Slack raises $120M Led by Google Ventures and KPCB at $1.12B Valuation
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
-you need to keep an eye on that tab in case something comes up,
-the 'notifications' don't work all the time (Archlinux + Firefox)
It's like somebody took all the bad qualities of IRC, and shoehorned it into a web-page and all the horror that brings. The features that I don't understand:
search-able logging of messages. Email and/or Pidgin already does that.
Group messages: Email already does that.
Transferring of files: Email and/or corporate LAN shares already do that.
But it does add the necessity of stopping my workflow every 5-10 minutes so I can check to see if there are any messages that _might_ apply to me.
The quicker it can be killed with fire the happier I will be. Or am I missing the point? curmudgeonly - check
beard - check
Unix admin - check
Perhaps there is no hope for me. Next thing you know people will want to take pictures with their cellphones! =)
For the most part I experience none of the issues you mention. I get pinged when my name is @'d or on some emergency channels where I have it set to ping me on any message. I find it massively more useful and less distracting than IM+Email.
The one notification challenge I do have with it is that channels can move quickly enough that if I get @'d more than once while I'm afk for a bit it's easy for me to to respond to the latest ping I got but not catch earlier ones. I'd really like it to have a separate view that summarizes your mentions.
As for the features you don't understand:
- Email doesn't give you search for conversations you weren't a part of to begin with. That's the huge upside of a transparent-by-default tool like Slack when it comes to search. I can search for "Solr latency" and find conversations I wasn't a part of, from a time I may not have even been an employee. That's huge.
- File transfers - same, see above for email. Corp Lan shares rarely get search/indexing right.
Oh and FWIW I'm at least 70% curmudgeonly neckbeard too :)
<snip> We also reserve the right to terminate your account (or the access privileges of any end user) and this TOS at any time for any reason, or no reason, with or without notice. Upon termination of your account, we will have no obligation to maintain or provide Your Data, and will delete or destroy all copies of Your Data in our possession or control, in a reasonably expedient way, unless legally prohibited. </snip>
Data retention is a separate issue, but I can envision reasons why I'd want to reserve a maximally "We don't owe it to you" clause, as a SaaS operator. (Slack, for example, allows arbitrary file uploads. This is a high risk feature, for a lot of reasons, data security, copyright compliance, and explosive reputational risk being only three of them.)
As a separate matter: if these clauses discomfit you, speak to enterprise sales. For $10,000+ you can negotiate better ones. If you do not wish to pay $10,000+, that's fine, but you don't get custom legal language.
For a free account this might well work.
For a paid account, a unilateral-termination right, if not worded properly, could kill all the legal protections of the terms of service by turning the TOS into an "illusory contract." [1] The SaaS provider could lose its limitations of liability, choice-of-law and choice-of-forum clause, arbitration provision, etc.
A better approach might be to provide that the SaaS provider can temporarily suspend the account for good reason, and perhaps enumerate some example reasons. That could be coupled with a termination for cause clause (with termination following notice and an opportunity to cure except in egregious cases).
Usual disclaimer: I'm not your lawyer, this isn't legal advice, YMMV, small differences in fact can make big differences in outcome, check with your own lawyer before making decisions, etc., etc.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_promise. For more information and citations, see http://www.oncontracts.com/using-wordpress-coms-terms-of-ser... (self-cite).
That sounds right --- the key difference is the refund, which wasn't mentioned in Patrick's original post.
If termination is for cause, you might not have to give a refund (although it'd look better to outsiders, and thus be more defensible in court, if you did give a refund).
How do you word this correctly to still be able to terminate whenever you want?
(I know one should speak to a lawyer, and I'm not running a SaaS business, I'm just curious of the generics)
Of course, conversely, as the person receiving service, you absolutely want the provider to have binding obligations -- and "we can cancel this at any time for any reason or no reason with no obligation to give you anything, including your data, afterwards" isn't what you want from a service you are relying on in any kind of business use.
> As a separate matter: if these clauses discomfit you, speak to enterprise sales.
Or just don't use the service that offers them. The reason services use boilerplate like this isn't that its essential, its that the perceived cost/benefit ratio warrants it because most people don't read TOS and don't change behavior based on them.
While email can be used for group communication, it's not ideal for the typical, constant interactions of a small team. Let's consider one use case. In email, file sharing with an individual is a multi-step process (new message, select recipient, insert subject, add attachment, write comments, send). In slack, you click upload, select file, and it's sent. No formality or friction in creating a new thread, selecting recipients, ad infinitum. Not to mention, it's hard to discover all the files shared between you and a group of people via email. This is important in an organization. A similar argument could be made for search and group messaging.
This snap judgement is the equivalent of suggesting that you'd forgo wearing gloves in the winter because wrapping warm pieces of fabric around your hands serves the same purpose. Purpose ≠ efficiency.
p.s. the desktop app > keeping a tab constantly open :)
That's not so much a feature of "using email" as "the UX of a typical general-purpose email client". But, heck, the UX of sharing-via-email from even a typical Android app is somewhat more streamlined than what you present, and the same is true of many desktop apps that have email distribution as a feature. The recieving side is still a problem, though the kind of progress in email clients we've seen with -- just to look at gmail as an example -- schema-based actions and Inbox's workflow -- suggests that we may not be too far from the time when the recieve workflow for document-sharing-via-email is improved, after a fairly long period where email client workflows were fairly static.
<groupname>.irc.slack.com
Google the internets for username & password setup.
yep: https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec...
Isn't that an horrific end-run around corporate security? or does irc.slack.com provide IP address whitelisting to restrict connections to those from within the company? Client SSL cert checking?
It just seems like a remarkable focal point that could give access to a lot of sensitive corporate data.
I've had the same experience as you with Slack and Hipchat. The front end guys with the shiny tools love it, and I live with it.
To the extent you're missing the point... it lets people that might not be able to set it up otherwise have secure messaging across desktop and mobile, and a unified place to have all the features that you mentioned vs getting familiar with nc/scp/ftp, grepping chat logs, etc.
That said, they must have one hell of a demo deck (or secret master plan) to get a $1B+ valuation.
One of the most important for our team is the ability to be signed into multiple organisations/accounts at the same time. Slack handles this perfectly, and HipChat not at all. I don't think I've seen a uservoice request with more votes than HipChat has for this http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/sugg...
Easy: our entire agency (70+ people, half designers/developers, half management, client and accounts, etc) is using it, no matter how tech-savvy they are.
I love IRC, and I ran an IRC server for us developers for a good 6 months, but got us to switch over to Slack for the sole reason that accounts management and PMs are happy to use it, and we get transparent searching across every chat :)
In retrospect, though, I might've gone too far the other way -- hipchat is pretty bare bones.
And also people who want it, are able to set it up, but would prefer to pay someone else to do it for them. Lots of useful services simply deliver something that people want, could do themselves, but prefer not to. Like and email providers and restaurants.
The valuation "sounds high", but they've shown that they can deliver a product that many users love and many individuals businesses will pay actual money for. I was shocked when I read the amount, but at least they sell a product!
The company you follow sells common stock to its shareholders.
But that's what VCs do - make a large number of bets that will fail and one that blows it out the park.
Their valuation is a reflection of the growth in Slack's business - meaning they have strong enough growth that they can command that kind of valuation on a huge raise. It is also like a reflection on the limited number of companies that have that kind of growth.
But these kind of valuations also create a high-wire act for the companies in my experience. Growth must be maintained at all costs to justify the valuation. They spend like they're going out of style because of this.
Chrome lets you create apps that open in separate windows.[0] Then it's precisely as bad as any other IM app.
> you need to keep an eye on that tab in case something comes up
If your team members don't @ you when something might be relevant to you, sure. However, if they don't, you can just check every hour or so and get back to them. That's the beauty of Slack - it sits somewhere between IM and email, not everything has to be instant (because everything's saved and you can read it at your pace) but it has the ability to be used as such when enough people are around.
Eleven Giants, the team working on repairing Tiny Speck's previous game, uses Slack like this. Nobody's ever all going to be on at the same time, but everyone can join discussions.
> the 'notifications' don't work all the time (Archlinux + Firefox)
Never had this issue - I'd blame you using a "bleeding edge" distro.
I too generally find Slack to be a more appealing user experience, though along with others I find the advantages over, say, Skype plus email to be fairly nugatory.
Because I work on a bunch of different teams for different organisations, I currently have open Slack, HipChat, Skype, and Apple's Messages, and I have to use Google Hangouts (which periodically completely kills Chrome for me) for a daily standup. I sort of miss those happy days when you could just use Adium for everything.
Other group chats I've used don't do this as well. Skype is particularly awful in this regard.
Hopefully with this new money they can invest a bit more in their Android development efforts.
In the press release, Butterfield says: "As the leader of a brand new product category, we have a huge advantage right now."
Does anyone know what product category he's referring to?
Enterprise collaboration seems like a quite old category to me, but maybe this is where I'm missing the point. Would be interested in hearing where I'm wrong.
Of course, you might agree with the person you're responding to and think the differences are being exaggerated. Personally that has not been my experience.
Think of it less as "fancy IRC" and more of "tool that lets people have fewer face-to-face meetings just to catch up on what everyone is doing".
The notifications are clever enough to not ping me again on the phone if the Mac app is already running.
Integration with other things is dead simple - I had Sensu alerts sent to Slack in a matter of minutes.
I don't know. It's instant messaging, it's not like they've reinventing rocket science from scratch, but it's a good implementation of the concept, multiplatform, well integrated.
If they have something solid, that is, a much better solution for an important problem where their solution will have a significant barrier to entry, maybe Fred Wilson's "large network of engaged userrs" who have a significant switching cost, then okay. Do they?
If it's anywhere bear as transformational for other companies, I can see it continuing to grow for a long time.
I appreciate having a lot of messages come through slack rather than clutter up my inbox.
As far as all the stuff it 'already does', isn't it more convenient than a lot of that. It's like a lightweight and snappier version in my opinion.
If Campfire was growing $1MM a month I am pretty sure 37signals would now be called Campfire and not Basecamp.
This is interesting. How many employees are using it? Slack costs 4 times as much as HipChat ($8/user/month vs. $2/user/month) so it seems silly to jump to a much more expensive product for no reason.
Developer tools generally charge far too little for their offerings - price point is probably not even a consideration for most companies, as long as its within an acceptable band.
But does it [compared to HipChat]? (asking as someone who has used HipChat but never Slack)
I don't think it's meaningfully different or better than HipChat. The most obvious differences are that it automatically retries sending messages if your network glitches, and that it's proponents are more irrationally positive than HipChat's.
They're interchangeable. People who argue otherwise don't have enough actual work to do.
If someone at the company wants it, price point shouldn't be what's keeping the company from using it.
That's because it actually is just a web page inside a chromeless browser window. Right click and you can inspect and edit the markup.
We switched from Hipchat to Slack for reasons that seemed to amount to little more than hype about it in the tech world. It's fine. I don't think it has had any real effect on productivity or collaboration, and I really don't see the 'amazing' benefits that Slack fans tout.
In my opinion all of the various integrations that people get so excited about in Slack basically amount to constant noise that I can't filter out or defer the way I can with email notifications.
You get many benefits depending on when you start. Faulting Campfire or Hipchat for not executing properly is missing what execution is all about IMHO.
Exactly the same here. The whole experience (especially the first run flow) was delightful and we immediately felt great about the decision.
Polish? It looks and feels like a ho-hum single page app (which it is).
What's impressive about it? Simple lists, a chat view, some text filter. Are you kidding me? Plus, just try "command-+" 2-3 times to enlarge the text, and see everything break down terribly.
But if you insist on web apps with more impressive UX work, anything in the list is better done: Twitter, Basecamp, Wunderlist, ..., hack even Gmail.
Which probably means that you have a coworker or two that's passively annoyed at you and/or actively ignores the channel.
I don't see how that's all that different from people having a discussion in a physical office. Someone might be annoyed people are chatting about sports, some might put headphones in so they don't hear.
Out of curiosity: how do you manage to get any work done with IM on? I get like 40-50 _emails_ a day (very low number by the industry standards) and if I don't close my Gmail tab it's a huge distractor during periods when I do long stretches of coding.
We don't do much email in our company, so that's not a distraction (it's <10 people in the company).
If everyone agrees to use a single chat service, like OC (like most large enterprises), then you don't have to search anything but the company directory, so the comparison doesn't seem to make sense. What you're saying is that IM is sub-optimal because everyone uses different services, but Slack is better because everyone is forced to use it?
This was a new term for me so I looked it up and quite frankly that sounds like a terrible overload of info.
Things that "you get with technology X" by having to do 10 extra steps and have everybody else on the team do the same to get the same benefits do not count.
Meanwhile, IRC.
I understand using IRC because of privacy concerns or you have very specific workflows, or just because you like managing your own services. But the threat of future changes is not a credible reason to avoid Slack. When it starts to suck, you just switch.
Slack has a bunch of advantages over irc, though: clients for many platforms, connections go over HTTPS (non-issue for firewalls, whereas IRC connections are sometimes non-trivial), cross-platform notifications, inlining of some content (slack calls this "unfurling").
Their trump card, however, is the simple third-party integrations support. In ~30 seconds, I can write an integration that e.g. watches the git repository on a machine and sends a message to a specific slack channel when the HEAD changes.
Yes, you can do this with an irc bot as well, but: you have to get that irc bot (maybe it's a library, a binary, whatever) to where you want to run it, and you have to write a few lines of code. Whereas with Slack, you can just curl an https endpoint from bash. There's no need to deploy anything, it's all there, and it's simpler to use.
I've seen less-neck-beardy teammates throw together slack integrations that have helped out quite a lot.
Slack lowers the bar to not just team chatting, but making the team chat work for the team's environment. In that it's a bit like emacs. It lets the team change it to fit their usage.
HipChat seems to have felt the competition and now they are taking it seriously. I use HipChat with my distributed team and it works VERY well. HipChat has Android and Windows native clients and have now set up a serious API. The Windows app need some work though.
HipChat is free and you can get all and more of what Slack offers at a VERY affordable cost of $2/month.
HipChat also uses standardized protocol of XMPP.
Sqwiggle now looks like it could be very attractive to slack with their video technology. Except that raise a lot of money soon, I'm predicting an acquisition.
PS: I have no relationship with HipChat. I am just a happy user :)
Looking at HipChat and Slack now, I would select HipChat because of the video and screen sharing features.
I've used Flowdock in the past and tried Hipchat too. I've also been a huge IRC fan when I was younger. I don't see that much of a difference between those and Slack.. Maybe:
- More intuitive for people who don't already know IRC.
- Really cross-platform
- Well integrated with various tools people love.
- Very good "on-boarding" flow.
Personally, I think we switched because I was a bit frustrated about the status quo. IRC was too complex for non-tech and didn't have a good cross-platform integrated solution. Hipchat app just felt so clunky and ugly.. same with Campfire, it felt really old. I've used and liked Flowdock but I thought it was just too much with widgets all over the place and smart inbox, where what I wanted was "just" a "IRC" I could use with colleagues.
Thoughts?
Investors are making a bet that this is indicative that slack are going to take over the entire enterprise communication space.
Just goes to show that this is definitely a great time to raise money!
Personally, I think Slack is smart to take the cash, although obviously it's going to require some serious discipline from them to make sure that it only helps them rather than hinders them.
I'm not an employee/investor/etc but I've been convincing freinds to apply to work at slack recently, I think if you are obsessed with productivity tools or communication tools, Slack, Asana or Quip are all companies worth looking at.
There's a compiled set of info on working at slack [1]. Disclaimer: I compiled it!
Back to my first point - now they have a ton of cash to hire a ton of people - very curious to see @slack in 6-12 months.
All of these are just different spins on the same communication features. There's nothing that's really defensible about any of them.
To me, that's an incredibly powerful fact. Not many apps comsume user attention like that.
"Just" being a "not Google" just might make you a trillionaire.
Your statement is still true.
Slack, the enterprise collaboration platform
It actually is true and a great way to market.
1.2B valuation seems high, but I guess this is a lesson that you can do the same thing everyone else has done, but do it better ( or at least differently) and actually be successful. Sometimes hard to believe that.
I used Flowdock https://www.flowdock.com/ for about a year for a distributed team, before Slack even existed.
From what I can tell Slack is a direct copy of Flowdock from top to bottom in regards to features, while Flowdock charges $3/mo/user.
I predict that it is really going to be huge.
HipChat only has an API you push to, whereas Slack can pull from other services.
We tried it and kept with HipChat. I found Slack's interface/text to be less readable than HipChat. It might look better, but for reading information and usability HipChat won. Our entire team is happy with our choice.
I do like the newest version of the HipChat Mac app a lot though.
I'm not sure the integration frustrations merit the 4x cost increase in switching to Slack though. Hard to justify that unless your team is very small.
This is just another testament to b2b software. They only have a couple thousand customers, but that's enough to get them a $1.12B valuation. If my mental math is right, that's roughly 200k per current customer? This is probably a strategic play on the part of GV/KPCB, moving into the enterprise market where they already have investments. They will leverage partnerships with other portfolio companies to multiply Slack's revenue, likely bringing that valuation in range closer to $XX,000 per customer -- far more reasonable in Enterprise.
Nice job Slack!
At work we use HipChat which is "better than skype", but still pretty crap. In stark contrast to the rest of the Atlassian suite which is basically good.
IRC, in the form of irssi+screen on some kind of unix host, is however awesome. There's no great mobile solution, and OTR crypto should be available on top.
What's amazing to me is so many companies in this space and so much money and all the products suck.
But they block OTR (at least HipChat does), and you lose most of the functionality.
With $120m, I hope they bring group video chat to Slack and a dedicated windows client.
For me Slack + Trello really work for an enterprise.
I know they are looking for a Windows Phone guy to build their WP app, good time to join them I guess.
/me just do something already
Made my heart rate accelerate I little bit.