
Slack raises $120M Led by Google Ventures and KPCB at $1.12B Valuation - BIackSwan
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/31/slack-confirms-120m-fundraise-led-by-google-ventures-and-kpcb-at-1-12b-valuation/
======
B5geek
I must be in the minority (based on the comments that I have read), but I hate
it. The other day the PHB announces to the office: We are going to use Slack
and move away from IM, Skype, etc. So I signed up. What I don't like: -you
need to keep a a tab open all the time,

-you need to keep an eye on that tab in case something comes up,

-the 'notifications' don't work all the time (Archlinux + Firefox)

It's like somebody took all the bad qualities of IRC, and shoehorned it into a
web-page and all the horror that brings. The features that I don't understand:

search-able logging of messages. Email and/or Pidgin already does that.

Group messages: Email already does that.

Transferring of files: Email and/or corporate LAN shares already do that.

But it does add the necessity of stopping my workflow every 5-10 minutes so I
can check to see if there are any messages that _might_ apply to me.

The quicker it can be killed with fire the happier I will be. Or am I missing
the point? curmudgeonly - check

beard - check

Unix admin - check

Perhaps there is no hope for me. Next thing you know people will want to take
pictures with their cellphones! =)

~~~
throwaway5752
Look at all the sibling replies.... You just have to get a Mac - works great
there! It's like Windows of 15 years ago, redux.

I've had the same experience as you with Slack and Hipchat. The front end guys
with the shiny tools love it, and I live with it.

To the extent you're missing the point... it lets people that might not be
able to set it up otherwise have secure messaging across desktop and mobile,
and a unified place to have all the features that you mentioned vs getting
familiar with nc/scp/ftp, grepping chat logs, etc.

That said, they must have one hell of a demo deck (or secret master plan) to
get a $1B+ valuation.

~~~
eli
Yup, I evaluated Slack and HipChat about a year ago and went with HipChat
mostly because of Slack's lame Windows user experience. (IMHO, the Slack
client also had too many bells and whistles. I would've like a default
"simple" mode that just is an IM client with group chat.)

~~~
inthewoods
Slack's lack of a native Windows app sunk it for our org - then the rest
adopted Hipchat and I think it is too late for us. I would love to use Slack,
alas.

~~~
eli
Yeah, HipChat definitely has its own issues. The notifications are kinda crude
and the integrations aren't as good as in Slack.

------
javery
The most interesting things to me is that Campfire was around before this and
Hipchat before that. It goes to show that execution is everything, Slack has
completely crushed it from a feature and integration standpoint and the polish
is amazing. We switched from Hipchat and we didn't really have a good reason -
it just felt better.

If Campfire was growing $1MM a month I am pretty sure 37signals would now be
called Campfire and not Basecamp.

~~~
hanley
> We switched from Hipchat and we didn't really have a good reason - it just
> felt better.

This is interesting. How many employees are using it? Slack costs 4 times as
much as HipChat ($8/user/month vs. $2/user/month) so it seems silly to jump to
a much more expensive product for no reason.

~~~
tg3
In my experience, if a tool provides any business value at all, worrying about
$6/employee is a complete waste of time. If Slack saves each employee 6
minutes _per month_ then it has paid for itself.

Developer tools generally charge far too little for their offerings - price
point is probably not even a consideration for most companies, as long as its
within an acceptable band.

~~~
frostmatthew
> If Slack saves each employee 6 minutes per month then it has paid for
> itself.

But does it [compared to HipChat]? (asking as someone who has used HipChat but
never Slack)

~~~
m3g0ga0
I use both on a regular basis, because our company has split personalities
about which chat client is best.

I don't think it's meaningfully different or better than HipChat. The most
obvious differences are that it automatically retries sending messages if your
network glitches, and that it's proponents are more irrationally positive than
HipChat's.

They're interchangeable. People who argue otherwise don't have enough actual
work to do.

------
jscheel
For the people who say group messaging is fine in email: are you all
masochists? Seriously, if I have one more 45-email thread between 3 different
people, I'm going to smack somebody. There is a time and place for email, but
group chat is not it.

------
pkorzeniewski
Everyone praises Slack here but I find e-mail + IM completely sufficient and I
work in a very large company.. Something urgent? Use IM. Something can wait?
Use e-mail. It's that simple.

~~~
hvs
I work at a small company (<10 employees) and we use HipChat all day. Since we
are geographically dispersed, it helps to maintain the inter-team
communication that is hard to do remotely. We probably only use it for 40%
"work." The rest is random news items and discussions about sports.

~~~
bryanlarsen
> We probably only use it for 40% "work." The rest is random news items and
> discussions about sports.

Which probably means that you have a coworker or two that's passively annoyed
at you and/or actively ignores the channel.

~~~
hvs
We're a sports company and everyone is usually involved with most of the
discussions. I catch your point, but it's pretty easy to ignore if you are
heads down coding. You can get someone's attention (for important stuff) but
addressing them directly (@username).

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brianstorms
IRC FTW. Slack gets big, gets acquired, integrates with Outlook, SAP, etc.,
becomes Outlook & SAP, nobody ever got fired for using Slack, etc., etc.,
Stewart becomes a billionaire, yadda yadda.

Meanwhile, IRC.

~~~
dasil003
Why would I forego the use of a tool that gives me dramatically more
productivity _right now_ than I could get even spending 100 hours configuring
and managing an IRC server on the prediction that some years from now Slack is
going to suck?

I understand using IRC because of privacy concerns or you have very specific
workflows, or just because you like managing your own services. But the threat
of future changes is not a credible reason to avoid Slack. When it starts to
suck, you just switch.

~~~
philsnow
It takes less than an hour to set up an IRCd, even with SSL.

Slack has a bunch of advantages over irc, though: clients for many platforms,
connections go over HTTPS (non-issue for firewalls, whereas IRC connections
are sometimes non-trivial), cross-platform notifications, inlining of some
content (slack calls this "unfurling").

Their trump card, however, is the simple third-party integrations support. In
~30 seconds, I can write an integration that e.g. watches the git repository
on a machine and sends a message to a specific slack channel when the HEAD
changes.

Yes, you can do this with an irc bot as well, but: you have to get that irc
bot (maybe it's a library, a binary, whatever) to where you want to run it,
and you have to write a few lines of code. Whereas with Slack, you can just
curl an https endpoint from bash. There's no need to deploy anything, it's all
there, and it's simpler to use.

I've seen less-neck-beardy teammates throw together slack integrations that
have helped out quite a lot.

Slack lowers the bar to not just team chatting, but making the team chat work
for the team's environment. In that it's a bit like emacs. It lets the team
change it to fit their usage.

------
OoTheNigerian
HipChat slacked (I know..;) ). They had this IM for business covered. Then The
Slack people came in and took the integration thing seriously.

HipChat seems to have felt the competition and now they are taking it
seriously. I use HipChat with my distributed team and it works VERY well.
HipChat has Android and Windows native clients and have now set up a serious
API. The Windows app need some work though.

HipChat is free and you can get all and more of what Slack offers at a VERY
affordable cost of $2/month.

HipChat also uses standardized protocol of XMPP.

Sqwiggle now looks like it could be very attractive to slack with their video
technology. Except that raise a lot of money soon, I'm predicting an
acquisition.

PS: I have no relationship with HipChat. I am just a happy user :)

~~~
jusben1369
We switched from HipChat to Slack (my devs just made the "executive decision"
one morning last April and we were done!) As a "Biz" guy I liked HipChat more.
I thought it was cleaner and simpler to use and initially had better support
for Android. And then when they added video/voice support (after we stopped
using it) I cried a little as that's the only reason I still keep Skype open.
Still I suspect Slack will use these $$'s to solve voice/video and I love the
backstory so it's likely the right long term option for us.

~~~
adieth
I don't understand why so many people use Slack, while it is completely
lacking voice and video.

Looking at HipChat and Slack now, I would select HipChat because of the video
and screen sharing features.

------
d0m
I'd love to know more about why did Slack were able to get so much traction
and raise that much money compared to Flowdock/Groove.io/Hipchat.

I've used Flowdock in the past and tried Hipchat too. I've also been a huge
IRC fan when I was younger. I don't see that much of a difference between
those and Slack.. Maybe:

    
    
      - More intuitive for people who don't already know IRC.
      - Really cross-platform
      - Well integrated with various tools people love.
      - Very good "on-boarding" flow.
    

But still, the difference in term of traction is _massive_ , am I missing
something?

Personally, I think we switched because I was a bit frustrated about the
status quo. IRC was too complex for non-tech and didn't have a good cross-
platform integrated solution. Hipchat app just felt so clunky and ugly.. same
with Campfire, it felt really old. I've used and liked Flowdock but I thought
it was just _too much_ with widgets all over the place and smart inbox, where
what I wanted was "just" a "IRC" I could use with colleagues.

Thoughts?

~~~
pbiggar
The difference in traction is insane! Slack has 15,000 companies paying them
in a few weeks after launch. In the article it says they have $1m/mo revenue -
that's incredible for such a young company.

Investors are making a bet that this is indicative that slack are going to
take over the entire enterprise communication space.

------
cjbarber
Wow.

Just goes to show that this is definitely a great time to raise money!

Personally, I think Slack is smart to take the cash, although obviously it's
going to require some serious discipline from them to make sure that it only
helps them rather than hinders them.

I'm not an employee/investor/etc but I've been convincing freinds to apply to
work at slack recently, I think if you are obsessed with productivity tools or
communication tools, Slack, Asana or Quip are all companies worth looking at.

There's a compiled set of info on working at slack [1]. Disclaimer: I compiled
it!

Back to my first point - now they have a _ton_ of cash to hire a _ton_ of
people - very curious to see @slack in 6-12 months.

[1]: [http://www.breakoutlist.com/slack/](http://www.breakoutlist.com/slack/)

------
dkrich
I just don't see how SaaS at this scale can ever be profitable. Asana, Slack,
and the like have to support large teams while the enterprise sales cycle is
extraordinarily expensive. If you're Oracle and can charge $5k a seat plus
consulting fees, then sure, I understand it. If you're an also-ran SaaS
business charging $8 a user, you're never going to be profitable.

All of these are just different spins on the same communication features.
There's nothing that's really defensible about any of them.

~~~
marcog1
Asana engineer here. With such a large market size, we can scale the sales
process to make it inexpensive. We only have a couple sales people. User
operations, i.e. keeping customers, is larger but still in all less than 10.

------
yarone
Multiple folks have told me that Slack is the very first app that they check
when they wake up in the morning. And then they use it for hours every single
day.

To me, that's an incredibly powerful fact. Not many apps comsume user
attention like that.

~~~
lbotos
While that's true, I mean I _have_ to as that where the communication for my
team happens. It's not like Slack did anything particularly inventive. They
just happened to be "not HipChat" (Which we used to use but Slack just had
that "cool new" factor)

~~~
jdimov
That's exactly the point.

"Just" being a "not Google" just might make you a trillionaire.

------
stevebot
Having used Slack I found it ammusing the way they describe it:

Slack, the enterprise collaboration platform

It actually is true and a great way to market.

1.2B valuation seems high, but I guess this is a lesson that you can do the
same thing everyone else has done, but do it better ( or at least differently)
and actually be successful. Sometimes hard to believe that.

------
austenallred
Our (small) team adores slack. I didn't even realize what the pricing was when
we first started - I thought it was free forever with some freemium features.
Then all the sudden we hit our quota (after a month of heavy, heavy use), and
paying for the full subscription was a no-brainer. The product truly is
fantastic, and we'll pay for it all day long.

~~~
warcode
It is free forever, as long as you don't require more than 10,000 searchable
messages in the archive or over 5 external integrations.

------
burpee
I don't really see how this is worth a 1.12B valuation - even with this amount
of users. I also think that the pricing for Slack is over the top.

I used Flowdock [https://www.flowdock.com/](https://www.flowdock.com/) for
about a year for a distributed team, before Slack even existed.

From what I can tell Slack is a direct copy of Flowdock from top to bottom in
regards to features, while Flowdock charges $3/mo/user.

~~~
misuba
Slack is massively better at dealing with documents.

~~~
arnauddri
dealing with documents is a billion dollar feature?

~~~
csallen
Companies aren't valued on features. They're valued on how much money
investors think they can make, which is usually a function of how fast they
can acquire users, which is often greatly affected by their execution on
simple features.

------
damon_c
In my experience and having tried everything since Google Wave, Slack is the
first platform to come along that has really significantly reduced email usage
while improving team communication.

I predict that it is really going to be huge.

------
massel
Serious question, can someone explain why a team using Hipchat should switch
to slack?

~~~
tonyhb
The major benefit of slack over hipchat is slack comes with integrations by
default. IE: instead of having to use Zapier or such to hook into Trello slack
can handle it for you.

HipChat only has an API you push to, whereas Slack can pull from other
services.

We tried it and kept with HipChat. I found Slack's interface/text to be less
readable than HipChat. It might look better, but for reading information and
usability HipChat won. Our entire team is happy with our choice.

------
chatmasta
Slack has been around since February 2014. An eight-month-old company raising
$120M is damn impressive, no matter how you spin it.

This is just another testament to b2b software. They only have a couple
thousand customers, but that's enough to get them a $1.12B valuation. If my
mental math is right, that's roughly 200k per current customer? This is
probably a strategic play on the part of GV/KPCB, moving into the enterprise
market where they already have investments. They will leverage partnerships
with other portfolio companies to multiply Slack's revenue, likely bringing
that valuation in range closer to $XX,000 per customer -- far more reasonable
in Enterprise.

Nice job Slack!

~~~
seanlinehan
~$15k per current customer

~~~
chatmasta
Sounds like a bargain.

------
rdl
I basically hate every one of these services that I've ever used. Crashy,
resource-intensive clients.

At work we use HipChat which is "better than skype", but still pretty crap. In
stark contrast to the rest of the Atlassian suite which is basically good.

IRC, in the form of irssi+screen on some kind of unix host, is however
awesome. There's no great mobile solution, and OTR crypto should be available
on top.

What's amazing to me is so many companies in this space and so much money and
all the products suck.

~~~
ottumm
I believe you can use IRC clients to connect to both HipChat and Slack.

~~~
rdl
XMPP clients (e.g. Pidgin/Adium).

But they block OTR (at least HipChat does), and you lose most of the
functionality.

~~~
heymishy
isn't the point to block OTR. a core concept of both of them is knowledge
capture and searchability which can't be done properly if your only having
part of the conversation.

~~~
rdl
I have no desire to have knowledge capture and searchability when I IM a
coworker with a password.

------
lazzlazzlazz
There are no discernible improvements over HipChat. I don't understand what
the fuss is about. We're in a bizarro-world.

------
jonathanwallace
I feel like Slack is what Campfire should've been. Or what IRC with a fast,
searchable history and a decent GUI is.

------
inthewoods
Is anyone on this thread using Slack (or Hipchat et al) outside of
development? I've seen it be useful (along with Hipchat) with development and,
to a lesser extent, design (UX/UI) - but outside of that no one seems
interested. Just curious if others have the same experience. I was talking to
a VP of Sales from another company that had adopted Flowdock and asked her
what she thought of it - her response: "I hate it." Saw the same reaction to
Salesforce Chatter.

With $120m, I hope they bring group video chat to Slack and a dedicated
windows client.

------
mwarkentin
I've been using Slack by myself as a replacement for email notifications from
various services for my side projects and open-source projects. Works quite
well!

------
fourstar
The issue with slack is that they have these NUX notifications all over the
place. If your product is that complicated, there's probably a deeper issue.

------
tzakrajs
How Atlassian of them.

------
ravivyas
What I really like about Slack is that it reduces the amount of office email.
I also love the number of integrations they have.

For me Slack + Trello really work for an enterprise.

I know they are looking for a Windows Phone guy to build their WP app, good
time to join them I guess.

------
thearn4
$1.12B kind of blows my mind, but me and my team really do love the service.

------
kingrolo
Also, the Slackbot is the friendliest bot I've come across.

------
general_failure
I will add this to the list of things that I thought can never be worth so
much :-(

/me just do something already

------
gtirloni
First thought: "Why is Google VC investing in Slackware?"

Made my heart rate accelerate I little bit.

------
bsjolund
Nice to see a decent Flowdock competitor, but I still don't see a reason to
switch.

~~~
lucisferre
We switched for largely arbitrary reasons. I do really like the Slack
experience, I'd say I prefer it in some ways. But Flowdock was also great, no
real complaints there at all.

~~~
yesimahuman
A sign that the switching costs are maybe not that big. We went from campfire
to hipchat to slack. And each time we were happy to move on despite a history
of chat messages (old documents aren't that useful since anything important is
in Dropbox). Interesting phenomenon.

------
thinkingkong
I know you should take money when you can, but part of me is wondering if this
is indicitive of some kind of "winter" coming for VC funding. If slack is
growing that quickly, why not wait another 6 months and drive for a better
valuation?

~~~
llamataboot
The growth seems baked into this (really high) valuation to me.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
There's a lot of money in replacing (a significant portion of ) email with an
actual better solution.

------
rabino
I'm so happy for them. Great team and great product.

------
nc
Wonder if they'll offer to buy MetaLab now.

------
blumkvist
Anyone remember Yammer?

