Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by mkhalil | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

mkhalil

For $200M ARR, in a non-fictional world I may have it as low as 600M valuation and as high $1.2b depending on growth.

But in this world, it's valued @ 5B. The tech world (bubble) is amazing.

Businesses are now being appraised like houses: "Comparable businesses were just bought for X dollars".

At the end of the day the valuations don't rely on businesses bottom line. They are based on two factors:

- How much Google, Apple, etc. MIGHT buy them for in the future.

- How much investors THINK Google, Apple, etc. would buy them today for.

Speculative markets have never failed us. /s

View on HN

The 'existential' issue with Slack, is not their growth rate or multiples ...

It's the fact that they don't necessarily have 'vendor lock in' - and substitution is easy. And it's an easy thing to copy.

It's designed for small teams, and small teams can switch to the 'next, cool thing' in a heartbeat.

At the end of the day it's just chat. That's it. There's nary anything special about it. They did a good job of it.

That said, brands to have sticking power, and if there is no reason to change then why?

They have some new MS execs, who might teach them the ways of 'sinking their claws in' :) and becoming incumbent.

I should add, the larger the company (even with small teams), the bigger the switching costs. After about 500 people, IT kind of becomes 'detached' from the people, and doing anything on one's own becomes harder, so tech becomes entrenched.

This company is the next 'IPO pony' the VC's are building up, hoping to push onto markets at high valuation to get a big bang.

To add: it's 'Softbank'. They have so much money to invest ... they are looser with their cash I believe.

But they do have vendor lockin... in that the switching costs are high. E.g. CRM, Access Control, Database, etc. Once big enterprise customers integrate you into their workflow, it takes a long time to get unseated.

I think most deployments aren't tightly integrated into CRM etc.. But I don't have the figures to back it up.

I totally agree with you, but I'm pretty impressed they got to 200m ARR at all. I guess marketing is a pretty powerful force when you have so much more money than your competitors.

I wonder if they can use this money to build an actual product edge, maybe with search.

If you think there's no lock-in I don't know if you understand what's going on here fully. Slack has lock-in from day one: as soon as people use it, it's hard to move away. We're an organization of 50 people and ripping out Slack, changing user habits and even getting all of our data out of there would be a _massive_ pain – so we'll never do it. This absolutely discounts how high the cost to your employees of continually switching tools is.

That people use it and may like it, is not really 'lock in'.

Ultimately, it's an easy-to-reproduce experience, and there will be/are competitors offering 'the same thing' - and so there will be price competition.

If you want to 'switch to an alternative' it would be a disruption, not a 'massive pain'. Your 'old chats' are not that valuable.

If Slack was integrated into other systems - or integrated with partners, customers etc. - that is 'lock in'.

FYI - It may very well be the 'next cool things' comes along, and you find small teams 'just using that cool thing' already.

Finally I would say that Slack is not even that optimal - there is a lot of 'noise' in those channels, and the value add I believe is not that high.

I consult for startups sometimes, they put me on Slack and it's total noise. I ask to just use email, and it works.

I think 'best practice' is not in a tool, it's in behaviour.

Email, used properly, with the help of a simple chat app for teams, can work just fine.

> If you want to 'switch to an alternative' it would be a disruption, not a 'massive pain'. Your 'old chats' are not that valuable

This is the definition of lock-in. Switching would be a disruption so you don't do it. I'm locked into Gmail. There are lots of competing products, but everyone knows my Gmail address and all my old emails are on it. I don't bother exploring switching because I know it will be a disruption.

I disagree your definition of what 'lock in' is.

All new technologies and process imply some degree of disruption.

'Lock in' is existential disruption.

+ You wrote your entire app in .NET - that's lock in. Changing it means gambling the whole company.

+ You went Oracle/SQL because of regulatory requirements - your app is wrapped around SQL, you have SQL/Oracle exports on board, you're not going to change that.

+ SAP - your whole company is wrapped around it, it's integrated with a dozen other systems.

+ You went Cisco - it really only interfaces with other Cisco gear. Lock in.

Slack is a 'chat app'. It's not that big a deal to switch.

If Slack evaporated tomorrow - one could switch to an alternative instantly. Teams would figure out a new protocol for communicating instantly. It's just chat.

There's a massive amount of potential lock in on the integrations side. How your pagers fire, how code deploys rollout, etc

> Slack is a 'chat app'. It's not that big a deal to switch.

You're over-constraining lock-in to its technical factors. Facebook has lock-in for totally non-technical reasons. These are equally, if not sometimes more, powerful than technical lock-in.

Lock-in means high switching costs. If it's more disruptive to switch than you could hope to gain from switching, you won't bother even contemplating switching and are, again by definition, locked in.

Your old chats might not be valuable for you, but in many companies, it has become de-facto documentation. People get questions answered, and it never makes it to the wiki.

As far as I know you can exgest your data & close the team -- what's the issue with ripping it out again? :)

3x revenue for a SaaS business that is probably growing at 100% yoy makes no sense. I have no idea why people continue to cite this. Even public SaaS companies aren't getting valuations so low.

I agree. 8-12x ARR seems to be the standard multiplier for valuation of a SaaS startup. This is also growing ~100% YoY at this scale. That being said, 25x seems very bullish. Even 20x kind of jumps off the page to me. Keep in mind, it's also the SaaS darling in the valley right now, so it's gonna get a bump.

The service is very cheap and easy to replace, so such valuation makes sense actually. Do you really expect Slack to bring in 10x more business than it has now?

That's not what a 10X multiple implies

How can you put a limit on their market cap without understanding their growth rate?

Related recent post by Fred Wilson of AVC blog:

Some Thoughts On Burn Rates:

http://avc.com/2017/09/some-thoughts-on-burn-rate

Reply on news.ycombinator.com