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Slack S-1

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Re: Slack S-1

#81

Post by jdavis703 »

will_brown wrote: post #62
dcosson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t understand this take at all. The public is free to just not buy the stock if they don’t want. You think the problem is that investors are leaving too much potential for growth on the table when companies IPO? They should wait even longer and keep more of that growth private?

I think a company going public should not operating at $150M losses using VC money...letting them cash out and profit by selling to the public. I also think there are other fundamental benefits to the economy. Yes the public is free not to buy...just as non-accredited investors would be free not to invest in unregistered securities yet regulations are still in place for a reason to protect would be investors. It does…

I know people who are wealthy enough to be accredited investors. However I have way more financial literacy than some of these so-called accredited investors. That I’m forbidden from buying and selling certain assets only because I’m not rich enough (yet) really goes against the whole pull yourself up by your own bootstraps ideology.

Re: Slack S-1

#82

Post by scrollaway »

snazz wrote: post #58
moreira wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm just not aware how things work in companies of Slack's size, but... what do you think $4M/mo is spent on, for what essentially amounts to a chat app? I realise there a lot of extras in Slack (attachments cost S3 storage, video calls take bandwidth, webhooks take some processing), but as of January 2019, they had 10M daily active users. $50M/365 gives us $137K per day. $137K per day just to serve 10M activ…

Knowing how famously inefficient the Slack application is with end user resources, I wouldn’t be surprised if their backend has been poorly optimized. I serve more than 1000 users on a $3.50/mo VPS with a not-particularly-efficient runtime just fine.

Cool, 10000 more of those boxes and you can rebuild slack "in a weekend for $35k/month".

Don't mind the lawsuits when you lose your customer data and forgot to pay for backups for "cost optimization" reasons.

Don't mind the complaints when your uptime is barely one-nine.

Don't mind the customer cancellations when your 1000-user VPS doesn't actually scale to 20k concurrents.

And don't mind the HN snark when you release your slack competitor without voice/video chat support, webhooks, apps, zero debugging capabilities when things go wrong, etc, etc.

I don't even like Slack and I think their bill is too high but please don't be delusional, it's a tired HN trope.

Re: Slack S-1

#83

Post by sinatra »

raldi wrote: post #60
sinatra wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an unnecessarily hostile comment. I want to disable threads for myself so I don’t miss important messages. What’s your use case for disabling vowels? And where’s your list of people genuinely asking for disabling vowels for years?

I'm sorry; I've just seen this attitude so many times in my career of, "Why not just create an option for this thing that would completely upend the way the product works?", which doubles the number of possible things you then need to test for, complicates the product, slows down development, adds technical debt, bloats the software, and clutters up the options screen. I'm on a couple slacks, some where local culture…

Thank you for turning the conversation more polite. I agree with you about options having a cost.

However, if so many of your users are complaining about something, and if the complaint is about something as important as “losing messages,” then something should be done about it. It’s no longer enough to say that “but it works for some people” or to say that “options add complexity.”

Our entire core team has discussed this. Nobody wants threads. They all lose messages due to this. But sometimes we accidentally respond to messages that start a thread. So, we want this option to be removed for the entire organization. But we can’t.

It’s an option that’ll have cost, yes. But, it’ll be much simpler than many other complicated (and low value) things Slack has worked on in past two years. Those other things are also adding complexity, slowing down dev, increasing things to test, etc. And, again, this option solves a serious and fundamental problem of losing messages. So, it’s worth the cost for many of their users.

Re: Slack S-1

#84

Post by cosmie »

adamw2k wrote: post #32

Surprised at Sales and Marketing expense given the low number of Enterprise (>$100k) contracts. Wonder what's baked in there beyond AE compensation? I don't see a whole lot of traditional advertising, but maybe it's out there?

They're doing quite a bit of TV advertising[1]. Production and flighting costs on commercials, at a global scale, isn't going to come cheaply.

[1] https://www.ispot.tv/brands/Zyh/slack/

Re: Slack S-1

#85

Post by ed312 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #51
maxxxxx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still mind boggling that all these unicorns haven’t found a way to make money even after being in business for years and having a mature product. It’s a strange world.

I think it's more mind boggling that people will continue to invest in them on the basis of a vague promise of profitability in the distant future. Turning a profit is much harder than buying market share.

Conversely it takes so much money and time to create a profitable company vs history.

Re: Slack S-1

#86

Post by cozzyd »

your-nanny wrote: post #48
cozzyd wrote: post #38

Memory usage seems to mirror their revenue as well! I like slack, we use it on all the experiments I work on, but I'm seriously considering upgrading my workstation for the privilege of not restarting my slack tabs every day or so...

you might consider Mattermost instead, if in research setting. It has better support, imo, for researcher use cases, and you can host yourself.

and herein lies Slack's moat... it's just too much of a hassle to switch!

Re: Slack S-1

#87

Post by Radim »

cupofjoakim wrote: post #41
maxxxxx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still mind boggling that all these unicorns haven’t found a way to make money even after being in business for years and having a mature product. It’s a strange world.

Well, these guys do have a good way to make money. Enterprise contracts are worth their weight in gold. As you could see from the quote, their revenue has increased more than their losses - which mean that they are on their way to become profitable. Arguably they could be now, if they didn't invest in growth as much.

> their revenue has increased more than their losses

But "net loss" already takes revenue into account! "Loss" is not the same thing as "expenses".

The revenue increased substantially, but so did expenses, resulting in a slight decrease in loss over the past 3 years.

At the current rate, the company would reach break-even profitability around the year 2070.

Re: Slack S-1

#88

Post by mritchie712 »

LeonM wrote: post #68
LandR wrote: post #53

I'm staggered that there are 575 companies paying slack $100k / year. I don't even have anything against slack but what is possibly worth $100k a year from a comms software?

If you run a company with 1000 employees, that just $100 per seat, that's not that bad. Telephony is usually quite a lot more expensive than that.

And you can make phone calls in Slack. The call quality and experience is pretty solid too.

Re: Slack S-1

#89

Post by maxxxxx »

est31 wrote: post #65
paulddraper wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still mind boggling that all these unicorns haven't stopped growing after being in business for years and having a mature product. It's a strange world.

Don't forget that products like Slack, Uber, Airbnb, etc. all could have basically everyone as their customer. These companies influence the daily lives of millions of people, with comparatively few employees, thanks to the scaling skills of technology. That's why they are valued so high and are still growing. Sure, they might be overvalued and one day the bubble can burst, but neither is it just a ponzi scheme, ther…

They also don’t have very high barriers to entry for competitors. Replacing SAP is really hard after it has been established in a company. On the other hand replacing Slack is really easy. Same for Uber. Customers and drivers can jump ship anytime.

Re: Slack S-1

#90

Post by snypox »

snazz wrote: post #58
moreira wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm just not aware how things work in companies of Slack's size, but... what do you think $4M/mo is spent on, for what essentially amounts to a chat app? I realise there a lot of extras in Slack (attachments cost S3 storage, video calls take bandwidth, webhooks take some processing), but as of January 2019, they had 10M daily active users. $50M/365 gives us $137K per day. $137K per day just to serve 10M activ…

Knowing how famously inefficient the Slack application is with end user resources, I wouldn’t be surprised if their backend has been poorly optimized. I serve more than 1000 users on a $3.50/mo VPS with a not-particularly-efficient runtime just fine.

Scaling and cost is not linear, my friend.
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