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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

It makes no sense for me. It's just a web frontend on top of an irc chat. $16B for that is a complete insanity.

This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era

At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales

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What a complete nonsensical comment. Is Facebook just a frontend on top of a user DB?

Nailed it

Is MySQL just a frontend on a filesystem?

Remove the pejorative 'just' and the answer is an obvious uncontroversial yes.

MySQL is a nicer alternative to managing really big CSV flat files on a filesystem.

Facebook is an RSS, address book, message share.

Etc.

Airplanes are just hollowed out birds, and so on.

Sure but if you keep following that analogy then nothing is worth anything

I mean remove the value judgement.

>nothing is worth anything

Very zen, worth rethinking the value of this statement too.

Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you better get to the real quality differences.

Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you start conversations about the depth of a thing instead of emotional discussions defending your positions.

Anyone could build Facebook, the value is the existing userbase. I would think that slack would be one of the easiest tools to replace because its only used within organisations so you can get everyone to switch at once.

The entire slack userbase could vaporise within weeks if slack made a wrong move. Slack doesn't really bring anything special to the table.

Slack made 140m in the first quarter of this year, their valuation is based on how fast they've grown their business and how fast it continues to grow. They don't sell ads, they sell seats, they're a SAAS company. 16B is not insane for a company that has grown revenue at their pace and continues to grow revenue.

They don't make money on the prime majority of their users, nor the bills for slack are particularly high. The digits simply don't make sense there.

I agree, but in a less disparaging manner. I'd say rather, the barrier to entry is super low, many competitors exist, and some arguably better. I don't feel they have runaway velocity like say, FB achieved early on when in a similar boat.

obligatory "Dropbox is just a trivial ftp server plus SVN"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Dropbox took on a problem users have (how can I sync my files between multiple computers?) and provided a great solution to it.

Slack takes a problem users have ("my coworkers keep bugging me with stupid questions") and makes the problem worse, because now your coworkers can see that you're online and demand instant answer :)

Slack is also very popular with open source and hobbyist communities. People often seem to assume that it's used only at work, which I guess makes some amount of sense given that the vast majority of paying customers are probably workplaces. Slack would already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.

And most of those communities don’t pay a dime not really helping the cause.

Then just leave yourself marked as offline all the time. I see many people that do that and face no kind of backlash for it.

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