> "I don’t feel like there are any serious vulnerabilities in the business."
No one in technology should ever find themselves uttering these words. It's like asking for it.
If the tech world remains relatively unchanged Slack is easily worth $3 billion. All they need to do is get a few million workers on there chatting away and they've got ~$10/month * millions, which is hundreds of millions per year.
They should probably sell to Microsoft and let them take on the risk at this point. There's a good chance the tech world will change around them and the whole thing will come tumbling back down to earth. Or they could try to become the new Microsoft.
>No one in technology should ever find themselves uttering these words. It's like asking for it.
It's a completely different matter to be saying the same words in private vs in a public interview that will be read by millions of readers. A CEO must say this (or something to the general effect while being PC) when speaking in public. Doing otherwise can only have negative consequences with respect to employees, customers, etc.
After seeing what happened to Flickr (both the product and the team) after Yahoo bought it, combined with Slack's crazy growth, makes me think a sale is unlikely. Especially to a big company like MS.
> There's a good chance the tech world will change around them and the whole thing will come tumbling back down to earth.
What supports this claim? Yes tech and the tech world changes quickly but some of the core functions of running a business, such as effective team communication, will not go away any time soon.
especially something in this space, a communication platform. even if you completely exclude the chances that your sofware will ever be less than perfect... who knows what messaging platform will evolve into your space and when one will find the keys to network effects that eat your lunch.
My team just gave up on Slack today, because push notifications seem too unreliable when we're on our phones. Paradoxically, we've found it works better when the app is not running than it does when it is running. Most of us are using Android phones. I couldn't find anyone else having the same problem, and I couldn't find any answers googling around, other than the obvious "turn on push notifications"-- push notices were definitely on.
We may go back to Slack at some point, if we can get it to work effectively for us.
The assumption is that if you're actively in the channel, you saw the item already and don't need a duplication notification on your phone for the item you just read.
What the other reply said is true, Slack by default only sends mobile notifications when you're 'away.' In addition, by default, it waits 5 minutes before sending notifications (this can be changed).
The v2 Android app is currently in beta - I've been testing it for several weeks. It's lightyears ahead of the current release version which is admittedly pretty faulty (no caching means that resumes are very slow). I've also found notifications to be more reliable. Perhaps give it another try once they ship the v2 Android app.
Slack is one of those curious tools that seems to take off despite doing nothing particularly new or innovative. We started using it due to some colleagues who raved about it. I haven't come across a feature yet that we've used that hasn't been part of IM / IRC clients for more than 15 years. The main feature of it seems to be that it's new, so when you first start using it only the 5 other people that you are collaborating with right now are on there, so it starts off feeling more productive and focused than other tools.
But then, I thought the same thing about Twitter (how is this not worse that every other IRC / IM service I've ever used?) and look what happened there.
Honest question, outside of writing your own bot are there any real IRC integrations for even half of the services Slack integrates with? It's really useful to set up monitoring services in a dev channel where we can not only read errors, but share code snippets with pretty formatting, Github integration to let us know when a PR has been opened to fix the issue, and then Trello to manage features too.
Not to mention the integrations outside of developers. I haven't worked in enough large companies, and never as a nontechnical employee so I'm not sure what sales teams were using for communication but I doubt IRC was their cup of tea. I imagine they used a lot of email, maybe some CRM communication but that's still not as useful, or rather I imagine it's less useful than Slack. Having a single place to discuss Stripe purchases, hiring with Breezy, MailChimp et cetera that isn't a gigantic email forward sounds seriously useful and I don't know that anything like that exists on IRC.
There are alternatives like HipChat, but they clearly didn't it the mark the way Slack has.
While you're right in a broad sense, I think in fairness slack has a lot of polish where others tools don't -- they get a lot of UX details right that seem "obvious" because they are getting them right. But they're actually far from trivial.
Unlike switching VM's or databases, switching from one front-end for a pseudo-irc-client to another is essentially simple, the migration is probably significantly less painful, there are no proprietary formats in the way (.pdf .dwg).
The actual costs / complexity involved in building a similar product are magnitudes less than the high valuation would suggest.
So I'm not sure how much early success is really worth in this market.
Switching databases is significantly more painful for a _small_ portion of an organization. Getting a large organization to switch messaging platforms across all team functions probably wouldn't be a seamless as you'd like to imagine.
The only way I can make sense of it is using logic similar to [this][1]. If I assume VC's consider slack a "force multiplier" for startups, then I can see it raising investments far above the value it provides when viewed standalone.
The fact that they already have a popular competitor in the space (hipchat) would normally make such a high valuation seemingly more confusing, but if viewed using the force multiplier logic, maybe less so? There could be concern that having only a single frequently used tool would make it too easy for someone to "own" a startup's lifeblood, so better to have more than one. (similar to github and bitbucket?)
I guess the alternative is that slack has some investor specific info about their product pipline where they are pitching other companion tools that work well together, and/or compete more directly with other popular services. Like atlassian/jira or something.
They are trying to replace all of corporate internal communication channels which includes email so there is some merit to it. While cost of switching is low for a smaller company, it is extremely high for larger corporation especially if they use all sorts of integrations with other products within slack. The more integrations they have the harder it is for competing product to catch up in larger corporations market, which probably provide most of the revenue for the product.
I agree that the switching costs aren't technical. Maybe for small teams in a startup it's easy to relearn a new product, but don't underestimate the stickiness with large groups of people all using and relying on it. Just think about how many large (& small) organizations still use email even though it's terrible for intra company communication.
Slack is good but it's nothing revolutionary that would merit the valuation. My main argument against their crazy valuation is that there's no lock in so it'd be easy for teams to move on to the "next big thing." Also, see http://getkaiwa.com/
The problem with trying to kill email is that you're never going to have everyone migrate off of it. It's going to have to be some type of layer on top of IMAP that then moves to a more sophisticated protocol. Google has done such a great job with NLP/AI/ML that spam from facebook, twitter, etc. are all put into a separate tab that I only see when I want to. When I click on an email about a flight, it gives me updates on the status of the flight. Gmail also makes it seamless to share docs. I could make a clean interface for email groups using the Gmail API and have the same product as slack. What am I missing here?
Slack is a great product but I do not think it's worth $2.8B. Hipchat has a much bigger company behind it and people switched to Slack pretty quickly because for the most part it is a better product. The reason for that switch is because the cost of switch is relatively minimal. Any competitor can come in and take that away from Slack. They are only worth this much if the tech landscape is static, which we all know it isnt. Just my 2 cents.
The value is not in the actual product, but in the lock-in that this solution creates. I find this outrageous, and I hope that soon a better and open chat/communication standard will emerge.
Slack is really a nice application. People have been saying email overload is a problem for years, and Slack has really put a dent in it for work/office use. Yes it's a simple app, but so is email, and simple done better is genius.
Slack's valuation will make a lot more sense once they delve into the video chat and conferencing world, making their way further into the enterprise.
People need to understand that investment is a vote of confidence in the team, not just the product. What can this team accomplish with that investment? That's the question.
We recently switched from Hipchat to Slack and at first I hated it, now I'm only mildly disgruntled because I did a few modifications:
1. Bubble when I get a direct message.
2. Leave all but about 3-4 groups.
3. Tell images to not default display (have to click on them)
4. Star important channels (The star is next to the #channelname at the top and it's only visible when hovered) That big star on the top right is not to star a channel.
5. and probably most importantly was to switch to the compressed mode so all the chat spaces are as tightly compacted as possible.
We switched from Hipchat (buggy in the beginning, smooth and ideal at the end) to Hall (a buggy, slow, awful mess) to Slack (also slow, but not buggy, and awful UX).
Hipchat gets notifications right. Slack and Hall seem to have (in)sane defaults, and not quite right customizations.
The web-view of Slack is slow and stupid.
It's picky, but I loved the vim/sed style substitutions in Hipchat. Slack FTL.
But the biggest annoyance by far: In Hipchat you could reorder your chats however you felt like. In Slack they're fixed. And team chats are arbitrarily (feeling) broken up into groups and channels. Which is a completely useless distinction for most I think.
Hipchat had @all and @here. Which seem pretty self explanatory. Slack has @group, @channel, and... I guess that's it. No version of @here AFAICT, and depending on what sort of "room" you're in, the @all equivalent changes.
The iOS app also makes something that looks like a room picker and instead makes it some other menu I forget. And notifications will happily occur on my laptop, computer, iPhone and iPad all at once if I don't catch it at my desk in time. Here's a hint: If you decide to notify my phone, don't notify anything else at that point. No cat picture or CI build notification deserves Def-Con 5 treatment.
But it has themes? And useless giphy integrations? Honestly I don't get the love at all. Form over function at it's worst. I really dislike it. :-p
I had my admin enable the IRC gateway and I just use that now. Uploaded files are a little awkward (but that's mostly because I have to switch between multiple google enterprise accounts during the course of a day).
Put the 'SLACK' user on ignore and most of the annoying integrations disappear.
Yeah, people are focusing too much on slack in particular and less on what the interview reveals about how VC and the tech industry actually operates. I'm really impressed by the way this guy thinks. These are things I haven't heard from other people.
There seems to be a booming market for Slack integrations lately. This is great because Slack just = text, and so building prototypes can be fairly easy. Our product (http://focusr.co) actually started purely as a Slack integration, and evolved into something else.
Is it me or does Microsoft just need to get a decent persistent group chat in office365/lync/skype for business along with a decent api for integrations. As small business/startup running office 365 the reason we started with slack was due to the lack of persistent chat rooms in office365. (yammer is just not usable and not sure who it's aimed at!)
The funny thing is that Atlassian, whose HipChat had a few years lead on Slack, was only (?) valued at $3.3bn last year for their whole suite of products
[+] [-] staunch|11 years ago|reply
No one in technology should ever find themselves uttering these words. It's like asking for it.
If the tech world remains relatively unchanged Slack is easily worth $3 billion. All they need to do is get a few million workers on there chatting away and they've got ~$10/month * millions, which is hundreds of millions per year.
They should probably sell to Microsoft and let them take on the risk at this point. There's a good chance the tech world will change around them and the whole thing will come tumbling back down to earth. Or they could try to become the new Microsoft.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|11 years ago|reply
It's a completely different matter to be saying the same words in private vs in a public interview that will be read by millions of readers. A CEO must say this (or something to the general effect while being PC) when speaking in public. Doing otherwise can only have negative consequences with respect to employees, customers, etc.
[+] [-] serve_yay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeg8|11 years ago|reply
What supports this claim? Yes tech and the tech world changes quickly but some of the core functions of running a business, such as effective team communication, will not go away any time soon.
[+] [-] netcan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unoti|11 years ago|reply
We may go back to Slack at some point, if we can get it to work effectively for us.
[+] [-] secabeen|11 years ago|reply
The assumption is that if you're actively in the channel, you saw the item already and don't need a duplication notification on your phone for the item you just read.
[+] [-] chambo622|11 years ago|reply
The v2 Android app is currently in beta - I've been testing it for several weeks. It's lightyears ahead of the current release version which is admittedly pretty faulty (no caching means that resumes are very slow). I've also found notifications to be more reliable. Perhaps give it another try once they ship the v2 Android app.
[+] [-] s_kilk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bergie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmmmmm|11 years ago|reply
But then, I thought the same thing about Twitter (how is this not worse that every other IRC / IM service I've ever used?) and look what happened there.
[+] [-] rezistik|11 years ago|reply
Not to mention the integrations outside of developers. I haven't worked in enough large companies, and never as a nontechnical employee so I'm not sure what sales teams were using for communication but I doubt IRC was their cup of tea. I imagine they used a lot of email, maybe some CRM communication but that's still not as useful, or rather I imagine it's less useful than Slack. Having a single place to discuss Stripe purchases, hiring with Breezy, MailChimp et cetera that isn't a gigantic email forward sounds seriously useful and I don't know that anything like that exists on IRC.
There are alternatives like HipChat, but they clearly didn't it the mark the way Slack has.
[+] [-] jonahx|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkmurakami|11 years ago|reply
I think the list will be much shorter for Slack compared to its peers.
[+] [-] bachback|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hurin|11 years ago|reply
The actual costs / complexity involved in building a similar product are magnitudes less than the high valuation would suggest.
So I'm not sure how much early success is really worth in this market.
[+] [-] mooreds|11 years ago|reply
Ui knowledge
Inertia
History.
The last is most important--if cultural knowledge over years gets embedded in slack, it will be easy to justify the modest ongoing costs.
[+] [-] mikeg8|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stock_toaster|11 years ago|reply
The fact that they already have a popular competitor in the space (hipchat) would normally make such a high valuation seemingly more confusing, but if viewed using the force multiplier logic, maybe less so? There could be concern that having only a single frequently used tool would make it too easy for someone to "own" a startup's lifeblood, so better to have more than one. (similar to github and bitbucket?)
I guess the alternative is that slack has some investor specific info about their product pipline where they are pitching other companion tools that work well together, and/or compete more directly with other popular services. Like atlassian/jira or something.
[1]: http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm
[+] [-] serve_yay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vskarine|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmp0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] error54|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PublicEnemy111|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drinkzima|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blumkvist|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shah_s|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] paulsutter|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html (pg, 2008, see number 28)
[+] [-] antihero|11 years ago|reply
Ah, because I would only ever want to talk to people within my specific team...
[+] [-] ianstallings|11 years ago|reply
People need to understand that investment is a vote of confidence in the team, not just the product. What can this team accomplish with that investment? That's the question.
[+] [-] UUMMUU|11 years ago|reply
1. Bubble when I get a direct message. 2. Leave all but about 3-4 groups. 3. Tell images to not default display (have to click on them) 4. Star important channels (The star is next to the #channelname at the top and it's only visible when hovered) That big star on the top right is not to star a channel.
5. and probably most importantly was to switch to the compressed mode so all the chat spaces are as tightly compacted as possible.
[+] [-] ssmoot|11 years ago|reply
Hipchat gets notifications right. Slack and Hall seem to have (in)sane defaults, and not quite right customizations.
The web-view of Slack is slow and stupid.
It's picky, but I loved the vim/sed style substitutions in Hipchat. Slack FTL.
But the biggest annoyance by far: In Hipchat you could reorder your chats however you felt like. In Slack they're fixed. And team chats are arbitrarily (feeling) broken up into groups and channels. Which is a completely useless distinction for most I think.
Hipchat had @all and @here. Which seem pretty self explanatory. Slack has @group, @channel, and... I guess that's it. No version of @here AFAICT, and depending on what sort of "room" you're in, the @all equivalent changes.
The iOS app also makes something that looks like a room picker and instead makes it some other menu I forget. And notifications will happily occur on my laptop, computer, iPhone and iPad all at once if I don't catch it at my desk in time. Here's a hint: If you decide to notify my phone, don't notify anything else at that point. No cat picture or CI build notification deserves Def-Con 5 treatment.
But it has themes? And useless giphy integrations? Honestly I don't get the love at all. Form over function at it's worst. I really dislike it. :-p
[+] [-] suvelx|11 years ago|reply
Put the 'SLACK' user on ignore and most of the annoying integrations disappear.
That said, I still hate the thing.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] applecore|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khorwitz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sakri|11 years ago|reply
Soooo time to create a Slack clone and sell it to Slack for a few million?
[+] [-] crafty78|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brazzledazzle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] memossy|11 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7554904
[+] [-] stillsut|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuke|11 years ago|reply
(And go use Flowdock.)
[+] [-] jingo|11 years ago|reply