Slack Taps Goldman Sachs to Lead IPO | Hacker News Reader

Slack Taps Goldman Sachs to Lead IPO

reuters.com

103 pointsi0exception107 comments

Fun fact, Goldman built a Slack-like chat service in house that they've spun off into a company called Symphony. It's pitch is that it's more compliance-friendly for heavily regulated orgs like banks. Also, it sucks.

The funny thing about the whole compliance thing is, a lot of traders were using AOL Instant Messenger before it shut down, to the point where I believe Bloomberg Terminal even integrated AIM. Some traders ended up moving to Discord, which is nearly as strange.

What is kind of funny was that it varied by markets: Yahoo Messenger was big in commodities markets, especially oil.

I think if Discord ditched some of the gamer aesthetic (or had a pseudo-internationalizion setting to replace the meme-y loading screens strings with a reminder to turn in my TPS report by Friday) they'd get a lot more use in corporate environments

That's not their market though, and they seem to be quite fine with that. Their latest feature: buy games through the Discord client[0]. They know who they want using their product.

[0] https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001265609...

It's kind of silly though that it's not their market. It would cost them very little to create a brand for Discord-Enterprise that uses the see technology but markets at companies.

I really think they're doing the right thing. It is unfortunate given how universally useful it is as an application, but way too many services and companies try too hard to be all things to all people. Discord has had a single direction and a strong vision, and it's really hard to have that if you just want to be the world's best chat app. (Telegram feels like it tried to do that and well, it really hasn't gone as well as it feels like it could've.)

Splitting it in two is of course possible, but that comes with its own set of caveats in my opinion. Enterprise users have quite a different set of priorities from gamers...

Either way, I've worked at companies that don't know what they want to be, and it frankly sucks for many reasons. Good for Discord to know what they want to be.

I'm not sure if silly is the word here or that I agree. They've found a niche, the reside comfortably in it, and judging from their blog posts: their developers are very happy doing it.

Doesn't seem silly to me if it's working for them.

Are they profitable, though, or are they floating on VC money?

It's okay, Slack sucks too.

Try Mattermost.

Last time I seriously gave it a try (4-6 months ago or so, it was during the last major slack outage for 4-6 hours or whatever it was) it was .. not pleasant to use really. Next on my list is zulip.

It's super performant for me these days.

It literally takes 10-20 seconds to switch between chat windows in Symphony, Slack is bad but not this bad.

Worked in finance (prop trading) and we used slack. There was some collaboration with Slack to get the compliance requirements right (eg. storing all message histories including edits for 7 years in sufficiently backed-up storage as is legally required).

(worked at Goldman)

Despite having this, all the traders just end up using Bloomberg chat. GS tooling often gets in your way more than it helps.

Oh Symphony was nothing like Slack. It was meant to be the Bloomberg IB killer[1]. You see, banks weren't happy paying 20k per user for chat. Turns out that the network effect is a thing and banks suck at building products, all Bloomberg had to do was sell Chat as a product and that was it [2].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/16/symphony-a-messaging-app-b...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83...

I sold hosting to symphony in their earliest days. Before they disclosed who they were they said "money is no object" which is a common thing heard when quoting hosting. When I learned they were backed by GS I laughed...money literally was no object.

Point of symphony was the privacy focus. If you are a bank you could imagine the issue with have all your data in Slack or a Bloomberg chat DB.

I don't think that the security of Bloomberg and Slack are even comparable. The nature of chat in finance requires messages to be stored by a third party by definition since most of the communications occur in group chats and between banks/traders.

What does Slack need to raise capital for? They have their niche and are doing great in it, I don't get why they'd want to be publicly owned with all the headaches that brings. I don't get why a lot of companies do it when they could just as well bootstrap and stay private.

Liquidity for people with stock options?

I don't know anything about their shareholder distribution at this point, so this is all conjecture.

Since they took capital, the funds associated with their prior fundraising rounds ($1.2B total) likely have 10 year horizons. Investors are looking to recoup their investment during that window. Having the company stay private means that they either need to raise a new round to buy out their old investors, or they need to return sufficient profit over a short window (just a few years) that their investors are happy with the dividend.

Not to mention, there are tons of advantages in having access to the public markets. It's definitely a headache and work, but it's not without its benefits.

Sometimes asset owners want to sell the asset and buy something else. There's not much point in investing if you never can take money off the table and spend it.

They already took VC money, going public follows from that, it isn't a decision the founders are really making for themselves.

Here is a VCs thought on going public, for what it is worth: https://avc.com/2016/11/going-public/

My guess is

* liquidity for employees and investors

* access to even greater amounts of capital

* access to capital that might not be as fickle as private investors

They don't. The founders and VCs are exiting by selling their shares to your pension fund.

>Slack is competing against the likes of Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O) Teams, Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google Hangouts Chat and Cisco Systems Inc’s (CSCO.O) Webex Teams in the so-called workplace collaboration market

How is Webex competing with Slack? Slack is for chat-based collaboration with people in your workplace. Webex is for scheduling video calls.

Is there some overlapping use-case of either one that I'm missing?

Slack supports video calling now. My guess is that's what they're referring to.

See Webex Teams.

https://www.webex.com/products/teams/index.html

Webex Teams includes what used to be called Cisco Spark. Spark is a Slack clone.

I worry this will lead to a further reduction in privacy for average users, as Slack is pushed toward "enterprise" features which are basically just giving your boss the ability to read all your private messages.

That said, I think it's naive and foolish to have an expectation of privacy on your work slack. Should you have privacy? Yes, absolutely. Do I expect it? No, not at all.

Why should an employer not be able to read messages that employees send to one another for the purpose of doing their job?

Well if its called a private chat... It's kind of expected that it'd be private.

Slack actually uses the term “Direct Message”, so there’s no textual expectation of privacy.

Perfectly fair question.

I view it much like having a conversation in the hallway or by the watercooler. It would be creepy and weird, and unexpected, to have microphones and cameras all over the office so the boss can record your conversations and eavesdrop whenever they like.

It also screams micro-management if the boss needs to drop in, even if you are just using it "for the purpose of doing [your] job."

I tend to feel that if you trust your employees so little, then you should just fire them. Conversely if my employer trusted me so little, I should probably quit.

Where I would probably make an exception would be if one of the employees filed an HR complaint or something, then I think looking at the existing record would be fine. But, it should be limited in scope to that incident.

I personally do not think it is a right of an employee to have privacy when having a discussion with another employee, over a work medium, about a work related matter.

Just because using the ability to read private messages screams micro-management, it doesn't mean that it's not occasionally necessary to discover instances of harassment or abuse.

Here in Ireland, we have pretty strict legislation around surveillance in the workplace. Any monitoring has to fulfil the three requirements of being necessary, legitimate, and proportional.

It has already been demonstrated that monitoring employee email to ensure that confidential information is not being shared is not consider proportionate (in a normal workplace), so I don't believe that monitoring direct messages in Slack would be lawful here.

That already exists. The CEO of my last company used it to weed out dissidents.

Slack gives your boss the ability to read all your private messages today. They have for a while now.

You probably shouldn't expect privacy in any workplace app, or even when connected to a company network, given how many companies route traffic through proxies that inspect packets for data exfiltration and who knows what else.

This is only partially true (unless it has changed in the last few months). IIRC they have to enable that setting, and it does not apply retroactively. Also, employees will be notified if the switch is off and it is turned on.

But I agree, don't expect any privacy on a company network, with a company machine, and/or on company-paid apps.

True, a company has to enable it, though I wouldn't bet on employees necessarily being notified. Slack's help site page about message export doesn't mention anything about notifying employees on higher tier paid plans (though that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't happen) [1]. Either way, I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that Slack would happily disable that feature if a seven figure deal were on the line.

All that said, it's also not really true that "your boss" can read your private messages, in practice most of the time. Most companies that do this kind of data export just dump it to a warehouse and hold it for safe keeping just in case. Some random director of engineering probably couldn't get access to it unless they were willing to jump through a lot of hoops. Though, Slack's Discovery API does seem to make it easy to create user-friendly interfaces for searching through private messages. But I doubt a lot of companies are doing that.

[1] https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204897248-Guide-to-...

If you can't prove a communication channel is private by encryption you put in place yourself, you should consider it compromised. Expecting any amount of privacy from Slack is laughable.

Maybe after he becomes a billionaire, Stewart can finally retire and actually release a game.

I'm hoping he'll do it the other way around next time. He should try to create a useful service and then discover that there was a great game inside it all along.

He’s playing the long game, just you wait.

Feels like this might be one of those IPOs that end up being fishing expeditions for a higher acquisition price, like happened with Qualtrics last month (bought out by SAP week before the IPO).

I doubt it. The founders the company saw Flickr starve to death after its acquisition. Surely they don't want the same to happen to Slack.

Side thought: I wonder if Flickr could have become what Instagram is today if not for the acquisition!

I don't believe Flickr was ever targeting the same audience. There are very few companies which succeeded in the space Flickr was focused on. Smugmug is probably the closest and they wound up buying Flickr from Yahoo!.

Turns out there's not much of a monetizable market for professional and hobbyist photographers to have a portfolio-like social photo service. Or no one's found it yet.

It’s called Instagram.

Not even close to the core of Flickr users, especially when they were new and growing.

If you read articles by early Instagram team members and users, I think you might be surprised at the overlap in audience and similarities in goals.

“When Richardson joined Instagram in February 2012, at age 26, the former art history major was drawn to what was then a fast-growing indie platform for photographers, hipsters and artistic-types who wanted to share interesting or beautiful things they discovered about the world. At that time, Instagram was “a camera that looked out into the world," said one of the company’s first engineers, "versus a camera that was all about myself, my friends, who I’m with.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/technology/2018/11/14...

Flickr very early on targeted mobile, and pioneered the concept of a photostream. My first smartphone photo upload to them was June 2005. And my use case was basically what I use Instagram for today: to regularly share interesting photos with friends and family. So I strongly believe that if Flickr had kept its founders involved and continued to innovate, it could have been the dominant social photo application today.

Any company could have pivoted to be Instagram. But Instagram was at the right place at the right time with the right product. Flickr did not have time on their side so it didn't matter if they had the other two.

What I'm saying is that it didn't have to be a pivot. Flickr had the key features and smartphone use cases worked out 5 years before Instagram existed.

The only reason there was a gap in the iPhone market for Instagram to fill was that internal warring at Yahoo kept them from launching a good iPhone app. If Flickr has just taken their existing smartphone features and put them in an iPhone app on iPhone launch day, they would have been the dominant social photo sharing app on the iPhone, just at they were on the web.

"5 years before Instagram existed" ... right place, right product, wrong time.

Chat apps (even "enterprise" chat apps) are commodities. Here today, gone tomorrow. The same is going to happen to Slack inevitably; an acquisition (or, really, any financial exit) at least get something for the founders.

There are high switching costs.

Once everyone in your 1000+ company is using it, its hard to get them all to switch to another chat product. You got saved conversations, workflows, integrations, etc.

I recently audited our developer integration with slack, it's about 15-20 hooks. We estimated it would take us a few dev weeks max to replace them. The bigger cost is people's preference for a familiar tool and the gnashing of teeth. It's actually their nice webhook design and apis that make it easy to move. And no if you're reading this and know who I am we aren't considering replacing it, chillaxe.

There is no switching costs involved. I am in one of the big corporation who's gone through 5 different chat clients. It could decide overnight that one of them must die and it wouldn't matter.

It's one of the lowest switching costs. A few weeks lost to redo the integrations that really matter. That's about it.

Zero benefit in the end, they're all a basic chat with some fanciness of top. It's just time wasted for all the users who hates change and have to learn a new tool for no benefit.

Do you think Slack or Github has higher switching costs?

Slack for sure. All the employees are going to be pissed off for months and lose a lot of productivity while they learn the new UI.

Git only impacts developers, a smaller user base, who can figure out how to use a new website.

That being said. They are both easy switch. Just need to update the URL to the new tool.

Work in a company with ~100k magnitude of employees that has been through multiple chat and collaboration apps over a decade. There is no switching delays for employees because these are basically deployed as hard cut over. There is pre-switching cost for the company because those integrations are what IT is basically paid to fix as part of cut over.

Agreed. I think tech valuations for single-product start-ups underestimate the competition and risk if substitution. I mean valuations imply too much top line growth and margins on businesses that might see their revenues drop or fail to grow and have poor cash flow. For example: Twitter, Snap. I also know first hand that valuations for urban mobility and real estate tech companies are really wild.

Slack feels so lacking compared to Facebook's Workplace.

Except for the fact that very few large companies are willing to give Facebook their data. That is any kind of data besides their social ad campaigns.

Really? I'm interested in Facebook Workplace but it seems to be just Facebook groups + Messenger. Slack appears a lot more robust than Messenger.

I’ve heard a lot of people talking about MS Teams. Is it as easy to use as Slack?

Every msft employee I know weeps over it.

My team at my job is pushing Teams over Slack (which the rest of my dept uses). As someone who has to use both, I find Slack to be wayyyy more useful.

Teams treats each message as if it is a “post” that is meant to be “commented” on and is extremely oriented around thread-based communication. Each “top-level” message gets borders and huge margins and padding in the UI. As a result, you can see fewer messages on the screen at a time. By contrast, Slack has the feature of threads, but defaults to being focused on the general flow of conversation, with more messages on the screen at a time.

Some people probably like the thread-based communication model Teams uses. I do not count myself among them.

I guess Yammer became in some form Teams.

Company swapped over a couple weeks ago.

It doesn't seem to do well with images that only exist on the clipboard being pasted over. Which made for a lot of my previous slack use. Now my desktop is littered with image i never cared to save in the first place.

Scrolling message history is a pain. Jittery, seems to be loading a total of like 5 messages at a time so it keeps needing to pause to load.

Sometimes it'll just go all white for a couple seconds

There was something I didn't like about copy pasting text in it that I can't remember right now.

MS Teams is a beautiful, ambitious idea executed with the attention to detail and technical competence you'd expect from a bargain, outsourced dev sweatshop where the project managers aren't fluent in the same language as the people who hired them.

That's the best description of PowerShell I've ever read.

Google should buy them.

Or Microsoft. With that, GitHub, and VSCode, Microsoft will have effectively subsumed the entire average developer workflow again.

Yep. And then someone will start slack/irc 2.0

Not entirely related but IRC spec 3 is in the works. it seems to be taking a long time.

The recent Spectrum acquisition may eventually serve a similar purpose: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18570598

Teams is actually not bad at all (sans linux/skype annoyance), but yeah.

Teams is super slow. Searching for past messages takes forever. Keyboard shortcuts are awkward... the list could go on. I cant say it compares well to Slack.

Keyboard shortcuts in slack are also terrible. Trying to paste a snippet of code simply isn’t possible with the keyboard, for example

For one liners, you can just surround the code in backticks a la `int counter = 0;` (i.e. type first backtick, paste in code, type the second backtick).

For code that's multiple lines long and where you don't care about syntax highlighting, you can surround the code in triple backticks a la (i.e. type first set of triple backticks, paste in code, type in second set of triple backticks):

  ```#include <stdio.h>

  int main() {
      printf("Hello world\n");
  }```

For code where you want syntax highlighting, I do think you either need to drag the relevant text file into the Slack window or use the '+' button to the left of the text box.

Nobody has email or chat search right, not google nor slack.

I find Google's email search to be pretty fantastic, to be honest. It's never failed me, even when I had to search years and gigabytes of emails.

Google's is OK but it's still not as good as a being able to grep a directory full of files, where each file contains a thread or message or whatever.

Only if you know exactly what you are looking for... sometimes going thru years of emails can be super painful.

Teams is terrible.

How so? I actually prefer it over Slack. Namely for those apps in tabs thing, where you can have a wiki and files and all of those apps belong to a channel, email integration, skype, the list goes on and on. Visually, Slack IS cleaner though and has those reaction gifs.

Try copying a short message someone sends you in teams without a Like button popping up and blocking your cursor and then come back here and say that.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I have Teams and Slack open 10+ hrs a day on my computer and I have it on my phone. Apart from Skype/calls and having to use third party bundled app (all on Linux) - it's working just fine.

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-canceled-8-billion-...

I agree with that. I think it makes a ton of sense for MSFT to buy it given it bought github. Plus, LinkedIn data + slack for customer tickets could integrate with its CRM.

Who says they're for sale?

How could a publicly traded company not be up for sale? As I understand it, a takeover attempt could be either friendly or hostile, but my understanding is that anybody with sufficient money could make an offer above the current market price and the board would be obliged to consider it. They could say no if the price was too low, but I think their fiduciary duty to public shareholders would oblige them to accept a sufficiently good bid.

“fudiciary duty” is typically a corpspeak invoked at allhands to explain why certain benefit is being cut. There’s no obligation to sell afaik and whether the company is public or not should be irrelevant really.

There might not be an obligation to sell, but there is one to serve the shareholders. If the offer is respectable I would think not selling would likely result in lawsuits, etc.

The public float can be a less than majority fraction of total float.

Huh. Are you thinking of Uber here, or is this a more general point?

If the former, I'm not sure that's possible given what we know about their cap table. And if the latter, wouldn't fiduciary duty to minority shareholders still require the board to accept a sufficiently good offer?

No. I know nothing of Uber's capital structure. I helped take a couple of companies public that only offered a minority fraction of their equity to the public markets. They structure as a different class of share.

Why not? It's not like their communications product lineup would be any more confusing if they added another service.

I think they’d be obliged to change the name every six months after the acquisition when they hire a new department head. Obligatory 15x price hike will also he implemented with no notice like Google Maps.

Mind if I post this comment on google wave?

Or talk?

Or hangouts?

Or plus?

Or... fuck, i honestly don’t know what Google is pushing for chat today.

It would be a serious enterprise play.. oh wait..

I don't disagree but Google seem set on Hangouts Chat. But it's rubbish and moving incredibly slowly in development terms. I hope the Chat team really get a kick soon to build faster to catch up with Slack and Teams. Not hopeful though.

I don't think Google is ever set on any of their products.

https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d...

Hangouts Chat is a different product than the one you linked.

https://www.blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-al...

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

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