? You be a professional. You don't have to take excessive abuse, you can quit. You can warn the customer that you will end the call (and you can carry through with the threat.) Being a jerk isn't necessarily abuse though.

Don't take things personally. Do your job. Work the process. Quit if things aren't working for you. This requires an orienting yourself to an environment which works differently from your home. It requires managing your emotions so that you aren't taking an existential threat level analysis with every non face to face conversation.

It's a different situation if I'm talking to my wife or children. Those are personal relationships.

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

#723

Post by freewilly1040 »

0xffff2 wrote: post #669
granshaw wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to get the average office worker to use IRC today and see how far that gets you. It really behooves Engineers to put themselves in the shoes of actual users once in a while

Nobody is saying IRC is the greatest thing in the world today. It was very effective in its time, and it existed (and continues to exist!) without a profit-driven motive.

It was effective for orders of magnitude less users than that of current chat apps.

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

#724

Post by kuschku »

oblio wrote: post #710
kuschku wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s the part where VC money comes in. 99% of the VC funded companies worth billions weren’t the first, or the best — they just managed to get VC money and out-spent everyone else on advertising, or used the money to give away their product until they were the largest.

Uber is still making losses in almost all markets it’s active in. Slack is making a 380'000 $ loss per day. Amazon hasn’t made a profit a single time in their entire history.

The Silicon Valley model of "let’s gain a monopoly by giving away a product and outspending everyone on advertising, then monetizing it" doesn’t reward the best product. Never has, never will.

And companies grown the traditional, honest way, making actual profits of course can’t compete with that. If I opened up a supermarket giving away everything for free, of course I’d have more customers than the supermarkets who have to make money.

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

#725

Post by szermer »

My experience with Slack has been the mixed bag of "I love this", "Turn it off", "I couldn't be global without it".

What makes me long on this stock is their position as leader of the Work Graph.(0) SAP and Salesforce have strong positions as trailing indicators of workplace knowledge (this is the information/ process that matters most to us) but Slack and to a lesser extend MS Teams are leading indicators of WHY the information/ process matters.

(0) -- https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609319/slack-hopes-its-ai...

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

#727

Post by jgalt212 »

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..

I would say this is only normal/healthy if you have a freemium business model--otherwise the revenues to me seem way to skewed (i.e. very/very far away from 80/20).

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

#728

Post by asdffdsa »

archiepeach wrote: post #714
Roritharr wrote: post #5

Well deserved. Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.

I think the whole argument of "unicorns exploiting legal grey areas" falls victim to Hanlon's razor. I don't really believe these companies set out to bend or break any laws, it was more a case of the legal system not catching up fast enough. Uber started as a service to hire limousines, not a platform company. If governments weren't so concerned with party politics, infighting and staving off populist surges, we'd p…

Consumer ride-sharing (uber/lyft) is obviously exploiting "grey areas"

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

#729

Post by xmichael999 »

hackerpacker wrote: post #605
granshaw wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no money to be made in creating and building on open protocols. Without money to be made there’s no funding. Without funding there’s no way to create great experiences. Without great experiences nobody will use the thing. Pretty straightforward, really

On the other hand, I don't think anyone accused slack, with multi-megabyte webpages and even worse mobile app, of being a great experience. I think I used it once, and said no more.

I wish I could upvote this comment 1000 times.

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

#730

Post by sureaboutthis »

0xEFF wrote: post #668
sureaboutthis wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two years ago, those 50 customers weren't using Slack at all. It will be just as easy for them to leave.

Why would they?

When they realize they are tired of the distraction and didn't really need it in the first place.
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