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Comment by phantom_oracle | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting because the valuation is:

- Either driven partly by what Slack is valued at (and then you add the other parts of Atlassian to get its total value)

- It really is this valuable, which would make Slacks billion-dollar + valuation a lot more legit than when people were nay-saying about it

- Just investors throwing money around because money is still 'cheap'

I still think that some savvy retail investors understand the tech market a lot more better now. This company is not burning through cash and shooting for super, super long-term growth (Twitter and it's ilk) so this feels more like a Microsoft listing than a Facebook listing.

Good on them for building something legit and something people would pay for (instead of advertising revenue).

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Slack seems like a great product but here are some interesting facts:

- Atlassian has more than 10x the revenue of Slack[1]

- JIRA and Confluence account for substantial amount of Atlassian's revenue. Two products that don't even compete with Slack[2].

I think Slack is a current silicon valley darling so people love to make this comparison but it doesn't directly compete with Atlassian's core business. It also has an order of magnitude less revenue.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-expects-30-million-reve...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015...

I really like Slack but I think it will be troubled in the short/long term in the same way Dropbox is now. It is innovative but many others will catch up it soon.

It has a great getting started experience and some fun gimmicks but most of the innovation was cloned from Flowdock anyways. What you are seeing is the power of a famous CEO and an awesome marketing engine powered by an experience VC.

And sometimes that's the difference between making a buck, and making a business.

In my experience, HipChat / Jira / Confluence is a nice stack to work with. What advantages does Slack offer over these?

Jira is definitely a pleasure to use. We only just started it a while ago and I'm often pleasantly surprised by the things I can do with it and just how convenient it is to work with. It's quite a change given that we previously used Mantis.

I am not saying that Slack is better/worse than HipChat, I am just referring to its commercial success that I think is related to its UX. I think its success will be in trouble when new or improved offerings appear.

Slack and Dropbox have pretty different business models from my vantage point. Slack entered the market as an enterprise product vs. consumer. Slack was built for collaboration from day 1, so there is some amount of lock in (change management in an organization is tough).

I look at Slack as being more like a hybrid of the best parts of Box + Dropbox... They have the good parts of Box's business model and the UX quality of Dropbox. And fortunately for them, they aren't in a market where the price is driven largely by the cost of the commodity hardware underneath them.

I have been saying for a long time the real target of Slack is Dropbox, since it adds a ton of valuable context around files shared.

Yeah, I imagine they will drive right towards each other. Dropbox is trying to get better at the whole collaboration / enterprise use case. And I have no clue about Slack's plans around document handling, but feels like a natural progression for their product. I don't think they do a great job there right now, but even something as simple as being able to add tags to uploaded documents (as opposed to free-text subject lines) could go a long way.

I don't think it has a single thing to do with Slack... Atlassian's main product is not Hipchat, it's Jira. A product which thousands of large enterprises use and pay a ton for. And has nothing to do with Slack.

It's price to the enterprise is seen as almost zero from their perspective. The other products that solve the same problem cost 10x as much. The entire Atlassian business model was disruptive. While their competitors were focusing on buying steak dinners for the highest exec that their sales team could get in contact with Atlassian products moved organically through the company. Awesome user groups cheap prices and a strong developer ecosystem made them very difficult to compete with.

One of the complications with trying to compete with disruption is that people inside your own company don't want to realize they are being disrupted. You see plenty of "the old plan is failing because we have not put enough time and energy into it".

Is your assumption that Slack validates the possibility that HipChat can be a bigger business? The group collaboration software market is by no means zero-sum at the moment, but I'd still wager that Slack is causing more churn for HipChat than HipChat can replace with new sales.

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