Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The next year or so I started to see a lot more teams/companies that were getting on the Slack hype-train, and now this.
Huge props to the team on this valuation but I'm still quite confused.
I always end up going back to IRC.
Non-technical users that are unable to use IRC require more handholding than other users. I'm not capable of providing that via a chat client.
There's only so much a bot can do, and the presentation of IRC varies wildly between clients. Slack normalizes all of that, which for casual users is huge.
Clearly it's drawn a lot of inspiration from IRC, and rightly so, but it's measurably better in a number of significant regards.
There's still a place for IRC and XMPP, but where Slack is a good fit, it's a great fit.
YMMV. Thanks
While I also like the polished UX, I'd argue that the only real value that slack adds on top of IRC is the UI/X and integrated history - the latter being something that IRC just plain lacks.
Selling equity at these insane valuations isn't cheap because you're giving up only 5% of your company, it's incredibly expensive because you now need to grow insanely fast to justify these valuations to your investors. IPO'ing at a lower valuation is more expensive transaction-wise to do, but once you are a public company, you have access to the credit markets where you can sell bonds at 5-10% interest. Am I missing something else here, or is this what others are seeing too?
Partners to help them maintain that position and keep ahead of the competition would be incredibly valuable IMO.
Valuations should be based on actual financials, but when it comes to tech right now they rarely are. Which is the definition of a bubble, IMHO.
What does it mean when there are more people shouting bubble than those who deny it?
But, there may (or may not) be a bubble going on despite this.
Ultimately whether it is viewed as a bubble in 10 or 20 years depends entirely on whether enough investors get burned and burned big enough that they stop investing, just like what happened in the early 00's.
Obviously based on their current financials this valuation is absurd, but given how fast they have grown and how many companies have picked up their product, I would put my money on them justifying this valuation in the future.
The objective is to take investment in order to build assets which down the road have the potential to be valuable either on a financial profit basis or in aggregating attention.
Obviously, this isn't a big "feature." It's not going to show up on their marketing materials. Nobody will ever say "hey, you should try out Slack because they let you silence emails." But it's this sort of UX philosophy, of anticipating and cleverly solving tiny little annoyances, that make it a really pleasurable product to use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscrib...
Technically the law is only that you have to honor them within 10 days, but I've seen a bunch of sites with one-click unsubscribe nowadays.
Snooze these notifications for: an hour, eight hours, a day, three days, or the next week. Or, turn email notifications off. For more detailed preferences, see your account page.
"hour", "eight hours", "three days", "next week" are all links that silence the notifications for discrete periods of time. Pretty neat.
Another example: when you change your password, Slack will send you a special link to sign-in on mobile so you don't have to type out your new password on a tiny keyboard.
> It [CAN-SPAM Act] exempts "transactional or relationship messages."
From my perspective, it went from nothing to huge success overnight.
Dunno if there is any correlation with that. But in general it works as expected.
It seems well suited to purpose, and works fine for me. The only gripes I have are minor (for instance, their iOS offering has this infuriating behavior that it will notify you for direct messages, and throw up the old red dot on the app icon, but then provide no ability to see where the message came from when you open the app.)
In light of how well it works, I am mystified as to how slack has managed to come in to the exact same space and carve out such a massive valuation. If there was ever an industry ripe for disruption, the "modern chat client with goofy icons that allows you to post gifs and search your chats without arcane IRC syntax" did not seem like one to me.
Slack is a substantially better experience than Campfire
Then within a month every other team I talked to was also using it... blew HipChat right out of the water.
I would attribute it to the amazing UX and well thought out feature-set. Integrations and per-channel notifications were both essential features and easy to find and figure out how to use.
I also wouldn't discount the design, their choice of color palette and styled stripes with the # managed to set them apart while still looking professional.
I don't know what contributed the most to my adoption personally, but whatever it is, they've got it.
For the general functionality, they're the same thing. It's IRC rooms and direct messages with persistent state across devices and support for pasting images and files.
HipChat does have a native Windows client, but it's months behind the OS X version, doesn't work with touchscreens and has known issues that take months to get fixed. I generally end up using a Chrome wrapper on their web client, which is how Slack does multiplatform anyway. Not a great solution (Chrome has a tendency to pop the software keyboard up all the time, even when you have one plugged in), but it works. If you're an OS X shop, the native clients may be a plus for HipChat.
As far as functionality goes, one feature that (AFAIK) is missing from HipChat is the ability to log in to multiple organizations. If you use it at work and at home, you'll be logging out and in on every device every time you want to change modes. One of my side project HipChatters uses it for his day job and has this issue. Slack's client lets you sign in to multiple teams (haven't tried it, but I see it in the menu).
I've spent much more time in HipChat, so I've experienced a lot more random issues there. Stuff like several hours of chat history being skipped when I scroll up (fixed by relaunch if you notice it happened), constant failures to reconnect after waking from sleep (again, fixed by relaunching), phone notifications popping up for every message even though you're currently in the chatroom on your phone having a conversation with someone, etc. It's possible that Slack has similar bugginess that I would have hit if I used it as much as I use HipChat, but I don't have enough time in it to say.
That's the TL;DR; - here is a story which may give you no more information than that:
I was working out of AlleyNYC when HipChat was getting big and they started using it internally and told all their companies that they needed to get on HipChat so they could get door/package notifications, announcements and talk to the staff... "by the way, it's awesome!".
We installed it, setup our accounts and the whole nine yards, but can't remember any point where I found HipChat showing me any value over Google Hangouts.
When one of my colleagues mentioned Slack (weeks later) it was very casual and when I signed up I found lots of interesting things readily available to me that I hadn't found other places (integrations, style, notifications, slick mobile apps, etc.).
Now, that's my subjective experience... was I in a bad mood that day I was told I needed to use HipChat and din't like being told what to do? What I in a particular good and open mood when Slack happened to be mentioned? If this had happened the other way around would I be a HipChat user?
I have no idea... my hunch is that the Slack style interested me more and that their startup tutorial presented their value more plainly and obviously than HipChat - but it could be as simple as the different context that I was exposed to them in.
Support for multiple organizations.
I think document support is better, but my HipChat workflow doesn't use many docs, so I could be wrong.
All in all, I think the Slack team studied core user flows and made polished solutions, whereas HipChat sort of does but is painful. An example would be reading scrollback or searching in HipChat. It is dead slow and clunky.
https://slack.com/integrations
All snark aside, the lion's share of the integrations seem geared toward technology workers.
I am pretty sure even founders don't know. It just happens with a combination of lot of luck and a very good product.
"We had no trouble importing our historical message archive and just moving over to this new chat system very quickly. I worry about the long-term stability of this company because if something better comes along, it will be equally fast to switch and never go back," he said.
I wonder about this. Will people move to the new, better thing and ditch their existing product? Is that an existential threat to Slack?
I do know that the product IS pretty great and "team chat with searchable archives" has been tough to get right for a long time. (Internal IRC servers, IRCCloud, Campfire, Hipchat). But being technically excellent and fun to use is no guarantee of success (soft spot in my heart for Zephyr and platforms like Zulip).
Slack needs to hustle right now and increase the barrier to entry. Not sure how - integrations help. Maybe asynchronous communication as well?
Slack gotta make switching costs in terms of inconvenience at least bit high for them to jump ship otherwise they'd face a very unpleasant outcome should a new hot player/product hits the market
For those of us outside of Silicon Valley who don't have the same funding climate, what's it like?
Private investors tend to invest in higher risk/reward equities, meaning you need to achieve higher growth rates to satisfy them. I am guessing many of the companies raising massive private rounds now need to still grow significantly before a liquidity event could justify the investor's investment (once you go public, the pressure isn't as high to achieve 2-3x growth year over year). Publicly traded technology stocks are expected to grow at most 20-30%/year, without further diluting the equity pool. Every new private financing round makes the pool a little smaller, meaning you still need to grow even faster to achieve the returns required by your investors.
In addition, once you IPO, you have access to many other forms of financing that are significantly cheaper than selling equity.
Since this isn't to add runway, it doesn't make much sense unless he's not planning on selling to another company anytime soon. By my estimation, Slack is not too far from being profitable (or able to get that way), with ARR somewhere between $15M - $30M and only 125 employees.
With this big war chest Slack could buy or build a few other collaboration tools. It'd be great to have a competitor to Google Apps at a similar price point.
This is especially evident with the integrations. If just the relevant slice of data is fed into Slack, it's easier to digest than running a full report in another tool. And it's now part of the corporate history. So finding patterns of endemic problems becomes much easier.
They are far from achieving that vision. I agree that company-searchable chat (and email) is valuable, but I doubt it will ever replace proper internal documentation--any other approach is far too noisy, and without a lot of context it's impossible to know if correspondence about an issue from two years ago is still relevant today.
Heard that one before. If Slack gets eaten by Google etc...that might not be the case. I am preferential to self hosted solutions.
> Support for private groups and 1:1 direct messaging gives you complete flexibility. Private things stay private, so just the right people see them.
If you haven't managed to work out how to implement this kind of communication with email then aren't there bigger problems at your workplace?
There are other things that bother me, such as
> The “ambient awareness” that comes from increased transparency cuts down on the need for meetings.
> “We no longer wonder what’s happening on the front line, we know. It makes our relationships deeper because we discover things about each other and we're in touch with exactly what’s happening.”
So I now need to scroll through screens of idle chatter to try and figure out what some other team is doing? Is this constantly pinging me while I'm trying to work? Will every conversation descend into bikeshedding as every man and his dog wants to offer his opinion on the new logo or product feature?
I've just never come across Slack in London yet, so maybe I'm yet to understand what it's like in practice.
In short, I live in Slack now and love it. Its an augmented reality I can share with my team, and the closest I'm getting to shared mind state without an implant in my head.
- it's always in silos - even if you send to multiples
- Email just creates more email.
In communication methods like slack you can communicate stuff public for people to see if they want - but dont need to
I can see the issue with scaling. There was a great video about the problems of email when Google Wave came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo . So if this service lets people drop in and out of a conversation with ease then I can see the benefit.
> Email just creates more email.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Email is not intrinsically bad. You can write one line chat-like responses and you can write formal letters. I can that moving your communication to a website with a different look and feel might make people behave differently though.
However I am now curious to give Slack a try...
The couple of things that I really like about it:
- it's good for collaborative working or editing - got a fire going? about to push code live? Get all the relevant parties in a chat room and talk through it, and then destroy it afterwards
- the integrations - for automated systems, slack messages are far less disruptive than emails
- the indexing/searching of documents + chats - game-changer for finding that slide deck someone talked about a month ago
> So I now need to scroll through screens of idle chatter to try and figure out what some other team is doing?
It's not great for teams updating other teams on what's happening, we have our own home-grown system for that. It would be very useful if you could have an announcement-only channel, where you could specify the people who have the ability to post, and others cna listen, but they don't have that.
> Is this constantly pinging me while I'm trying to work?
It's configurable, but it has twitter- and irc-style mentions, so you can set your client to only ping you when you get specifically mentioned or something is posted in a critical channel
> Will every conversation descend into bikeshedding as every man and his dog wants to offer his opinion on the new logo or product feature?
It's possible, I guess, but the structure is such that you end up with channels that are important and those that are just interesting. Important channels you monitor throughout the day, interesting ones you check twice a day.
For us, all the product-related channels I monitor as much as possible. Sales- and marketing-related channels, I maybe check sporadically
That being said we are also heavy users of small private groups to keep things focused for specific scenarios.
It's not magical, but Slack is a very well executed product. And compared with trying to use hangouts, hipchat, or Skype as yourchat client, it's so much better.
It also has keyword based notifications. I've got a few keywords set up on our rooms so if someone is talking about pieces I own I get a notification and can join in if necessary.
On the other hand, you could just use IRC (IRCCloud is $5/month and has support for embedded gists etc) and a private chat server. This is what we did at my last company. But I haven't used Slack for real, so don't take my word for it - it's not impossible there are even more benefits compared to IRC.
We're using Slack now and this is not an issue. The search capabilities are nice occasionally, although when I was trying to search yesterday through a private conversation history it only gave me results from public rooms so I finally just had to scroll up a few days to find what I was looking for. Bookmarks/stars are a really nice, simple feature that is incredibly useful though. If someone says something and you think you're going to need to come back to that, just bookmark it right there. I remember years ago having conversations on irc and either copy/pasting into notes files or even taking screenshots of the window so I could come back to it. :)
Slack has very configurable notifications, so you can choose how much specific channels and conversations interrupt you, and you can choose how synchronous or asynchronous you want it to be.
Well-implemented chat is hugely valuable. It's hard to overstate how valuable it is.
There is a lot of efficiency gained since emails can often be heavy and include lots of extra wording, signatures, greetings, etc. There are plenty of conversations that just move faster through a lightweight chat system.
Lots of companies were using MSN, Skype, Lync, Gmail, IRC, etc to do chat before and now there's finally a better crop of tools like HipChat, FlowDock, Slack and others. They all offer various abilities above just chat messaging like APIs and integrations to get notified about various other things all in the same place.
Is Slack a nice tool? Yes, it's finally a chat system that works for actual business needs.
Is Slack worth this much and better than everyone else? Not sure, the other ones mentioned are pretty good too and there are still lots of missing features with all of them. $2.8B seems very inflated, but then again this is Silicon Valley at work.
No, it is not "just chat." Chat is just one function. Slack basically brings ALL of the information that is relevant to your team in one place. It has out-of-the-box integrations with a TON of services, and all the data they are sending to your team's Slack feed can then be search on, which provides massive productivity advantages.
> They all offer various abilities above just chat messaging like APIs and integrations to get notified about various other things all in the same place.
Thanks for the confirmation.
It's OK though. I know you're just being obtuse.
And no it doesn't bring "all the information" together, there's still plenty happening outside of it.
Enjoy using it but we don't need all the abstract hyperbole.
Yes. The main alternative I've seen at a couple largish corporations is Microsoft communicator/lync. Lync has some good video/screensharing stuff, but slack is more reliable and provides a great search history feature, which is the killer feature IMO. Also, the mac client is much less buggy than what MS offers. I know these sound like tiny features, but Slack is there when you need it and stays out of your way when you don't, which is priceless when you're trying to get stuff done. Communicator always had a knack for crashing when I was trying to search history or in the middle of a chat.
For those saying IRC is a good alternative, I've yet to see a deployment as useful and easy to use as Slack. Obviously IRC is cheaper, but I doubt most bigcorps are too price sensitive for messaging systems.
Email is not a great form of communication. Private chat has a lot of value. Being able to chat in real time is very very valuable.
We use slack where I work, but we have always had a chat program of some sort. Having different chat rooms for different teams means you don't need to scroll through infinite chatter to get an answer, you can just ask it... and ask the right audience. Need to quickly see if you're platform is down? Hop in the OPS channel and see. Want to see what's up with CI? Hop in the Dev channel. Want to see if support is getting hammered? Hop in support...
It's simple, easy to understand, and easy to use. It's searchable, and accessible. The other things you mention seem more like a culture issue than a tooling issue.
Capital costs are low and slack is probably cash flow positive. Why are they raising a Series E for this much money? That's enough to pay for thousands of employees.
They must have something up their sleeve beyond just chat. My theory is investment is flowing into slack because enterprise was so quick to adopt them, and slack now has its foot in the door at many of the largest companies. This puts them in a position to compete with Dropbox, Box, and other enterprise-focused companies.
Slack is playing in a field much bigger than corporate chat. They are a new entrant into the enterprise platform wars and seemingly more agile than Dropbox et al. I imagine investors are putting money into this advantage position more than the slack product itself.
I'm curious what the key differences are that drive a $2.8 billion valuation relative to the lower valuations of those two companies.
On a serious note: Remember it is a private financing round. VCs and parties involved calculate based on current metrics future value of company. So, although it may or may not be accurate, it is literally putting a value based on other metrics. For all we know, it could all collapse in a year from now or a lion's share of businesses around the world will be using Slack as their main comms. platform in 10 and thus $2.6B wouldn't sound so bad.
Everyone will always be reachable with effort, even in a group setting. Slack isn't an infrastructure critical component (such as Github or AWS) where 0.001% downtime would effect my business. Slack's utility far outweighs the prospect of a few hours (max) of downtime a month.