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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

I am watching this IPO with keen interest. If it goes well, in terms of market day open to close, perhaps that suggests that the Uber IPO will be a similar success. I also want to participate in the Slack IPO as well.

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Why would I want to be at the end of the food chain, owning a money losing taxi company? What's unique to Lyft, are there at least signs of profitability given the pressure from competition?

I thought the not-so-secret about IPO's is that there's nothing 'Public' about them. Ie by the time you can get to them, you're too late.

I dont think I would participate in a slack IPO. More competitors pop up each day and I dont see anything particularly unique about their approach that would keep companies interested in keeping their services. Full disclosure though, I have not used their product in years. Maybe its not as slow and bloated anymore, but I dont see whats stopping another trendy team chat app from coming along and posing a threat by the time they go public.

Slack has a network effect for any user that is part of more than one group. If it's just one group for work, sure, the company could switch and gone is the user. But if that user is part of other groups they will push back against the switch as no one wants more chat windows.

Who pays the Slack bill? It doesn’t matter if the network effect doesn’t accumulate value toward the entity making the buying decision.

What Slack has is a golden brand and a price point that apparently doesn’t make companies look much further than that.

It smells a lot like New Relic in that sense. Eventually the pricing catches up and new signups start dwindling and despite a good deal of lock-in companies think about switching.

Slack is very nice to use. Users love it. Those who negotiate and pay the bills (like me) are surely keenly watching for any credible competitor to get out from under the fairly "fully priced" (to put it as politely as I can) offering from slack.

Have you tried Hangouts Chat?

We have not. Will have a look.

Very respectfully, I personally think your comment is very out of touch with reality and might end up having the same accuracy as the one that was criticizing Dropbox for not being particularly unique [1].

Slack is immensely viral, in Silicon Valley it's basically used by almost every single tech person, its network effect is gigantic. When I glimpse at people's phones on public transportation, a large portion of folks are interacting with Slack. And that's not only used in startups, also in massive companies, both big "old" enterprises such as IBM as well as "new" enterprises like several FAANGs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It's funny how many of these massive companies attempted to build internal alternatives that were ultimately abandoned. IBM gave it a shot with Watson Workspace, only to shut it down last month and redirect users to Slack channels.

https://help.workspace.ibm.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001562237...

I don't know if you're right, but Dropbox's 52-week high was 43.50 and its low was 18.50. It closed today at $21.72.

I like slack as a company but it’s so trendy I can only imagine price will soon outpace any realistic valuation. I doubt an average investor will be able to buy it at anything close to the ipo price.

It’s the integrations. If Slack keeps pricing about the same and service is stable, people won’t switch. They won’t even switch if a cheaper competitor comes around. Slack only needs to be good enough to keep people stuck.

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