
Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation - lgats
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/734095998/putting-a-price-on-chat-slack-is-going-public-at-16-billion-value
======
Roritharr
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.

~~~
mehrdadn
I don't know about "well deserved". They did it by holding people's data
hostage. It's one thing to make your messages unsearchable or otherwise
available in the UI until your pay, but holding your data completely hostage
until you pay up isn't exactly a noble way to go about things. Even _Facebook_
isn't this obnoxious about getting you a copy of your message history.

~~~
vehementi
Nah, this is a super slanted view of things. Their business succeeds because
they've made a best in class amazing thing, not because everyone begrudgingly
wants to see their history, lol

~~~
einpoklum
Slack is still inferior to IRC overall. Don't know what you're talking about.

~~~
vehementi
What? Slack is objectively better in every way except the open source part

------
fasteo
>>> 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 <1% of their paid
customers. Is this normal in the corporate SaaS market ? I can only think of
this as a huge risk.

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 underwriter will push the stock to
investors. Is this so ?

~~~
notjustanymike
Most of the places I worked had 2 or 3 whales. 55 whales is actually pretty
good.

~~~
osrec
Interesting... I guess you could see a lot of SaaS companies as outsourced
software development teams for the whales.

~~~
trose
yep, if you owe someone a little money they have control. If you owe someone a
lot of money, you have control. The whales use SaaS companies to develop
things they dont want in house and demand features because they know they're
one of the biggest customers.

------
askafriend
Slack is great. The valuation makes sense and I wish them continued success.

All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company
make us more productive.

I would hate to go back to what came before it.

IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same
sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.

~~~
beatgammit
What's wrong with the UX of IRC? IRC is a protocol, not a specific client, and
it supports a wide variety of server and client plugins. We had a really nice
IRC going productively for a year or two, but we scrapped it because only our
software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something
else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text).

The nice thing about IRC is that everyone can use whatever client they like
and it will just work. I preferred command-line UX (irssi) because most of my
job is based around the terminal, others prefer desktop clients, while others
prefer web clients, and all were available for our IRC server.

Our problem was that management wanted everyone on the same thing, and neither
side (IRC vs Google chat) wanted to switch (they liked integration with web
Gmail, we liked extensibility, and had already built useful plugins, like "run
a build"). In the end, they didn't like our "less professional" plugins (Chuck
Norris facts, gifs, etc), and we ended up compromising on Slack (we rebuilt
some of our custom integrations).

We went through a year or so of adjustment, and now we're reasonably
productive with it. However, morale is a bit lower, and I think we're a bit
less productive than before, but that's really hard to judge. Honestly, I just
wish there was some nicer looking IRC client. I don't like trusting Slack and
would prefer the tried and true protocol that we can tweak and just pay for a
flashier client for those who like such things. However, it's better than the
previous situation where teams just didn't communicate in text because they
couldn't agree on a medium, which led to more interruptions than the annoying
Slack notifications (non developers tend to always @ the tech lead instead of
letting it be answered by whomever happens to be looking at the channel).

I think it's wrong to blame IRC here. The UX of IRC is fine, it just doesn't
have a flashy client (pidgin is really easy to use and available everywhere,
but it's kind of ugly).

~~~
golergka
Can you log on to IRC from your phone and then instantly search through all of
your company's chat history through the last couple of years?

~~~
kuschku
Sure, that's exactly what I'm doing all the time.

I can search my logs easily
[https://i.imgur.com/nTpoYs0.png](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](https://i.k8r.eu/54BPMQ.png)

Of course, I use self-hosted quassel and quasseldroid.

Many other projects such as weechat and IRCCloud are also working on making
IRC better than slack at everything it does — IRCCloud has a web client,
mobile client, hosted team servers, a slack bridge, reactions, threads, emoji,
attachments, and all you'd want from slack, natively.

Other projects such as IRC.com are also working on bringing the feq advantages
Slack has back to IRC to make it more attractive.

The one single real advantage of Slack is marketing. They can call companies
and spend a lot on money on getting more customers, due to the VC funding.

~~~
ubermonkey
"The one single real advantage of Slack is marketing."

Respectfully, NO.

Providing a very useful turnkey set of features out of the box that are
technically possible but fiddly and hard to use in IRC is in and of itself a
huge advantage. This is why they're successful. This is why people use it.
This is why people use it who barely know what a command line IS.

~~~
kuschku
If you want that, you can just use IRCCloud, it has all that in a single
solution. Just like Slack.

IRCCloud can even connect to Slack workspaces.

The only advantage Slack has over IRCCloud is marketing.

It's relatively ironic that I have to end up praising IRCCloud here,
considering I'm contributing to a competing IRC client.

~~~
rakoo
But when you use IRCCloud you don't use the IRC protocol anymore, you use the
IRCCloud protocol. Which is the same as using the Slack protocol. Your
features aren't available outside IRCCloud. Your account, your data, your
history, everything is tied to IRCCloud. You haven't gained anything compared
to Slack. You're advocating for the _exact_ same model and you don't realize
that the only way to have the same features as Slack in an easy way is to
basically do what Slack does. You're just agreeing with what the parent is
saying.

~~~
kuschku
IRCCloud can connect to normal IRC servers, and normal IRC clients can connect
to IRCCloud servers — and you can export your logs and import them elsewhere.

That makes it much closer to the open ideal than Slack is.

------
antirez
Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat
was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open
standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to
adapt their old open protocols for the future.

~~~
Sahhaese
The death of the protocol.

People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the
open web has truly died.

I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web
grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

~~~
granshaw
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

~~~
hackerpacker
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.

~~~
monsieurbanana
I've met only a few programmers IRL that complained about slack, and even then
it was for ideological reasons, not user experience reasons. Everyone else,
most programmers and all non-programmers I know like the user experience.

I haven't had any real issues with desktop or mobile apps either.

~~~
tombert
I use Slack for work, and while it was an order of magnitude better than the
dumpster-fire of Hipchat (which it replaced for our team), I still think that
the interface is kind of "meh".

Custom emojis are fun, inline markdown is useful, but it takes a lot of memory
for something that, to me, seems like it should be lightweight. We've had IM
since the 80's, after all. There's a part of me that has a visceral reaction
to seeing an IM client taking more than 100mb of memory (though to be fair
they seem to be getting improving that a lot.

------
mstaoru
Next >$16B opportunity: bring something close to Slack, but that actually
works, to China.

China is chat-first culture, but neither DingDing, nor Wechat Work achieved
the status that Slack has in the US/EU.

Problems with Slack in China: it's often blocked, it's unbearably slow, the
apps are not in the stores, it's Chinese search is lacklustre, it's UI is
centered on "longer" messages but Chinese language is very short so it could
be optimized somehow.

~~~
biztos
You'd probably need it to be very efficient in order to run on some of the
cheaper mobile devices, and of course only a Chinese company would ever be
allowed to succeed at that scale in China.

I could easily imagine a Chinese company coming up with Slack-but-fast-and-
easily-monitored, making that >$16B in Asia, and then coming at the US/EU
markets with it.

~~~
mstaoru
In the age of 8-core Snapdragon 660 phones that cost barely north of a hundred
dollars this is not much of a concern. Besides, most "office" types update
their phones every major release.

------
wayoutthere
I agree they’re a great product org, but not sure I agree they’re a $16B
company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I’m not sold on their long
term viability. It’s just too easy for new IM platforms to take root inside a
company once the old one gets too noisy.

Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not
convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product before
something shinier comes along.

~~~
Roritharr
Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals
they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-
communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were
founded.

They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future,
but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.

~~~
scarface74
The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when
Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office
subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with
Microsoft’s other options.

Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for
Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.

~~~
davedx
You think enterprise companies switch a product they’re already using with all
the integrations to another (possibly inferior) product just because of price?
That’s not usually been my experience

~~~
cdash
No, the switch to a product that is fully integrated with another more
important product that they already use.

~~~
Marazan
And with Flow adding integrations all the time Microsoft are real close to a
killer Business product.

Seriously, Flow is good stuff.

------
granshaw
The thing that really struck me about Slack was its level of polish, esp
compared to other software around the time of its release.

The overall level of polish on similar apps has risen since then so that’s
less of a differentiator, but I still refer to Slack as a great example of
polish and consistency in product, with mostly great UX as well

------
leshokunin
Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations
could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels
superior in every aspect, especially since it's free.

I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user
base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely
that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert have already
been converted. I expect CAC to go up and payer conversion to stagnate at
best. I don't see how they can 2-3x their revenue this year (unless there are
drastic, risky changes).

In addition, the slow iterations on the mobile and desktop clients, and the
meteoric rise of Discord are enough cause for concern. I don't see how this
investment would have legs.

~~~
fpvracing
How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are
that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack
extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do
they make money / keep the lights on?

I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their
free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and
hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were
forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go
elsewhere immediately.

~~~
lewisl9029
Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it
to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low
friction voice channels.

But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I
don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless
there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently
there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to
different communities from the same account. Some examples:

\- Can't change avatar based on server: [https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-
us/community/posts/3600...](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-
us/community/posts/360029341852)

\- Real account name shows up on profile even if you provide a different
nickname to the server: [https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-
us/articles/219070107-S...](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-
us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames)

I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers
rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes
of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it
generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of
effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows.

FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using
Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate
all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views
of history).

~~~
fpvracing
For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer
and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with
strangers. Text feels much more comfortable.

Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has
used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will
stick with Slack for now.

~~~
lewisl9029
It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had
reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels
can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a
purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself
up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt-
out mechanism outside of leaving your desk and camping in a conference room.

Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding
definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their
search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of
reasons that might apply to you as well:
[https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-
spectrum-...](https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-
spectrum-8fa6b979645b)

TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form
discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully
index-able by search engines.

Wish you the best on your launch!

~~~
fpvracing
I will check it out and thanks!

------
emtel
Anybody who thinks they know for sure that slack can't possibly be worth $16B
should go back and read some threads from around the Facebook IPO (like this
one
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320585)).
It's very easy to write reasonable sounding things - making accurate
predictions about the future is much harder.

~~~
raldi
Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture a guess that Slack is
going to do very well for itself, though it may dip and swoon over the next
couple years before it reaches that point.

An even more applicable comparison is the HN thread about the Dropbox
announcement. "What? This is just [IRC|rsync] with gimmicky bells and
whistles."

~~~
drawnwren
I think it's telling that I've seen that Dropbox comment mentioned (and here
distorted to the whole thread) probably >100 times yet can't remember the
threads it was mentioned in.

~~~
raldi
I don't understand what you mean about "distorted"

~~~
saagarjha
Actual comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

------
mullingitover
It's pretty hilarious that first Stewart Butterfield tried to make an MMO
(Game Neverending), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the
spinoff, Flickr. Then he tried to make another MMO (Glitch), failed at that,
and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Slack.

I hope he tries to make another MMO.

~~~
mettamage
I feel naive for asking: how would you come up with Flickr as a spinoff for an
MMO? A chat application, yea seems fair, but Flickr?

I am seriously withholding my urge to spam question marks on this page as they
are dancing around my head.

~~~
Kiro
Is it so hard to imagine a photo sharing feature inside the game? MMOs can be
anything.

~~~
Ensorceled
Yes. Can you please explain or give an example of an MMO where photo sharing
is a major mechanic or important MVP feature?

~~~
Kiro
Why does it need to be a major mechanic? It was a feature in Game Neverending
and they used that to build Flickr.

~~~
Ensorceled
I was replying to somebody who was annoyed that somebody was surprised there
was a photo uploading and sharing feature. It’s a surprising feature because
it isn’t a major mechanic.

------
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...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609319/slack-hopes-its-ai-will-keep-
you-from-hating-slack/)

------
keyle
I wish them all the best. But I do hope they stay small in spirit and nimble.

One of my favourite things about slack is /feedback and the fact that someone
will get back to me within 24hrs. There is no product of this scale that has
such a low barrier to feedback/questions/bug report.

~~~
city41
Except in my experience they don't actually fix the bugs. For literally years
the Slack app would get into a zombie state if your network changed in any
way: switched WAPs, got on/off the VPN, switch from wifi to ethernet, etc. The
app would still think it had a network connection but it actually didn't. The
only way to fix it was with a hard refresh. To this day I still reflexively do
a ctrl-r whenever my network changes. Because after reporting this bug to them
over and over and over I got fed up and just moved on. I honestly have no idea
if the bug has actually been fixed, ctrl-r has just become complete muscle
memory for me now.

~~~
keyle
Interesting, I'm on MacOS and in a similar environment (switching vlans etc.)
and the socket just reconnects fine both on the web version and the 'app'.

~~~
city41
It’s possibly fixed now. I first encountered this in 2016. Many coworkers
complained of it and Slack always acknowledged it was an issue they were
looking into whenever I reported it.

------
ngaut
Mattermost raises $50 million to advance its open source Slack alternative

[https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/19/mattermost-
raises-50-mill...](https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/19/mattermost-
raises-50-million-to-advance-its-open-source-slack-alternative/)

~~~
astrange
Here's another one.

[http://www.ircd-hybrid.org](http://www.ircd-hybrid.org)

You don't even need a client because you can read
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812) and
then use telnet. Just remember to respond to PINGs.

~~~
pestaa
Is your cynicism targeted at Mattermost?

Because I find it to be already better than Slack. Took a few commands to set
it up at work on our own server. Convenient, fast, and has the good bits from
the Slack UI.

------
theturtletalks
Their valuation stems from MAUs and majority are on the generous free tier. Do
investors really think they can monetize the free users?

~~~
zild3d
2018 revenue was $400 million, ~doubled the previous year - Slack isn't a
company with just a ton of free users and no monetization

~~~
fastball
40x still seems like an insane multiple.

~~~
rayiner
Assuming they have a margin of 50%, their EBITDA multiple is 80. For
comparison, Facebook had an EBITDA multiple of ~50 at IPO time.

~~~
umeshunni
Slack isn't a consumer company, they are an SaaS enterprise company. Most SaaS
enterprise companies trade at far lower multiples. A decent comp for Slack
would be Dropbox, which has $1.4B and rough valuation of ~$10B

------
rdiddly
Aha! If you were wondering "What's Slack useful for?" this is the answer.

------
not_a_moth
The obligatory "but they have massive losses",

> For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, the company reported losses of
> $138.9 million on revenue of $400.6 million. That’s compared to a loss of
> $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million the year prior. [1]

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/slack-first-quarter-
financ...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/slack-first-quarter-financials/)

I don't understand valuations.

~~~
fiblye
My question is where the _hell_ is that money going?

That money is all the cash flow in some entire minor industries. It’s the GDP
of some minor lower/mid-economy nations’ cities. Their losses are equal to
half the entire GDP of Palau.

Maybe I’m detached. But I don’t understand the cash flow in chat apps today.
It’s absolutely bizarre amounts of money for something that can and _will_
easily be replaced in a few years, as always happens.

~~~
windexh8er
Overpaid executives. I worked for a darling in the security space that has not
posted a profit ever in it's 7 years post-IPO (they could at this point, but
choose not to). Yet the company paid the CEO, multiple years I was there, over
$300M annually. The current CEO makes a "base" $128M and has incentives of
over $400M dangling in front of him. Yet any time the company misses guidance
do you know what they blame? Paying the "field" (sales and field engineering)
too much in commission and stock grants. Yet if you roll up all executive and
board grants on an annual basis you're north of a Billion (with a B) in pay.
Yet... No analyst has the nerve to ask that question point blank on the
earnings call.

Beyond executives and the board? Marketing. I'm now at a much smaller F round
startup that blew $350k+ on the RSA conference and another $150k+ on expenses
for said show. The return on that is miniscule.

Where does the money go? I feel like most startups I've been in have been very
good at funneling the funds exactly where they want it. Profitable doesn't
seem to be the goal anymore, but more of to sink as much cash into executive
pockets as quickly as possible.

~~~
cheez
That can't be right... according to this
[https://www.investopedia.com/highest-paid-
ceos-2019-4687532](https://www.investopedia.com/highest-paid-
ceos-2019-4687532)

Musk was the highest paid (and that was incorrect, he was not paid that much -
that was the max.)

------
loeg
It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and
in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text
chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.

~~~
henning
I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense
of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts,
m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else.
I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams
that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active
Directory or if they can really do anything about it. So, I congratulate them
on their success but I, too, am utterly mystified.

~~~
orthoxerox
Slack and IRC are incomparable. Slack has authentication, message retention
and search, multimedia attachments, mobile application with notifications,
conversation threads, etc.

You could try and cobble together something similar from an IRC server plus
ten different programs, but most companie would rather pay Slack a wee amount
than maintain a Frankenstein's monster.

~~~
kuschku
Except for message retention and search, IRC already has all that, and even
that is possible with bouncers.

Mobile applications with notifications, conversation threads with +draft/reply
(IRCv3 draft), multimedia attachments (IRCv3 idea), authentication with SASL
and standardized account management (IRCv3 draft), etc.

Look at what IRCCloud provides, and what IRCv3 is doing.

~~~
oblio
> Except for ##2 killer features##, IRC already has all that, and even that is
> possible ##if you implement it yourself##.

That's what normal people see when they read your message.

~~~
kuschku
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 you through everything else). It's about as simple as it can get for
selfhosted. (Quassel gets you message retention and search immediately, and
the other features are already being worked on).

~~~
oblio
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.

~~~
kuschku
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.

~~~
oblio
Amazon has made a tiny profit for several years before AWS, when it started
having larger ones.

But it was never too much in the red. It shouldn't be placed together with
Uber.

------
nodesocket
Does anybody have any idea how pricing of this will open up compared to an
IPO? They are doing a direct offering (DPO), which essentially means no new
shares are being allocated and there is no underwriter which typically means
the price can be way more volatile on opening day since no underwriters to
control and establish pricing. DPO as I understand you are buying shares
directly from people who already have them.

------
huis
To me the succes of Slack also shows how invaluable it is.

Companies jumped to it very easily. Everybody just started using it. And the
moment something better comes along Slack will be forgotten.

I think this is different from Facebook. Company employees come and go so they
don't value what they put on Slack very much. And for companies the history on
slack is also not very important.

Well that's how I see how Slack is being used inside different companies.

~~~
CoryG89
I don't necessarily think Slack is worth $16B any time soon, but I actually do
feel like my searchable Slack history stretching back ~5 years is one of the
most valuable resources I have at my fingertips on a dailt basis. The search
quickly pulls up stuff from years ago even stuff from before we changed the
subdomain for the org.

~~~
yardstick
Before Slack, that history might have been contained in email. Which has
always been available and goes back decades in my case. Slack worries me in
the sense that when it’s gone so is my data, but email I’ve always got my
copy.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
"Might". There's a lot slack channels that I'm somewhat privy to, but
otherwise would be out of the loop on if it were an e-mail. It gives me access
to a lot of institutional knowledge in my organization.

------
bluedino
Slack did not kill IRC. It seems like a few people here are saying that.

AOL IM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Chat, SMS...all killed IRC. Sure, there's a small
niche of users out there but it's a deserted island for the most part.

------
dstaley
It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true
native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching
to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to
companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least
trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project
Catalyst (I mean, they already got Twitter!), but Microsoft is investing in
React Native for Windows which could prove really interesting. Hopefully
Microsoft doesn't settle for just making Electron better.

~~~
marcrosoft
Maybe because the real future is web apps and has been for more than a decade
now.

~~~
cududa
If it’s been the future for a decade, and that future isn’t here ... is it
really the future of applications?

~~~
narag
I would replace "the future" with saying that it's much more profitable for
vendors and less convenient for users, so it's being adopted as fast as
vendors can overcome users's resistance.

~~~
marcrosoft
It is actually much more convenient for users. They can switch
computers/phone/OSes and have the same experience. The same is not true with
native apps.

~~~
scarface74
I don’t _want_ the same experience cross platforms. I don’t want the “Mac
experience” when I am using Windows (see iTunes) or the “Windows experience”
when I am using a Mac (old versions of Office).

~~~
marcrosoft
No, what you want is the same experience. Which is what the web gives you.
What you are describing is native apps trying to replicate the same experience
and failing because they are native.

Edit: Native apps require more maintenance which adds to the delta in
experience. If a single app is created (web) there is no delta.

~~~
cududa
Are you seriously trying to tell someone what they want, when they clearly and
rationally laid out specifically what they actually want?

------
lern_too_spel
This valuation depends on the continued incompetence of Google and Microsoft,
who both offer Slack competitors as part of their productivity packages that
most of Slack's paying customers already subscribe to. Their offerings are so
bad that people pay money to Slack _not_ to use them.

~~~
pgm8705
This has been my experience. Every few months or so we sign in to Google
Hangouts Chat in hopes it has made some progress so we can stop paying for
Slack, but it is always a disappointment.

------
6cd6beb
Is this another one of those companies whose S1 says "We're not profitable and
may never be"?

Why is that the right time to go public? Once the company has an obligation to
move towards profitability, doesn't that expose its investors to the risk of
another startup subsidizing the same product or service with VC money,
undercutting the new established brand?

Like if slack wants to become profitable they probably need to push more
people to the paid version of the app, but then won't another company just
make a clone and convert some VC cash into a runway with which to poach
slack's userbase, and eventually file an S1 saying "we're not profitable and
may never be"?

I'm struggling to understand _why_ this keeps working, because no one seems to
have a problem with it _at all_.

~~~
zknz
Teams bundling will hold back wider adoption by the large co's who use
office365. How will the userbase continue to grow?

------
perfunctory
Off topic. Didn't know NPR had text only version of the site.
[https://text.npr.org](https://text.npr.org)

~~~
egze
Link to current story:
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=734095998](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=734095998)

------
debatem1
There is no way Slack is worth $16 billion dollars.

That's over 40x current revenue for a company that lost almost $400,000 a day
last year.

~~~
lallysingh
Dude, when you see the valuations of other unicorns you're gonna be soo
pissed...

~~~
debatem1
Well, you aren't wrong. But I think there are unicorns that are good
investments, particularly cloudflare and juul. There are other unicorns I view
as highly speculative but potentially viable. But slack? No way. Not at this
valuation. If it ever makes this much money, let alone this much profit, I'll
eat a hat.

------
tjpnz
Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of
anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using
it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of
receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.

~~~
count
Yes. Working in a fully distributed team, irc+pictures is great.

It's on you to manage your interruptions (it's easy to kill them totally, or
to customize what you see). If you just take it all, then yeah, I can see that
being a living hell. So like, don't do that.

------
dillonmckay
I miss Screenhero.

That was an amazing implementation of an application.

~~~
fisherjeff
And now they’re dropping its functionality from Slack!

Would LOVE for someone to buy Screenhero back from Slack and bring it back to
life. Truly a shame as it is.

~~~
jsherwani
I’m working on it! :)

~~~
JofArnold
That’s good to hear. Good luck! The world needs ScreenHero!

------
HHalvi
I think Slack is a bit undervalued more than over valued. The market is big
enough for Slack + Microsoft, Amazon Chime, G Suite and so many other players
to coexist. Also Slack to me feels like a good enough messaging apps. P.S: I
hate it's knock-knock chime when engrossed in work and the fact that i have to
keep the app running to get notifications.

~~~
efficax
You do know you can change the chime?

------
starchild_3001
Slack is a great product (vs email or public chat alternatives). I wish them
the best expanding their user base.

Are they worth 16B? None of the armchair investors here know their financials
(addressable market size, user growth rate, expected ARPU etc). Until a
careful analysis done, I would caution you against coming to a quick
conclusion.

~~~
barefootcoder
Why do you say that it's good vs email? In my mind they're for different
purposes.

Slack for urgent matters, email for asynchronous communication that isn't
quite as urgent. Email is also better for things that the recipient may want
to refer back to in the future.

Regardless, I wish that my co-workers would stop sending a message only saying
"hi, name" and then waiting for me to stop working to respond before they type
their actual question. "not only am I going to interrupt you, but I'm going to
make you acknowledge the interruption before making you wait while I SLOWLY
type the actual incomplete question".

<Grumble, grumble, I hate when people misuse Slack>

------
stevehiehn
Crazy, sometimes I picture the creators of HipChat laying in bed staring the
ceiling mumbling: 'but, but, we did thi..'

~~~
hombre_fatal
We tried HipChat for a whole day before bouncing. It was so bad. Had
hilariously poor UX, using commands like \code to get a single line of
monospaced text, iirc.

~~~
Apocryphon
Weirdly enough, I had heard that HipChat used to scale better than Slack.
Supposedly Uber used to use the former rather than the latter because once an
org hit a certain threshold in thousands of users, Slack was no good. This was
years ago, however.

~~~
bastawhiz
Uber did use HipChat instead of Slack, but mostly because Slack was
uninterested in standing up servers for Uber. My understanding is that Slack
basically ran a single server instance for each Slack team.

Atlassian bent over backwards for Uber, but just enough to make it functional.
It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive
hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning,
waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone.

Uber eventually replaced it with a (forked) Mattermost cluster.

~~~
lallysingh
" It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive
hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning,
waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone."

That was my hipchat experience a few months ago. Thankfully I don't have to
use it anymore

------
chx
Slack usability has steadily been decreasing over time.

On desktop I am not getting the "unread" grouping but mobile I do.

The drafts feature is on both and can't be disabled.

Both of them break habits of where my channels are. It is terrible UX.

The "threads" feature on the sidebar allows you to reply to a thread but if
you get a counterreply you need to click to see it. A better flow can be found
if you click the channel name on top of the thread -- there's no indication
like a timestamp or anything this jumps you to the thread in the channel --
and then click the thread link in-channel and then answer in the sidebar --
now the conversation flows without further clicks. Do I need to mention how
terrible UX this is?

~~~
mkobit
I agree that the usability has been declining.

The threads feature is pretty close to useful, but it still buries information
and it isn't clear to other users in a channel when a thread becomes "live"
again unless they explicitly follow the thread or make a comment. Both of
those actions require excessive clicking on the desktop client (at least for
Ubuntu).

The most frustrating part for me is that keyboard navigation for threads is
nonexistent, and it forces you to weave in and out with your mouse.

------
gumby
Maybe now they have some money they can finally afford make video chat work on
mobile.

We ended up switching to zoom for video chat because it worked on phones as
well as computers and handled slow connections (US<->Australia) much better
than Slack's electron chat.

~~~
enonevets
I believe they announced a partnership with Zoom rather than competing against
them.

------
samstave
Slack should make a phone/device.

The fb foray into a phone market with that device was an utter disaster and a
joke.

The fb phone basically introduced one “feature” ‘the circle profile pic’ and
the physical phone was chintsy and lame....

Go back in time to the danger device. The hiptop was cool, and all, but even
then there was a miss. Regardless of the fact that danger became android...
there was still a miss.

We beed a messaging only platform device.

This need has not been solved.

If a slack-first device existed where i have topical channels for things and
branch channels, but i can dm and pm and mm people.... thats the device i
want.

Just give me a slack-first os on a device and ill be ok.

------
duxup
>net loss of nearly $139 million

Even that seems like a lot to spend, and that is just the loss...

I wonder where the money goes.

Granted it is a big impressive product but still it would be interesting to
track expenses for a company as they approach unicorn status.

~~~
trimbo
> I wonder where the money goes.

Cost of Revenue: $51M

R&D: $157M

Sales & Marketing: $233M

General & Administrative: $112M

[Source: their S-1]

------
founderling
I never used Slack. Given a $16B valuation, I wanted to see what it is about.

But Slack seems to actively prevent me from using it on Safari on my iPad.

It keeps trying to make me install their app.

Is there a way to try their web interface it on an iPad?

------
dr_dshiv
I hope this gives Stewart the resources to build his next amazing game.

------
biztos
I like the human story: Stewart Butterfield co-creates Flickr, revolutionizing
online photo sharing; sells it for what at the time was "real money" but
quickly discovers he could have held out for a whole lot more; burns through
some VC failing at games; and then has that Eureka! moment when he realizes
the Enterprise will eat any damn thing you feed it, and he hatches his plan to
join the nine-zeroes club he missed out on in 2005, software quality be
damned!

~~~
orcdork
It's like software quality is sometimes irrelevant to monetary success or
something.

------
inputcoffee
These declarations of valuation should be followed by a little note explaining
what multiple of earnings (or, failing that, sales) this represents, and how
fast it is growing.

Is that high? Low? about right?

Well, it depends if Slack made $100 million in sales and is flat, or if it did
$2B in sales and is doubling every year.

(I assume that it doesn't have earnings because its still growing and plowing
all that money back into the business)

------
trollied
Awesome. Now their developers will be able to afford the new Mac Pro, with
1.5Tb of RAM, just so that they can run the Slack client! :-)

------
ddlutz
So they are worth $1,600 per user? I don't understand how that is possible at
all.

~~~
nwallin
My company is in the middle of switching from Slack to Microsoft teams. The
water cooler talk is that we're paying Slack $1000-$2500 per year per user.

It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games.
Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales.

I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that
we're paying that much, tbh.

~~~
ec109685
Slack is nowhere near 1000 a user.

~~~
jazzyjackson
Well they work out their own deals per business. Their standard rate is
180$/user/year (without pay-up-front discounts) but that doesn't include SSO
or terabyte storage per user. I'd be curious to know what add-ons a corp might
stretch the budget for, I can't find details for what they charge for SLA

------
pcurve
Even after nice runup in recent months, Atlassian with its diverse portfolio
of products is only worth $32B.

Which one is overvalued?

~~~
iamtheworstdev
Probably Atlassian. It's not the quantity of products so much as the desire to
use them and their establishment as _the_ product to use for a given purpose.
Slack doesn't have that many competitors that are as useful. Whereas Atlassian
has a lot of products no one has ever heard of and a lot of competitors other
people have heard of.

------
thallavajhula
For those curious, their symbol is $WORK

~~~
partingshots
Stealing WeWork’s thunder... A smart move, though perhaps a little painful for
all the existing plans the WeWork marketing department had.

~~~
zild3d
WeWork is rebranding as "The We Company", so the word WORK is probably not
their #1 choice

[https://www.fastcompany.com/90289512/exclusive-wework-to-
reb...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90289512/exclusive-wework-to-rebrand-to-
the-we-company-in-wake-of-disappointing-funding-news)

~~~
lallysingh
That's terrible.

------
tim333
CNBC's interview with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield ahead of direct listing:

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Stewart+Butterf...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Stewart+Butterfield%2C+Slack)

------
luckie
With all these IPOs coming to market at nearly 50-60 times their earnings
remind me of the dot com era. Bond yields are inverting just like before the
previous crash in 2008. I see another wealth transfer on the horizon. The
smart money is securing the bag.

------
matchbok
Crazy. I can't stand the software.

Experiment for slack fans: Start talking about something in a channel with ~20
people. Then ask a friend to ask _another_ question in the same channel. What
happens? A mess. You now have 2 conversations modeled with a single stream of
single-line messages, with no context. One someone starts a conversation in a
channel every single other user in that channel now has to wait. (or risk
being pushed up past the fold, which people never scroll to)

Chat just isn't how work gets done. Or how knowledge is transferred and, most
importantly, retained.

~~~
garrett_oh
Isn’t this what threads are for?

~~~
mamurphy
I've only used discord -- do threads exist on slack? Or is GP right and lack
of threads is a major downfall of chat apps, including slack?

~~~
garrett_oh
Slack does have threads. Everyone at my company is quick to remind those who
don’t use them.

~~~
kbyatnal
Slack threads feel very much like an afterthought though. They never get used
at my company (and for good reason).

------
neumann
Does that mean Zulip is worth $16B? Cos it is awesome and self-hostable if you
want it to be.

~~~
theturtletalks
Rocket.chat and Mattermost are also great open source alternatives. I was
surprised I couldn't find an open source plugin for live chat with Slack.
Rocket.chat has that built-in and I host it on a VPS.

------
popotamonga
Congrats and all. But the app still sucks. Since last update, on windows,
randomly quits but leaves an invisible process behing consuming 25% cpu.
Changing organizations the first time in the day takes ages (imagine when you
have a dozen).

------
amelius
I think they have to thank Google for that one, i.e. for completely messing up
hangouts.

------
jfoster
One aspect of many SaaS companies that I am concerned about is their exposure
to economic downturns. Slack charges on a per-user basis, so if their average
customer reduces their workforce by 10%, Slack's revenue reduces by 10%.

------
warp_factor
Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will
be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history.

\- They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work
culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.

\- They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed
app terribly written in JS.

\- They managed to make a lot of people absolute convinced advocate of Slack
so that a lot of hyped startups have now to use Slack de facto or risk mutiny
and have people create Slack channels on behalf of the company without any
oversight.

So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. I'm
convinced that we will see Slack retrospectively as something that destroyed
productivity. I will agree that Slack can be useful when used correctly but I
never saw a place that used it without it becoming that "attention driven"
growing monster.

~~~
yzmtf2008
> _So yeah I don 't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this._

While I understand where your complaints are coming from, I encourage you to
think about the fact that _so many_ companies are "falling" for them.

You and I might care about disturbances, "attention driven" work culture, open
protocols, etc., but not everyone is a software engineer. The world is bigger
than that. Clearly, _some people_ quite enjoy Slack. I'm not saying it's the
most optimal product, but perhaps being optimal is not as important as it
seems.

~~~
Barrin92
Many people enjoy candy too, doesn't mean it's good for you. Not everyone is a
software engineer, but everyone has limited attention.

Slack's chat nature as the OP points out favours instant messaging over
batching up replies, which, like many bad habits, appeals to the reward
portion of our brain but is genuinely unhelpful in structuring work. There's a
reasonable (and increasing amount) of evidence that multitasking and context
switching can lower your working IQ by 10 to 15 points. Deep Work by Cal
Newport does a good job of going into the detrimental affects that distraction
from workflows has on people.

~~~
warp_factor
you put it better than I did in my initial post. They managed to hack that
reward part of the brain with immediate interaction at the expense of deep
meaningful work that require long periods of reflection before producing
anything.

------
buboard
I wonder how startups come up with valuations. In this climate it seems the
market is ready to fill in any valuation and convince itself that it was the
right one. Seems like they could easily have gone higher

------
CriticalCathed
That's incredibly overvalued for a glorified chat client.

------
dfischer
Just moved to Workplace by Facebook from Slack. Love it. Async communication
via posts is way better than incentivized real-time for everything.

edit: lol, this is downvoted? nice.

~~~
whenchamenia
I am not sure exchanging one walled garden for an even higher walled garden is
good practice.

~~~
dfischer
Everything is a walled garden, if you're that paranoid just pipe everything
into your own DB through API capture.

------
r32a_
Slack can eat into Zoom very easily. Massive room for growth

~~~
chime
Zoom works perfectly every single time. I've managed to make Slack's audio
call feature work only rarely. I wish Slack had decent shared whiteboard,
screenshare, and audio/video conferencing but that is a hard problem and they
are currently not able to deliver. Zoom does flawlessly.

------
harry8
So given a required rate of return of 5% - $16B is how much you would pay for
consistent risk free, net inbound cash flows of $800m per year, in perpetuity.

One way of getting that would be 800m users generating _profit_ after expenses
of $1 each every year.

This is a chat app that is completely and totally replaceable with irc. No
really it is. $800m per year in clear profit.

Is that really feasible in any way? How? What's the bait and switch here?
(With facebrick it was the surveillance nobody knowingly agreed to. Is there
something like that here?) Can anyone do a back of the envelope calculation to
make this price make sense?

------
lone_haxx0r
> Forrester analyst Michael Facemire says it's hard for people to understand
> why the platform is more useful than other chat applications without trying
> it for themselves.

It isn't.

I know Slack probably needs to justify its valuation in front of some people,
but Slack is not different from Facebook and Instagram in this regard: They
offer nothing unique or technologically superior. The whole point of their
business is hoarding users to the point that it's the "default" app in their
given context.

I'm not saying it's bad. If they didn't do it, someone else would have done it
anyway.

~~~
luckylion
Eh, maybe I'm in the minority here, but I've been forced to work on MS teams
for a project and it's atrocious compared to Slack. Not to mention the lack of
a client for linux, their web app doesn't work in chromium for no reason (it
does in chrome), and the UX is just shit.

Slack _just works_ and their UI/UX is on point, everything is intuitive. Their
client is slow and eats RAM, but I totally see that it's more useful than
other chat applications.

~~~
rightbyte
MS Teams works well enought for me at work. All I want is having a chat window
with the old messages on top to be able to send copy pasted variable names and
chat abit.

Skype for Business doesn't save the conversation and is useless (it mails it
to you ...), for example.

------
sandGorgon
It is interesting to remember that slack was built as an outsourced product in
its early days.

------
quickthrower2
Well done! :aussie_conga_parrot:

------
noja
Slack made minus 139 million dollars profit. They clearly deserve a higher
valuation.

------
Alrijlqanturis
This is one the best news in years and congrats for them!

------
fnord77
$16B on $400m of revenue? Is this high or not too bad?

------
peternicky
Slack macOS application is without question the worst performing software I
use. Launching slack causes my cpu usage to skyrocket to 100% for 5 or so
seconds.

------
ryanmarsh
I shouldn’t have turned down that offer.

------
spookybones
Is anyone here buying shares?

------
scarface74
They will be “successful” once they become profitable. Until then, they still
haven’t proven that they have a business model where they can charge customers
enough to cover expenses.

~~~
markmark
They could be profitable tomorrow by decreasing their advertising spend. Their
current customers are absolutely profitable, they're just choosing to use some
of that money investors are throwing at them to keep growing.

~~~
scarface74
You’re making the assumption that they have no churn and that they don’t need
to acquire new customers.

------
hkt
Goodness me, can I IPO off the back of an electron app too?

------
xmichael999
It's a web based IRC client, I don't get it...

------
mamon
Venture capitalists are cashing their investments by IPOs - sure sign that the
next financial crisis is starting soon :) Dotcom Bubble 2.0 is ready to burst.

EDIT: I do not imply that venture capitalists poses some insider knowledge. It
is not necessary. It's just the fact that when bullshit companies with
bullshit product, that generate losses instead of profit get valued at $16B
(other recent examples include Lyft and Uber) it means that economy is in
crazy state, and it does not take much to induce panic. My guess is one of
these unicorns will fill for bankruptcy soon, thus pushing the market over the
edge.

~~~
sambroner
I keep hearing this take!

Yet, I have no real evidence that points me to its truth. The thinking seems
to be predicated on VCs having inside knowledge or excellent speculative
skills. That might be true, but presumably they're not the only strong
speculators.

Are we seeing other major players move out of tech? We're certainly not seeing
massive liquidation in general.

------
durdleturtle
I love the software, though this kind of feels like the Dot Com bubble all
over again.

~~~
patio11
I would encourage people to read the Pets.com 10-Q to understand what the dot
com bubble was like from a corporate finance perspective, because there are
deeper lessons than "Some companies with substantial Internet operations
IPOed."

[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100683/000089161800...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100683/000089161800004394/e10-q.txt)

Pets.com paid $10.5M for pet food then sold it for $8.7M, while needing $23M
to keep the lights on that quarter.

Compare to
[https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/](https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/)
:

Slack, unsurprisingly because it sells software, has positive gross margins
rather than negative gross margins; they're healthy at ~80%. They appear to be
able to turn $1 of sales and marketing spend in Year 1 into > $1 of software
revenue in year 2. Their churn rate on a dollar basis is 43%. Excuse me, -43%;
a cohort of SaaS customers paying $100M in year 1 will pay $143M in year 2 due
to growth in number of seats more than offsetting churning accounts.

There is no price at which a rational person should want to own Pets.com.
There is, very clearly, a price at which a rational person should want to own
Slack.

~~~
tantalor
> a price at which a rational person...

This price is not that.

------
sureaboutthis
I hear people mention Slack once in a while on various forums but I have no
clue what it is. I do not know anyone who uses it so it's not something I, or
anyone I know, feels a need for--otherwise we would be searching it out. And
therein lies a problem. $16B for something few people need or want? I guess I
have to look up Slack and see what it is.

EDIT: So I looked it up and it looks like something useful for a lot of remote
workers that need constant, instant contact with people working on the same
stuff at the same time. To me that's a pretty niche market. If I thought the
phone or email wasn't good enough, I might pay $5/month for such a service.
But irc works pretty good still today.

IRC isn't worth $16B

~~~
Kudos
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.

~~~
sureaboutthis
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 I know. A small space but the same people
have heard of and use Coke, Microsoft and Google.

~~~
mbloomfield
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.

------
AznHisoka
Is 16B really too high of a valuation when Atlassian is double the market cap
at 32B? Both have similar products (collaboration/productivity) and are
extremely sticky.

~~~
theturtletalks
Atlassian has a wider suite of products. I would say HipChat is the Slack
alternative. Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello. And Atlassian
is more developer centric whereas Slack is monetizing enterprise users.

~~~
cycrutchfield
HipChat is awful, and only an alternative in a very charitable sense of that
word.

> Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello.

And thank goodness for that, because those are awful as well.

~~~
firecall
Trello is a decent product! (but not created by Atlassian)

Jira I've always hated... gawd. Just something about the way it does thing...
so complicated. Hated that product.

BitBucket is what it is - almost never used the web interface.

Confluence is their other product... also not great and just a bit annoying to
use for some reason.

------
baybal2
It makes no sense for me. It's just a web frontend on top of an irc chat. $16B
for that is a complete insanity.

This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product,
with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst
saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era

At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from
ads sales

~~~
jensvdh
What a complete nonsensical comment. Is Facebook just a frontend on top of a
user DB?

~~~
tantalor
Nailed it

~~~
Spivak
Is MySQL just a frontend on a filesystem?

~~~
colechristensen
Remove the pejorative 'just' and the answer is an obvious uncontroversial yes.

MySQL is a nicer alternative to managing really big CSV flat files on a
filesystem.

Facebook is an RSS, address book, message share.

Etc.

~~~
paxys
Sure but if you keep following that analogy then nothing is worth anything

~~~
colechristensen
I mean remove the value judgement.

>nothing is worth anything

Very zen, worth rethinking the value of this statement too.

Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you better get to the
real quality differences.

Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you start conversations
about the depth of a thing instead of emotional discussions defending your
positions.

