Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 809 posts

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

#751

Post by hiccuphippo »

bborud wrote: post #392
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.

You are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. Which means that the professional in me wants to see a decent client before I'm happy. What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.

Check volt if you want a slack client: https://volt-app.com/

Other electron based apps like Discord perform better so I'm not sure why Slack is so crappy.

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

#752

Post by LyndsySimon »

sagichmal wrote: post #495
raverbashing wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I read those "slack sucks", "jira sucks" rants I can't help but think "kids these days" are spoiled Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service? Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers. "Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it…

I would literally and unironically prefer to run a company on mIRC/corporate IRC servers and Bugzilla than Slack and Jira.

I agree.

I use IRC all the time, and IRCCloud makes it comparable to Slack.

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

#753

Post by naveen99 »

Quinner wrote: post #704
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you saying they are bartering and not paying sales tax for their services and their customers personal data ?

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

#754

Post by kuschku »

golergka wrote: post #746
kuschku wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's exactly what I'm doing all the time. I can search my logs easily https://i.imgur.com/nTpoYs0.png (soon with even better integration, the prototype is a separate web app), and I can just open the web client or app on any device on this planet and instantly have all my logs and channels, and just chat: https://i.k8r.eu/54BPMQ.png Of course, I use self-hosted quassel and quasseldroid. Many other projects su…

> Of course, I use self-hosted quassel and quasseldroid. That sounds exactly like the infamous first comments on the HN Dropbox post. I'd rather pay someone to use their app than go through the pain of self-hosting and administering yet another service.

Well, the post was "just use FTP with rsync".

Quassel on the other hand is to Slack what Seafile or NextCloud are to Dropbox — definitely not as comfortable, as you need some knowledge to self host it, but it's easily doable for everyone on this site, and once it's set up, it's just as comfortable.

Of course, if one wants to use a hosted service, there are solutions like that — IRCCloud is pretty much identical to Slack, except based on IRC, and in addition to paid team workspaces, you can also connect to any IRC network and use the same features there.

So, you see, while it has some hints of the same attitude as the original post — and definitely, neither of these products is as polished as Slack, after all we can't make 380k$ losses a day, while Slack can — they fulfil pretty much the same purpose with pretty much the same ease of use

And of course work on single-click deployments and hosted services for more such products has already started

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

#755

Post by justforyou »

sb8244 wrote: post #615
hackerpacker wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do these things matter to most users? The non engineers at my work have never complained about slack.

They do. Non-engineers just tend to blame the age/quality of their company issued hardware rather than the problematic software causing performance issues.

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

#756

Post by mbloomfield »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #503
Kudos wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a venn diagram with an intersection of people who use Hacker News and people who don't know what Slack is, and it's literally just you. It's bizarre to me that you feel the need to share your opinion on the valuation of something you knew nothing about a half an hour ago. That said, $16B seems to be about 4x more than I would have expected.

That I've been deeply involved in the design and implementation of both hardware and software for 40 years and know nothing about it, and don't know anyone in the industry who does either, is a comment on the $16B evaluation. Companies thrive on the needs and wants of people which is why Coke and Google and Microsoft stock prices are so high and maintain those levels. I don't find want and need for Slack among anyone…

On the contrary, I literally don't know anyone who doesn't know what Slack is. I'm not sure if it's a generational gap, corporate gap, or what, but I've used it at multiple organizations both in and out of tech.

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

#757

Post by briandear »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #713
hellofunk wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal take is that, as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society, there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards. This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.

> as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society Found the bug. > there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that govern…

> It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols.

I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.

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

#758

Post by justin_RigD »

davnicwil wrote: post #192
TallGuyShort wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm biased because I like Slack, although I haven't tried Discord so I'm only comparing it with the usual competitors that are terrible, but it does feel very sticky to me. It's replaced email for my JIRA and Google Drive notifications, it's replaced Google Hangouts for most of my team chat and 1:1 video calls. And I'm not even using all the plugins many of my colleagues are using yet. They really seem to have gotten…

Another area it's very sticky is 'SlackOps' - i.e. putting your devops commands and notifications into Slack. Having done this at my previous startup it's very, very nice (in my opinion), but also, enough setup work that even supposing you were tempted to change to another platform you'd be reluctant to.

We are all about Slackops! Trying to build a company around it https://slack.com/apps/AAQ1WT8MD-rigd

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

#759

Post by notSupplied »

doomjunky wrote: post #705
vishnugupta wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It is also one of the most abused rules, often used to justify extremely sloppy "big picture thinking".

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

#760

Post by levlandau »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #503
Kudos wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a venn diagram with an intersection of people who use Hacker News and people who don't know what Slack is, and it's literally just you. It's bizarre to me that you feel the need to share your opinion on the valuation of something you knew nothing about a half an hour ago. That said, $16B seems to be about 4x more than I would have expected.

That I've been deeply involved in the design and implementation of both hardware and software for 40 years and know nothing about it, and don't know anyone in the industry who does either, is a comment on the $16B evaluation. Companies thrive on the needs and wants of people which is why Coke and Google and Microsoft stock prices are so high and maintain those levels. I don't find want and need for Slack among anyone…

The alternative interpretation of what you have said is that $16B is actually too low and that Slack is undervalued or at the very least it has a lot of room to grow.
Post reply on HN