Salesforce buys word processing app Quip for $750M | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce buys word processing app Quip for $750M

techcrunch.com

272 pointsrhc2104175 comments

Mark Benioff, Sales Force CEO, personally invested in the original venture round that raised $15M [1]. Assuming that round set a $75M valuation, it implies M.Benioff made at least a 10X with this investment.

I'd assume boards are diligent when it comes to potential conflicts of interest and the $750M valuation is justifiable. But I don't know that for a fact. Does anyone have insight on how boards deal might deal with this scenario ?

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/quip/investors

edit: grammar

Usually, you would have the transaction approved (or rejected) by the disinterested members of the board (i.e. the directors with no conflicts of interest).

Suppose the conflicted interest on the board has majority share - would they still sit out on the vote?

Not sitting out opens you up to lawsuits. But, a lot of sketchy crap goes on.

Yes, what they're looking for is a majority (or 2/3 or whatever threshold is called for in the bylaws) of the disinterested directors.

If there are no disinterested directors, or it's something like 5 out of 6 directors are conflicted and the 1 director isn't comfortable going it alone, then the company might ask for approval of a majority of the non-conflicted shareholders. This isn't strictly required I think, but it's considered the safe thing to do.

Yup, something similar happened with the Tesla/SolarCity acquisition: "Mr. Musk said Monday he wasn’t involved in the decision making about the valuation of the purchase." [1]

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-and-solarcity-agree-to-2-6...

How does it work when Person A,B & C equally owns Company X which has cash reserves of 10m and liabilities of 10m

Person A & B also own Company Y.

Company X buys out Company Y for 5m which later leads to bankruptcy of Company X with creditors left holding the can.

How is conflict of interest treated here? What if Person C also has equal shares in Company Y. Is Company X debarred from buying Company Y. Can creditors sue Company X directors ?

This case may be relevant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Henry Ford, in his 3rd attempt at starting a car company, began what we know as Ford Motor today. His previous two ventures had failed; the first was run by the Leland team and renamed Cadillac; the second dissolved; the third made cars using Dodge Brothers engines, transmissions and differentials. According to "Wheels for the World" by Brinkley, the 3rd company of Ford's had run up quite a debt to the Dodge Brothers while getting the Model T going. Henry cut them in as shareholders in order to pay off his parts bill. Once it was a sales hit, Henry Ford resented giving the Dodge Brothers such a high percentage of the profits and did not want to purchase the drivetrain from them anymore. He started manufacturing his own drivetrains to cut them out of the picture.

So there is a lot of case history built upon Dodge V Ford, and the actual story is a fascinating thing to compare to modern day Silicon Valley.

My main takeaway from reading "Wheels for the World" by Brinkley was the similarity between the tech boom and the auto boom in the early 1900s. Many startups, a few succeed, and then consolidation as the industry matures - Microsoft acquires LinkedIn, Facebook buys WhatsApp, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Wheels-World-Company-Century-Progress...

that increase in value is peanuts compared to Benioff's net worth of 4.2 billion https://www.google.com/?ion=1&espv=2#q=benioff%20net%20worth

Irrelevant. On a personal level, he didn't get to his current net worth by not seeking out lucrative deals. It's also irrelevant from the legal perspective (see Martha Stewart).

Martha Stewart went to jail for lying about something. Also, don't confuse strict liability torts with those that require negligence or intent to harm. But certainly if a strict liability statute _is_ violated, you're right that it doesn't matter if it was "just a little bit".

Good point and observation. In this particular case, it is moot since Benioff is above doing any side-deals to put more money into his kitty. I would certainly suspect a VC on a public company board and the company buying the start-up VC invested in. Lots of examples like that.

> In this particular case, it is moot since Benioff is above doing any side-deals to put more money into his kitty.

What makes you say this?

How is it moot? on the Salesforce side Salesforce is giving Benioff personally a huge exit with shareholder money.

On the Quip side he will recuse himself from the final decision, but of course he had insider info, and can offer a lot of reasons board, management might not want to look for a higher.

Seems like a nice exit, but seems foolish to pretend conflicts don't exist. In fact, like someone said "no conflict, no interest."

Oh! Sorry for the confusion. Conflicts do exist. I am was speaking purely from the point of view of Benioff pulling of something questionable with the express intention of putting in more money in his kitty or do good for his investments opportunistically. I was saying Benioff is beyond that. Legally speaking, he will have to tread this carefully, and show that he didn't shirk his fiduciary duty as a board member and CEO while making this deal.

The single most important thing in conflicts of interest is up front disclosure. If you let everyone know what's going on, there is rarely an issue. (This is what ultimately brought down the CEO of LendingClub [0])

One challenge is we never see the instances where boards shoot down pet M&A projects, because those discussions happen behind closed doors without a merger announcement.

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/lendingclub-ceo-resigns-over-sal...

This is a duty of loyalty issue. When there is a board decision and a conflict of interest arises (like in this circumstance) a court would look at whether the transaction was fair to the company and shareholders to determine if there has been a breach of fiduciary duties. Generally, a board needs to make sure that the deal was both procedurally fair (voted on and approved by disinterested board members, special committees, etc...) and substantively fair (fair dealing, fair price). There is a ton of case law that fills in all the cracks as to what procedurally fair and substantively fair actually mean but that's a high level overview.

When Oracle bought NetSuite there was a special committee put together to handle all the negotiations exactly because of Larry Ellison's personal investment into NetSuite.

There needs to be a thread on "newish online tools that everyone is starting to depend on or love" because I had never even heard of this domain/product until this news.

Apparently, neither did the Quip toothbrush people.

How is Quip better than good old Google Docs?

EDIT: Just looking at it, it looks very reminiscent of Apache Wave, which I was (unfortunately) a fan of. I wonder if it was inspired by it?

EDIT 2: It seems that Quip, unlike Google Docs, is end to end encrypted, which makes it possible to use on corporate intranets that normally forbid tools like Google Docs for security reasons. Hrm.

EDIT 3: Might as well plug the newest thing _I_'ve heard of. https://discordapp.com/ is a great voice chat client, intended for gaming but surely useful for productive ends. It's Erlang-backed, as well. Seems to have great connection quality and is just a nice, fun app.

That's basically Product Hunt

Fair enough, I don't visit that site enough.

I'd like something that doesn't show apps when they are brand new, but features ones that stand the test of (a little bit of) time and have proven useful beyond the initial launch phase.

Maybe it's just me getting older...

Product Gather ? :)

Seriously, there are several sites that review apps, actually way too many of them.

One I've found myself using a few times is StackShare - http://stackshare.io/ . It's lacking ot the "review" side though.

Just curious, in what way does Google docs not have "end to end" encryption?

It's HTTPS to them, then it's "inside their systems in some unknown form", then it's HTTPS to whoever else looks at it.

Basically, there's nothing preventing Google themselves from looking at your Docs data in cleartext. And that's bad for corps who want total privacy.

I think it is worth pointing out that 1) you have no idea what Quip does with the data once it gets past their web server 2) there is no mention of "end to end" in Quip's security document https://quip.com/ABbYAZsD8nbt

Yeah I didn't get his comment either. I read their security document. They use SSL to encrypt traffic in transit. That is all. It's not encrypted at rest or in any other fashion. Big deal almost everything is SSL these days during transit the big sales point that catches MY eye are products that encrypt your data at rest like tarsnap, where no one, including the state can access it. THAT is the only products I will use or trust. These guys mine your data just like Google. Don't kid yourself.

While you're right to be suspicious — of any hosted product, really, especially biz intel things like this and Slack — I think you got ahead of yourself in the last couple of sentences. A does not necessarily imply B there. (I'm not kidding myself.)

Answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12207328 but in short, you're correct, I made a bad assumption.

You can run Quip on premises, and it's functional without an Internet connection. So if the security picture matters that much there is an option (priced rather well, too).

There are a number of "shadow IT" single-admin Quip instances popping up both in systems I'm aware of and those I hear about from other folks, so I'm guessing it's easy to administer. I know it works without Internet connectivity because I saw someone install it in an environment that intentionally has no access.

I've always wanted Google Docs on prem so if Quip is it, that's interesting in itself especially for the security reasons. But, Google has incredibly stringent controls around user data after a particular press-involved incident involving an SRE, so while the paranoia of possibilities is well-founded, in practice they'd need a damned good reason (like a critical failure in the product) to even look. They can, and do, walk employees for getting this stuff wrong.

So theoretically, yes (good security mind), practically, not likely.

Thanks for pointing out it can be run locally. That's a win IMO.

What was the Google incident?

David Barksdale. To be clear, though, if one squints he did leave a positive legacy in many more forms and technical barriers on the way to a log entry. Not all him, but a lot.

Good lesson to learn for all of us with administrator access, too, about not even trusting inside folks. The DBIR is compelling here.

You're right. I read too much into the "Security/Privacy" section of their website.

So what's the real selling point, then? Like I said it seems like a hybrid of Google Docs and Google Wave.

That's essentially exactly what it is. Our team got a demo from them trying to determine the best tool for our use-case and we simply couldn't justify it over google docs for how we do things, especially since we were already setup on the google apps platform for our domain.

Data at rest is not guaranteed to be encrypted.

The documents are still human readable when I edit them. I am left to assume that in quip, you edit the raw ciphertext manually.

I recommended using discord in order to do voicechat with the team I'm on. Most other teams use something like talky.io or appear.in.

Give me an application anyday.

I think it's a pretty well-done app!

(Since you asked for it...) We've been working on something similar at Nylas, trying to build next-gen email. Lots of our users also use Quip, plus our app is open source. https://nylas.com/

Thanks for sharing that link! No mention of encryption or security on the features page is what personally turns me away. You don't even mention security :(

This is what frightens me in 2016. Apps are being developed where security is not the primary constraint. After everything we've learned about warrantless wiretapping, the NSA collecting everything, etc it's like nothing will wake some people up that they need to adjust to the new paradigm that security MUST be the primary constraint. Sigh.

https://nylas.com/security/ (buried under the More menu)

Thanks! I saw that after more digging. It still should be under features IMO. And they say in "Level 2" security data is encrypted at rest. Who holds the keys? They should make that clear. It should only be trusted if the end user holds the keys.

This subthread is quite offtopic now, but I'm a happy Nylas pro user (and something of an email client nerd). Keep up the great work!

Definitely worth a look for those who haven't heard of it before.

Thanks for the kind words! :) Feel free to send me any feedback you have. (I'm one of the co-founders.)

I don't see anything in their site about end to encryption?

Ah, you're right. Perhaps I read too far into the "Security/Privacy" section here: https://quip.com/about/tour

Preface: My team has been using quip for the past 6 months (and switched from google docs). The value is in the collaboration tools.

Quip has inline comments and document level comments, chat rooms, private chat, and the ability to tag people and documents anywhere. It's a really powerful collaboration mechanism especially for remote teams, and cuts down on emails.

It's extremely intuitive for digital natives, but completely turns how one views documents (as static and entirely separate from the comments on them) on it's head. It's less friendly to people who are long time MS Office users.

> Quip has inline comments and document level comments, chat rooms, private chat, and the ability to tag people and documents anywhere.

I think Google Docs has all of the above.

Yea, its a clone with chat stuck on.

I don't like Quip. Too slow. Collaborative editing works much better in Google Docs. Can't do proper headings/subheadings or TOC. Just a few of the issues that jumped out at me.

> Quip has inline comments and document level comments, chat rooms, private chat, and the ability to tag people and documents anywhere. It's a really powerful collaboration mechanism especially for remote teams, and cuts down on emails.

Google Docs has all of this (I've used all of it for the past 5-ish years). Is there something specific Quip does better?

Interesting.

Google Docs seems to cover most of this already, and is free.

The fact that a for-pay competitor to Google Docs (adding in in-context chat and everywhere-tagging) is finding success, is very interesting.

I wonder if there's a market for an end to end encrypted collab tool... all I could find was https://www.crypho.com/ which seems fairly basic.

One reason I prefer Quip over Google Docs is that it simply works a lot better. I have no end of weird issues in Google Docs where input freezes up or drops characters. In their own browser! Quip has been rock solid for me. Their desktop app works well too.

For working in teams I like how well shared document organization works.

I've never had any of these issues you've faced with Docs and I've been using it for over 6 years.

Thinking about this just in terms of product...

There are two real competitors on the market - MS Office, and Google Docs. Office is where it is today through sheer inertia. It's a slow-moving and often terrible product. Google Docs feels like a "free product", with a lot of limitations. The market feels like someone could "Slack" it - walk in with a good enough product and just lay waste to the incumbents very quickly.

The shift to cloud-based tools is happening rapidly, pushed by the ubiquity and quality of mobile devices. Salesforce practically invented this market, and they have incredibly deep hooks into the enterprise (and lucrative enterprise licensing agreements). MS Office feels like a clunky antique hobbling users to their clunky old PCs, but Google Docs isn't going to satisfy the corporate power users who are amazingly productive with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

Mark Benioff is ambitious. This isn't about his RoI for some A round investment. He's already a billionaire. More money is just bouncing the rubble. What's important is he built a company, Salesforce, at the top of the second tier of the software industry. It's important enough to have shaped the industry, and make billions - but it's not Google. It's not Apple. It's not Oracle. And it's not Microsoft. If he wants to break into that tier, he needs to level the company up. Taking over the enterprise productivity app market and consigning Microsoft to the dust bin of history? That might just do it.

And finally... like all large companies, Salesforce may be facing market saturation and a tapering off of growth. It's too big to easily develop breakthrough products in house anymore. Instead, there's growth through acquisition, buying hot startups with the ample buckets of cash you have, to break into new markets.

So maybe, just maybe, this buyout is exactly what it looks like.

Google seemed to decide to stop investing (they bought docs didn't they? But improved for a while). Sun in an earlier era did the same with open office but gave up, mostly. Seeing sustained investment would be good, but there is huge legacy in office software. The real disruption we see is markdown and git, but there might be an intermediate in usability.

(Microsoft are doing pretty well at not leaking revenue)

The killer is sharing via a web browser. No word needed ever.

Office through Office365 has, IMO, left Google Docs behind. It's actually quite a nice product - arguably better than the more recent versions of the desktop clients, for non-power usage.

GoogleDocs hasn't changed appreciably in the ten plus years I've been using it. I get the impression that Office 365 is eroding their solid foothold in education, and I've been seeing enterprises go to Office 365 en masse, mostly for Exchange, but the whole Office suite comes along with it.

> GoogleDocs hasn't changed appreciably in the ten plus years I've been using it

Google Docs went publicly available in 2007 (= 9 years ago); how can you have been a user for 10+ years?

I guess it's only been just under 10 years[1], rather than 10 plus.

[1] http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-announces-goo...

Just scan through the google docs blog. You'll see lots of steady iteration of new features. It gets better and better.

I use it daily and also find the speed and reliability excellent. It feels like they are making great strides behind the scenes in scalability.

I have written 4000 words fully references postgrad essays in google docs.

Google spreadsheets does all my organisations budgeting and planning systems.

> Google spreadsheets does all my organisations budgeting and planning systems.

i suspect this is the #1 use case.... roll-your-own centralized shared ERP with version tracking, permissions, users, etc. it's what we use too, but as we grow we're slowly replacing individual spreadsheets with real/saas tools, but then we're just making new ones for software that doesn't exist yet, so it continues to grow overall.

Have to disagree. Within the last year I tried to get my team to migrate to Office Online and the lag was terrible to the point where you simply can't collaborate on documents together. I have no issue with Office 365 in general, but if you're trying to do online document collaboration, Google Docs is miles better.

Have to agree with this comment. Word Online is bad enough, when you start using Excel or Powerpoint Online it becomes disastrous. I've needed the extra functionality of Excel/Powerpoint over Google Sheets/Slides at times, but 'collaborating' over Office365 was much, much more painful than working individually and recombining sheets like the old days

You clearly haven't used Google Docs in some time. To imply that Google Docs hasn't changed throughout its development span is just plain disingenuous. As for seeing enterprises go to Office 365 en masse I think just the opposite is true. Enterprises aren't going to continue paying these outrageous prices for Office anymore and it's a very easy target for budget cuts.

You seem to be unaware of the fact that Office isn't desktop only any longer. Office 365 is growing like crazy and there's no way Salesforce is going to catch up before the cloud wave blows over. Infact, modernizing and getting office on ever device has been the shtick of Satya since he took over.

I'm fully aware of that. I've used Office 365. It's still tied painfully to its legacy, and Microsoft is in a vulnerable spot, trying to transition the product to the future.

Think like an ambitious CEO for a moment. The dynamic nature of the situation on the ground means that Office - the most successful enterprise monopoly since IBM invented the punchcard - has never been more vulnerable. You can buy a competitor in the space who isn't carrying around a bunch of legacy, whose founder's track record of successful cloud products includes, oh, Facebook. You've already got a monopoly on an enterprise cloud product where Microsoft can't really compete. Same end user base.

Do you grab for that brass ring? Or make excuses why it's impossible?

Viewed through this lens, it looks like a fantastic bet at quite a cheap price. I mean look at the Instagram bet. That was looked at as expensive back then, but now it's considered very very cheap.

It's all up to SalesForce how they handle the acquisition, but the potential is there, as you describe.

You probably haven't used Google Docs in a while. It's much more capable than four years ago in my experience, and does everything I want it to do these days.

I use Google Docs virtually every day, and I'm no power user.

But I know real Office power users in corporate settings. They'd point and laugh. Meanwhile, I'm beating my head against a wall trying to get Google Docs to handle nested lists and tables adequately. It's a crap product, a toy, at least by enterprise standards.

But I know real Office power users in corporate settings. They'd point and laugh.

Does this emperor ever wear clothes? I've heard about these people, only to discover they were "masters" of some truly suboptimal tasks like "track changes" or "paragraph styles".

One word... Excel.

I'm sure there are some wonderful things Excel does that Sheets doesn't, but since I haven't noticed them they don't bother me. One thing that I don't miss about Excel is the 2^16 row limit. Also I seem to recall some difficulties copying and pasting pivot tables, but it's been a few years...

> I'm sure there are some wonderful things Excel does that Sheets doesn't

PowerPivot.

Excel has had a 1 million row limit for a while. I haven't tried Sheets in 2 years but it was unpolished even for simple tasks.

Try it again - it got a major upgrade a while back and it now does everything I ask of it. Including my company's accounts, which have to handle four different currencies and tax reporting regimes. There is a nice python library that allows a script to suck data from our 12 bank accounts daily, do most classification, and update the sheets directly.

They'll be replaced by people who know Python, r. Excel is powerful, but those spreadsheets are difficult to maintain cheaply. It's like coding without any refactoring tools.

The true skill is organization, imho. Power users are replaceable as tech advances.

Not for nothing but the only thing I use Word for on a regular basis is contracts. Track changes may be sub-optimal but its a critical tool in this use case.

IANAL. Every time I've been part of a distributed group that has tried to use track changes, we have given up. In some cases that means "keep the language in git and dump it into word (or preferably, pdf) when you absolutely have to", and in others it means "Joe has the master; send him your changes in 'change the first sentence of the fourth paragraph to the following...' form".

Exactly - if Salesforce wants to survive they need to offer a full suite of office productivity apps. Quip seems be a good fit to fill up that hole.

Honestly, I was thinking they will buy Evernote but I guess Evernote has crappier product and Salesforce does not need users: just something quality they can improve on it.

So the question now is: Who is going to buy Evernote?

I have to use Quip every day and I'm dying for Office 365. Quip is actually terrible.

How so?

I'm not fan of Quip (just does not work for us) - but it really does not matter from point of view of Salesforce: they cannot buy Office 365 and MS probably indicated that they will do something to directly attack Salesforce, so they have to do something.

"Office is a terrible product"

Sure, everyone office in the world uses it as software of choice. I wish all software products were that terrible.

There's this silly myth that capitalism produces the best products at the lowest prices. A hard look at successful products is the best argument against that. Get a monopoly, create market barriers to entry that aren't "product quality", and enjoy.

I don't understand this valuation. I've only used Quip a bit but it doesn't seem like an amazing piece of software. Do they have a massive user base? Did they do a fantastic job at enterprise sales? Do they have a lot of recurring revenue?

They've got an all-star team and their product looked pretty awesome to me, although I haven't used it.

What I'm more curious about is whether they integrate with Salesforce? Where do they make sense under the salesforce umbrella?

Regarding Salesforce - they have really trouble with notes and things like that. Quip make sense: if nothing to replace crappy Salesforce notes section with Quip and people using Salesforce will be a little happier.

The price tag of $750M is a little too much for me but I'm anyway not verse in these kind of deals (and I was under impression that Quip is in trouble since I haven't see a lot of people using it).

Quip is great for notes.

yeah but... $750M for notes?

people thought evernote was worth a bit of money at some point

I didn't say it was worth $750M =) but I do love the product and hopefully SF won't muck it up or kill it off.

This makes sense.

1. Talent: As others say, an all star team. I've interacted with some of them as a vendor (Quip is our customer) and know a couple of them as friends of friends, and they have a rockstar team.

2. Integration: This is going to add collaborative document sharing to Salesforce's product line. Much like the Chatter acquisition to beef up their "collaborative, connected customers" story.

3. DATA: Essentially, Quip's metadata is the intra-organization graph of who collaborates with who. While Salesforce needs to be careful how they are going to use it (and definitely need to create the technical infrastructure to take advantage of this data), this is a deep well of customer knowledge that they can parlay into selling other Salesforce products.

Thanks, this is insightful!

Of these I hadn't thought of the data utility, but yeah that's probably pretty useful. However, as you suggested, it's a little hard to take advantage of that without creepiness potentially killing the larger customer relationship.

I think the other 2 are nice, but I'm not sure I buy them. I've used the product and for a rockstar team it was kind of crap. They're trying to build slack-dropbox-googledocs all in one, and it's substantially less capable at each of those tasks than the individual products. Maybe now they'll have the resources to build it out and make it actually good, but I have no idea how such a product in its current state is worth 750M.

Everyone has a star team, you know? Only the best are hired, everywhere.

The data bulletpoint makes the acquisition fit in more storywise with SFDC's recent ML acquisitions (no one asks about the not-recent ones), but I don't know if it justifies the price. I also doubt there will be much integration and would take a bet Quip will be no more in a year. (I'm on the inside but I have no knowledge of this deal, nor do I really care about it to poke around...)

Do they have a massive user base? Did they do a fantastic job at enterprise sales? Do they have a lot of recurring revenue?

Maybe Quip doesn't, but Salesforce certainly does.

Note I don't fully understand the valuation either but it seems like there are definitely synergies here.

I'm not exactly a fan of Salesforce the product but their acquisition strategy seems to be pretty solid. They tend to buy stuff I associate with high quality and good dev teams (Heroku now Quip).

This is an acquisition to get Bret Taylor. I'd expect Salesforce to put him in charge of slowly improving the core salesforce tech stack.

Doesn't seem like a acqui-hire. Is it really worth hundreds of millions to buy someone?

Some individuals, yes.

CEOs are often paid hundreds of millions of dollars, and some VP-level executives at big companies are also worth that kind of money.

Is paid really the same as worth?

What really? I thought CEOs are paid millions, not hundreds-of-millions.

I mean, if they stay at the company for decades, sure it can add up to hundreds-of-millions. But upfront? Sounds like a lot!

Not saying it happened in the case of Quip, but last year Google effectively paid $380M for Diane Greene:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/19/google-buys-bebop-and-name...

Oh interesting. Nice info.

It is a little different because the bulk of their compensation is often in shares or options to buy shares. These are often structured in a way such that they are "free" money. If you have a company with a hundred million shares outstanding, you can make 500,000 new shares and only dilute the total value of the company a little but still add to an employee's net worth quite a bit.

Hmm. By what mechanism will Taylor be able to net billions of dollars to Salesforce in the next few years?

Well he helped build google maps. That's a decent example of how small teams can create large value over enough time.

Another example: the original tablet at Apple was built by one guy. Sharp people can focus on good investments and generate disproportional returns, even if they didn't do the work directly.

The right person is. How much was Steve Jobs worth to Apple?

Bret is one of the most outrageously talented and productive people I've ever worked with. In a high-leverage position, such a person can be extremely valuable.

Why not just hire him directly? Hey, come work for us. Here, salary of $20/mil a year, guaranteed for the next 5 years.

Theoretically, as the CEO of Quip, he has some interest in helping his coworkers cash out too.

Obviously the rest of the team is likely to be very talented as well. Also, he's the founder, which includes a responsibility to act in the best interest of the company (plus $20M/yr would be much less money).

Also, someone like Bret is very unlikely to be attracted by purely monetary gain like a $20/mil year salary(or even $50/mil year.) He probably cares as much, if not more, in being able to achieve some larger goal--which requires building a sort of team he has already built.

Nothing like abandoning a company you built right as it hits its stride.

That's a good question. When Steve came back to Apple through the NeXT acquisition, he didn't come alone. He brought a team of smart devs, and a pretty awesome technology stack (Foundation, AppKit, Objective C).

Now Steve was obviously the lynchpin and you probably couldn't have gotten one without the other, but I wonder hypothetically what the value of those things separated would have been. Steve alone, or team+ip alone. I suspect neither one would have been as valuable as both together.

What size company is Quip? What size company is Salesforce? It doesn't matter how productive you are, how smart you are, or how "anything" you are. You can't beat the bell curve. What matters in the grand scheme of things is how good everyone else around you is. I've never seen smart/productive people last at large companies. The bozo/non-bozo ratio is always too high at big companies.

Yeah. Large companies are lead by idiots. That's why they are so large.

No, they got large because they weren't previously lead by idiots. Then they get large and then they rot.

History is littered with endless examples: HP, IBM, GM, Kodak, Sony, Xerox, Sears, Pan Am, US Steel, Nokia.

Some of them collapsed entirely, some still struggle on, some recovered only to rot again. It's rare that mega corps don't go through some variation of a rot cycle due to the accumulation of poor leaders at the top once they get large enough and far enough away from the original vision and leadership that got them to the top.

You are oversimplifying this to the point where your conclusion is almost completely wrong. There are many factors which contribute to the decline of companies. For example there was an article about Kodak on HN and why it failed. The inertia was too strong in that case. Differences in goals and objectives is another very popular reason.

I understand it's tempting to think your bosses are morons but they rarely are.

So if Kodak leadership was full of geniuses how come it failed? Companies often get large not because of leadership but because they happen to be at the right place at the right time with the right idea. Plenty of people have the right idea but they rarely happen to be at the right place and time.

I pointed you out (sort of) to why Kodak failed. It had MASSIVE facilities with 10s of thousands of employees making industrial chemicals. You cannot snap your fingers and transition to another business model.

Indeed. Why do you think a giant software company is any different? Having incompetent leadership just exasperates the problem. Your assumption was intelligence of leadership somehow mattered and I pointed out you are incorrect. Leadership intelligence doesn't matter as much as people think.

- Leadership at large companies are not morons.

- Why Kodak failed then?

- Kodak failed because of inertia.

- Leadership intelligence doesn't matter.

Do you hear that? That's the sound of the logic chain breaking.

Don't hear it. All I hear is someone that thinks leadership at large companies can make a difference. Oh wait, I did hear a logic chain breaking there. The break was caused by some kind of pre-conceived notions about leaders making a difference.

Can't help you if logic falls on deaf ears.

In hindsight Steve Jobs was worth billions but that was not clear at all at the time he was (re-)hired. Many super bright and previously successful people have failed in their new positions. When you price that risk in, $750M hardly seem like a great deal.

As an ex-SFDC employee, I'd be surprised if Bret is still there in 2 years.

Not that there's anything wrong with it; Salesforce is a great place to work in many ways, but like many big companies they have trouble retaining key employees after acquisitions.

Read the article. It says that Bret and the other cofounder aren't staying. Why comment if you don't even take 5 mins to read...

Did I miss something?

"We understand that Taylor and his co-founder, ex-Googler Kevin Gibbs, will both be staying on post-acquisition."

Salesforce are mad if they think they need to spend three quarters of a billion dollars to get a person. Everyone is replaceable.

If I was a betting man this is salesforce's (necessary) response to the news from Microsoft that they are integrating the dynamics stack with office 365.

How do you see that? It seems like a straightforward shot at biting into office market share at $750MM.

Quip is amazing, I started using it last year when they published a blog post documenting how they build their native Mac app app using a mix of React+cpp[0] and been using it since then, not without issues though [1][2].

[0] https://medium.com/@btaylor/react-with-c-building-the-quip-m... [1] https://twitter.com/bithavoc/status/750419283797237761 [2] https://twitter.com/bithavoc/status/760231521211080704

I'm honestly surprised so many people on HN haven't heard of Quip.

I mean Bret Taylor is a pretty big name, and we've all known that he was working on Quip for a while. There are a bunch of Bay Area companies that use Quip and the Quip team made a big deal about the future of mobile word processing when they first came out.

I'd be less surprised if the general public was unaware, but interesting to see the surprise come from the HN crowd.

Quip talked about how many users they had in a Recode article from Oct 2015 [1]:

> Taylor said Quip has millions of individual users and 30,000 business customers, though not all of those are paying.

So to do some back of a napkin math if they had 15,000 paying customers (50% of their noted business userbase) how much would they make in revenue? I've distributed the numbers across different levels of SaaS monthly bills because most customers will pay for the cheaper packages.

    75% (11250 customers) *  5x users =  $30/m = $337,500/month
    15%  (2250 customers) *  7x users =  $50/m = $112,500/month
    10%  (1500 customers) * 10x users =  $70/m = $105,000/month
    5%    (750 customers) * 25x users = $230/m = $172,500/month
                            Estimated Revenue:   $727,500/month 
                                             or  $8,730,000/year

(these buckets of average users could be much much bigger (100's of users) on the higher end if they have enterprise customers but I'm being purposefully modest)

[1] http://www.recode.net/2015/10/15/11619612/bret-taylors-quip-...

I see I'm not the only one who's never heard of Quip. It seems hard to believe they have so much traction and aren't an HN-household name...

It seems hard to believe they have so much traction and aren't an HN-household name...

I would suggest that, perhaps, "HN household names" and "things lots of people actually use" are not particularly strongly correlated.

I strongly disagree when there are "millions" of users, and the product in question is a web-software startup. The early adopters of these products are very likely to be small, tech-savvy businesses, which is definitely one of the core HN audiences. Not to mention a lot of us just follow software startup news in general...

Yep, I agree with you. Very surprised I haven't heard of this company in the slightest considering someone just bought them for $750m.

It's a collaborative notes and documentation suite. Lots of people use it -- including the company I work for -- but it's not "disruptive", isn't surrounded by legal controversy that I'm aware of, and mostly just delivers value for money. Which makes it the opposite of what gets talked about on HN.

50% of paid customers in a freemium model looks insanely high. 20% would be huge already.

If those numbers are freemium for businesses as well then yes it would be far lower. Most likely 10% conversion. He said 'business customers' though which is confusing. To adjust my numbers,

     10% of 30,000 =  $1,746,000/year
    100% of 30,000 = $17,460,000/year

What matters most will be those conversion rates combined with (potential) growth rates.

Have to use it on a daily basis and coming from libre office, it feels really weak. Especially the table calculations are not good. They got a bit better in the last months, but still feel like a toy :/

Liber office has virtually no realtime collaboration, no mobile, and no web app. It's apples and oranges. Libre office is still going to be better for writing long form, and quip is for pairing (a)sync review and ACL management.

It is difficult to see the role of libre office (or any native only app) in the enterprise for much longer.

I see both as office apps.

This is facesioustly reductive.

True, but when I get told to use this instead of Libre Office, because we can collaborate better with it. Then I think it's natural to miss features.

Definitely.

For those who haven't heard of Quip: one interesting data point is that Facebook uses it internally, since they don't use any Google products. I'm sure countless other companies use it too.

MicroPro, the company behind Wordstar, was the dominant word processing company in 1984. They were the largest software company in the world at the time, with about 25% of the industry. They went public in 1984 for a market cap of $165M. That's $482M in 2016 dollars.

What makes this word processor worth $750M?

For one, the market is a lot bigger. Only 8.2% of all US households had a computer at all in 1984, and only 18.3% of adults aged 18 or above had reported that they used a computer somewhere (either in school, at work or at home) [1].

[1]: https://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/files/1984/p23-155.pdf

But the prices for apps are a lot lower.

In the enterprise market?

Not necessarily. A copy of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2016 is still $150, and Google Apps for work is still $5 or $10 per user per month. Heck, Slack is $6.67 or $12.50 per month per user.

Microsoft Office was $499 to $999 in 2000.[1] And that was promotional pricing.

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/1999/01/07/microsoft-announces-of...

my guess: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Personal_computers_(...

What are the odds of Microsoft buying Salesforce?

Not sure why you were down voted.

I'd say they are becoming lower by the day. Microsoft have announced Dynamics365 and I suspect they will double down on competing with Salesforce now.

Particularly now that Salesforce are competing against office365 with quip.

Salesforce only have a CRM, and even though it is popular they don't offer ERP, financials or any productivity tools.

I think they got greedy when they rejected Microsoft. With oracle buying netsuite (super charging their product dev funds) I think Salesforce will be in a bit of a pickle in a few years time, as they simply won't be able to offer an integrated package to the same level of depth their competitors do.

Microsoft has a long way to go before they can start cannibalizing Salesforce, Dynamics has some perks but customizing it sucks. I managed to start a Salesforce trial, implement a couple custom apps in 48-hours (albiet, with knowledge of Salesforce before hand from my previous job) and within a month got the green-light to roll it out to the ~8 person team in our company that desperately needed a proper CRM to replace the access DB they were using + a couple LOB applications. 80% of this was point-and-click work I could have given to one of our Jr developers if I wasn't scrambling to get a POC ready on the side, and, in fact, most of the day-to-day work on our Salesforce org is done by one of our Jr. devs today.

My experience with customizing Dynamics is extremely poor, I'm a C# developer but the thought of touching that gives me horrors equating to Sharepoint.

I don't have any experience with NetSuite, so I won't say anything about it. Regardless, as long as Salesforce keeps being a great platform for quickly hammering out LOB apps I don't see it going anywhere, our parent company is heavily invested in it and we have doubled our licenses over the past year and are looking at upgrading most of them from the "App Cloud" licenses to full "Service Cloud" licenses to take advantage of the case-management functionality so our teams can have everything under one roof instead of having to go back and forth between email, zendesk, and Salesforce.

Quip is a turd, a common investor of my past startup pushed me hard to try it and I didn't like it one bit. I never understood the hype.

Seems that Facebook makes extensive use of Quip internally even though it's doing the whole Office 360 subscription doohickey.

"An interesting side-note, though: While this deal means Microsoft will use Office 365 for e-mail and calendaring, they probably won't get much use out of Microsoft Word — Facebook uses Quip, a mobile word processor developed by former CTO and current Twitter board member Bret Taylor, for word processing."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-facebook-exec-microsoft-go...