Hacker News Reader

Comment by jayhuang | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty surreal for me. I tried out Slack briefly when they first allowed the public to request accounts. Made a mental note "cool", and moved on.

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.

View on HN

We're in a serious bubble right now, IMHO. This valuation is based purely on the fact that all the other hip companies are using it, along with the fact that it is a good product.

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.

Valuations are also based on future potential (or lack thereof) as well. If a company is currently having a great quarter but there is news that might impact their next quarter, you can bet their stock will drop before their financials even take a hit. It works both ways.

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.

I feel similarly. Of course there are tons of people saying "no no no, it's not a bubble", but historically, bubbles were never acknowledged until they bursted.

"but historically, bubbles were never acknowledged until they bursted."

What does it mean when there are more people shouting bubble than those who deny it?

That particular metric means nothing. People like me saying there's a bubble means basically nothing, because no VC is actually listening to my opinion. Just like most commenters on here saying there isn't also means nothing.

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.

No, no, no. Startups valuations should NEVER be based on financials because startups should by definition have limited or no financials.

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.

I haven't used a tool like Slack that I have so strongly integrated into my tech ecosystem. It seamlessly fit in with everything I use and is always up on my computer.

Is there anything that you can't use an IRC bot + Pagerduty/OpsGenie/etc for that Slack does integration wise?

Yes, exactly one: getting all of your organization's non-technical users to use it.

Anyone I work with that can't use IRC I wouldn't want in our chat. I'd prefer they use email or do face to face meetings simply because of the sheer volume of information I'd need to convey to communicate effectively.

Two can play that game: I'd never work with anyone who insists on the abomination that is IRC.

I said can't, not lacks a desire to.

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.

How about vs HipChat?

IRC is quite capable, but Slack is like IRC without all the rough edges and with a nice API.

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.

What are those significant regards?

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.

I honestly find Slack and Slack's API to have more rough edges [along with most of the "IRC replacements"] than IRC which is why I was curious.

YMMV. Thanks

Something about this, along with all the other absurdly high private financing rounds currently taking place seems incredibly off. As an entrepreneur, I want access to the cheapest capital I can get, but at the same time in private rounds want partners who can open doors and help break down barriers. Slack is big enough now that the second part shouldn't be an issue (same with Uber, AirBnB, etc).

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?

I'd say you can never have too many partners with solid connections. It's been mentioned here a couple times, but the possibility of Slack losing ground in the near future to a new competitor is quite high, especially now that they're on everyone's radar with this kind of valuation.

Partners to help them maintain that position and keep ahead of the competition would be incredibly valuable IMO.

Yeah, I agree completely. I really don't see the value compared to the alternatives.

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame"

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/IPod

Agree, it's pretty odd business model... "a cool chat"

such as?

IRC, FlowDock, HipChat, the list goes on.

I've tried FlowDock, HipChat, IRC, Slack, and like 5 others I can't remember the name of.

I always end up going back to IRC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com