Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/21/slack-confirms-it-has-raised-427m-at-a-post-money-valuation-of-over-7-1b/

by Manu1987 • 8 years ago

132 198 8 years ago

pentae2• 8 years ago

Amazing how they are a $7b company with hundreds of employees and the issue of it still taking minutes to upload an image from the mobile app is happening years after they acknowledged it for the Asia region.

We pay hundreds a month for Slack and they are worth 7b but with all their money and hundreds of employees they just can't figure out how to get a photo to upload in a reasonable time. Just can't figure out how to do it!

lukeqsee3• 8 years ago

for the Asia region.

Depending on where you are in Asia, this is a hard one. I run a company with geo-distributed systems, and even having a few Asian-base servers it is still difficult to reach the whole region. You almost need to have datacenters in every country to make it work effectively.

Not saying it's an excuse…it is $7B after all. That buys a few servers in many different regions. :)

Edit:

To continue my thought. Here are a few of the issues you're facing:

    - China has the GFW. 
    - South Korea has very subpar links to anything outside South Korea.
    - SE Asia is tons of undersea cables with limited capacity.

This issue is very likely to be somewhat outside their control, since it sounds very much like a bandwidth issue they may not have the ability to rectify.

pentae2• 8 years ago

Its strange, we have a solid fibre connection in Thailand and have ~20mbit upstream to Singapore. It's not like we are in a shack on a mountain in Peru on a dialup modem. Slack is the only service we use thats ridiculously slow for us and we use a lot of US based services.

pvg• 8 years ago

it is $7B after all.

There's no actual $7B involved here. At least, not in the 'buy the Angkor Wat and turn it into a data center' sense.

scruffyherder5• 8 years ago

Which is nonsense I get 50mbit sec to a server I host in Chicago from Hong Kong. 165ms latency.

scruffyherder5• 8 years ago

Is that what the deal is?

It's so terrible I just make people Skype me.

beager2• 8 years ago

It's a reasonable case to be made that the wide adoption of Slack despite its issues contributes to their perceived valuation. This tells me that:

1. Slack has tapped into an energetic market 2. People will use the product even if it sucks, or can be compelled to use it by their company's management and IT. 3. There's money on the table for anyone who can build Slack-like services at a better level of quality.

There's also a spiritual similarity in this gripe to the gripe about Apple being a $1T company despite their descent into software and dongle hell—people are buying it despite its flaws because the marketing and the appeal is overwhelming.

sschueller2• 8 years ago

How much of that valuation is your data?

lukeqsee3• 8 years ago

If you want to commit corporate espionage. . .

just become a Slack employee?

I hope they have very, very good security and encryption measures on all levels.

mrep• 8 years ago

Not really unless they changed their systems recently. They were mostly a php stack last I heard and they even got hacked in 2015 [0] which is why my last company refused to use them.

[0] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

scruffyherder5• 8 years ago

Clearly not enough money for that IRC bridge...

tapoxi• 8 years ago

They onboarded the early adopters onto their platform with a promise of openness, got them to switch their company, and now that they're locked-in it's time to tell those early adopters to eat shit.

It's deceitful, but its standard operating procedure for SaaS and we've seen it before with Twitter.

I wouldn't be surprised if IMAP is deprecated from GMail in a few years.

scruffyherder5• 8 years ago

Sometimes I'm surprised I can still send and receive email via SMTP.

Having lived through the hell that was x.400 I'm almost amazed there isn't a billed tier for businesses to go back to those dark days. Although I think we almost were there with exchange/Skype federation.

cmiles742• 8 years ago

I expect we'll start to see a wide variety of integration disappear as they begin locking their customers into the product.

mechazawa3• 8 years ago

How come Slack is worth $7.1B? I can't imagine they produce that much value or have a high enough revenue to warrant this valuation.

everyone3• 8 years ago

Have you been living in a cave for the last decade? This is modern business, whatever is hot and gets a lot of users, gets a ridiculously unrealistically high valuation. Also, you never need to be profitable, as long us ure hot you can just keep doing more rounds of funding.

brazzledazzle• 8 years ago

Tool integration and automation with Slack are things that people have come to depend on. There’s not much unique to Slack in that regard but they have the momentum and many products will either be Slack-first or be integrated exclusively with Slack. There’s a lot more out there in terms of APIs these days so people can, and do, develop their own integrations for other chat platforms but that’s not quite the same.

I don’t know about 7 billion but based on how technical and non-technical teams alike use and depend on Slack I can easily see 1 Billion or more. But 1 and 7 billion are really far apart. If I were a Slack employee I’d be thinking about my stock. If it sold for 2 billion would I be shit out of luck? Legitimately asking, I don’t know how stock preference works when the VC investment comes after stock has been issued to an employee.

IshKebab• 8 years ago

Because lots of companies pay for it.

Cthulhu_• 8 years ago

Their base product is bringing in $5/month/user, and they'll often get dozens to hundreds to thousands of users for each company that joins, whose employees are usually already using the free version of slack, as a sort of grassroots movement within companies. It's been the primary means of asynchronous communication for the last ~5 customers I've worked at, and I've been in slack channels of 30 to 300 users - in total, an easy 500 paid accounts, and that's just from my network.

Anyway yeah it's a risky investment and a precarious valuation, there is plenty of competition out there right now, yet somehow nothing seems to be able to come out as better than Slack. Maybe if a party actually spent those millions in investment funds to create good non-Electron apps.

swozey• 8 years ago

One of my Slack channels (not servers, no idea how many are on this workspace) has, no exaggeration, ~45k users. It's a hosted FOSS project so they're not making money on those users, though. I'm curious what the largest Slack instance is if it's not k8s.

wott• 8 years ago

They have a deal with Corsair and Micron.

CaptSpify• 8 years ago

Because their value isn't from the product itself. It's from being able to dig into the data being transferred with the product.

forthispurpose• 8 years ago

What is the good alternative to Slack now? Cheaper / OS / self-hosted etc?

wut422• 8 years ago

There's Matrix and Riot. it's still a bit rough on the edges but overall it's very cool projects.

namibj2• 8 years ago

He asked about slack, not Whatsapp. ;)

namibj2• 8 years ago

Mattermost.

sailfast• 8 years ago

Came here to say this. Mattermost runs really well on a small-ish box, self-contained, has never gone down, and we've been able to grow organically to hundreds of unique users a day all inside the firewall. Pretty much a no-brainer for me.

sschueller2• 8 years ago

https://zulipchat.com/

https://rocket.chat/

bachmeier• 8 years ago

If you have just a few users, Rocket is very easy to install and has always worked well on a $5 DO instance. My preference is for Zulip, as it's easier to track multiple discussions, but I don't have an incentive to switch now that my Rocket instance is running.

I have no experience with more than a few users. If you want a hosted solution, I have seen reports that Zulip works well with a large number of users.

ryneandal• 8 years ago

Discord is great. Pitched to gamers, but could easily function in a work setting.

everyone3• 8 years ago

Has anyone considered using Discord instead of Slack? They seem very similar.

fbnlsr• 8 years ago

Discord is MUCH better than Slack. But since it's primarily aimed at the gaming community it doesn't get the same audience.

everyone3• 8 years ago

I used Slack at work about a year and a half ago.. I have recently setup a Discord server for one of my own games. Discord seems to, have more features, work more reliably, and be a lot easier to administrate.. Also its free!

Maybe Slack has advanced in the past year and a half tho..

mechazawa3• 8 years ago

Discord has a huge image problem. I won't touch it with a 10ft stick or even mention it in a professional environment. Besides that it's very annoying that it's a complicated mess that has no real focus.

deadbunny2• 8 years ago

Discord has a huge image problem. I won't touch it with a 10ft stick or even mention it in a professional environment.

Because it's aimed at gamers?

Besides that it's very annoying that it's a complicated mess that has no real focus.

It's a chat and VOIP system, seems to do those both very well. Not exactly complicated.

mynewtb• 8 years ago

Cut them some slack.

EvilEndures2• 8 years ago

I use Discord in place of Slack for hobby/non-professional projects.

The problem with Discord tbh is I've found it to be less reliable than Slack in terms of uptime/push notifications. It also has fewer devop functions prebuilt which means building them out.

Not a big deal if you are a hobbyist, is a big deal if you are paying people $100+/hr to do it.

davidwparker• 8 years ago

We use Discord instead of Slack for work. It works well, most of the time. But it's not a perfect solution, and some bots / things that are just a few clicks away in Slack we've had to build out manually. That said, prefer it to Slack anyway.

faitswulff• 8 years ago

I've recently made this switch. If just for the sheer performance difference (mostly startup time), Discord is worth it. The free search, file uploads, and audio/video chat really makes it, though.

Zealotux• 8 years ago

I use both and I find Discord to be much better, I don't understand why they don't release a "corporate" paid version that would basically be the current version but with a different skin and without all of the gamer nonsense.

LinuxBender• 8 years ago

A corporate version of Discord, ideally on-prem, would make a lot of sense. Their current data retention policy for the public discord servers would violate many corporate data retention policies.

mcintyre19942• 8 years ago

Discord feels less polished to me. I find push notifications way less reliable, and often if I do get a notification the app won't refresh for a few minutes to show the message. I think there's no offline handling at all for notifications, so if you're offline when a message it sent you're never notified about it. Search is basically unusable if you want context, they only let you see a few messages after your search term. Also they don't have outgoing webhooks which make bots more awkward.

It is nice that it's free and unlimited of course, it's a no brainer compared to free Slack, but for work I'd prefer to use Slack.

Pinbenterjamin• 8 years ago

That's a crazy evaluation, is that company really worth 7.1Instagrams?

It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story. Especially since it's built on top of electron, which I'm still trying to accept as a real platform for application development, and not the '3d printer' of the software world.

I hope they don't use this money to feature-swamp the app, and instead focus inward on performance and migrating to a more stable platform.

jeromegv• 8 years ago

Instagram at the time they sold, Instagram today would be worth billions more than that.

huntermeyer• 8 years ago

Instagram is worth more than $100B: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-25/value-of-...

hashrate• 8 years ago

and instead focus inward on performance and migrating to a more stable platform

Very unlikely , I'm not aware of Slack being an Innovation Driven company. I've seen nothing from them in the Open Source World.

growtofill2• 8 years ago

Comparing Slack (B2B) to Instagram (B2C) doesn't seem correct to me. Slack wasn't the first-to-market (there's been Hipchat), but to my understanding, Slack was radically better, that's why it became so successful.

As for using Electron for its desktop app: do end users really care?

naibafo• 8 years ago

Yes, I have stopped using both, the Slack app and the rocket.chat app at work since I was definitely seeing the effect of them in my RAM usage.

I don't use an application tray in my desktop, so having browser windows open for the chats is basically feature-equivalent and saves me RAM

maxehmookau2• 8 years ago

I care. It's slow and terrible for accessibility.

conception• 8 years ago

I always count these by Star Wars franchises. Is slack worth the rights to almost two Star Wars sized franchises? No. It's not.

jerkstate• 8 years ago

depends on which ones!

jerf3• 8 years ago

"It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story."

If I tried to write down all the other corporate-focused chat products that preceded Slack, there would be no way for me to write them all down. To say nothing of the chat products that weren't necessarily corporate focused, but could easily be used in a corporation. They were not first to market; they came into a crowded space, but one where nobody seems to have quite put all the pieces together the way the market wanted, and proceeded to dominate.

If I would have any concern about Slack as an investor, it would be that they don't have a terribly great moat, in part precisely because there are so many companies sitting on a code base that has 90% of the hard technical work done. Personal chat products had a certain amount of stickiness because you had to be on the service that your friends were on. A corporation can simply move wholesale by executive fiat, and the bigger the customer, the bigger the savings number will be and the less connected the buyer will be to the people demanding Slack in particular. I would expect Slack to be facing some pricing pressure in the medium-to-long term as the abundant field of competitors starts essentially copying from Slack what works and starts tweaking their products to fit.

solatic• 8 years ago

Integrations serve as a moat. Anything that sends notifications to your chat platform, anything that adds slash-commands which become part of people's daily workflow, all of those become requirements which need to be replicated in a migration. For companies with non-trivial numbers of integrations which do non-trivial things for their users, it becomes more and more expensive to contemplate a replacement. For products, in particular, with such wide-ranging use within a single enterprise, replacement requirements will be defined by committee, and will be so long as to de-facto prevent migration.

And besides, the field of competitors is getting smaller, not bigger. See: Atlassian throwing in the towel on HipChat and Stride.

lkrubner• 8 years ago

"it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story"

Can you say why you feel this is a first-to-market story? When they started my first reaction was "This market is too crowded and they will have a tough time gaining traction." At that time, I used Basecamp for project management, and so I thought Campfire was excellent for team chat.

I also worked at one company that used Yammer, and that seemed fine.

Also, obligatory, I worked at a company where the tech team used IRC.

Back in 2004, I worked at a company where the dev team used Yahoo chat. It was surprisingly good. We would be logged into video chat for hours, talking over problems with each other.

I like Slack, but I've never understood why developers made such a big deal with it. I wonder if it caught some generational shift? It arrived on the scene just as the economy was recovering from the Great Recession, and it caught the eye of the next wave of founders who were building startups in the new era. But I don't think it is an example of first-to-market. It is actually more interesting than that. It is an example of late-to-market-but-still-successful. That's rare. But I still don't understand why it has been so successful.

lesss365• 8 years ago

It's used by companies to not only communicate, but also used by management level employees to pry on conversations/gossip. Personally know of a well known company where a group of managers used Slack for snooping on those they manage(d), and subsequently fired those they found criticizing them/higher-ups.

Not saying that this is surely what makes it valuable, but could see a management team deciding to use it as a means of improving productivity, where they could take logs and tie them into a system for gauging sentiment. Not saying it's right at all, but could see the value others could see in that

jartelt• 8 years ago

A lot of people said $1B for Instagram was overpaying and were proven wrong.

maxehmookau2• 8 years ago

Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.

mechazawa3• 8 years ago

And one that doesn't use >1GB ram when idle

joelhaasnoot3• 8 years ago

And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...

drb913• 8 years ago

No need! Everyone is already so happy with the electron version; why would they waste more money improving your experience?

hvidgaard2• 8 years ago

Lets assume well paid developers of $150.000 yearly, 5 man for 3 months is less than $187.500 is wages. Lets be generous and say we double that to account for other expenses. It's $375.000 for a feature that will be a reasonable sales argument.

fastball3• 8 years ago

You can think a 5-person team can build highly performant native apps for a number of different platforms in a matter of months?

phailhaus5• 8 years ago

And honestly, how hard can it be?

Excuse me? You think 5 people can 100% replicate Slack natively within "a few months"?

iambateman• 8 years ago

But once you get to that organizational size, there are 3 project managers and a VP with an agenda and designers and design managers and a QA department which is backed up “for a bit” and a PR team who wants to make sure we get a good Q2’19 “win with the developer crowd”.

So it takes a year, and $2.5M, to do what should take 3 months and $300k.

* not saying this is the case at Slack, it’s just often the case at Everywhere. ;)

fizx• 8 years ago

Video performance is a LOT harder than you think.

At another company, I watched an five person team, half of whom had related PhDs, the other half over a dozen years of video engineering experience, make incremental improvements to the WebRTC stack.

After a year, was it better? The metrics said it was somewhat better, but the customers still complained all the time.

moistoreos• 8 years ago

But Electron man. Electron. (sarcasm)

beager2• 8 years ago

Or one that doesn't drop 5 seconds of call audio when I open a new tab in Chrome. Yes, really.

spyridonas2• 8 years ago

I think contributing to open source and making electron better/faster/lighter will benefit everyone and i prefer it over making a native app

Tehnix• 8 years ago

Unfortunately it’s also vastly less likely to bring the same speed ups in even a 4x time frame. It’s not like the Electron devs are caring about speed at all atm.

Spivak• 8 years ago

Which is something that people complain about, but isn't enough of a motivator to get anyone to switch. Skype for Business fits the bill of a lean messaging platform with similar features but it's just terrible. Mattermost is pretty cool but it's self-hosted which makes it a non-starter in shops that don't have IT staff. And all the other competing products are basically just Slack clones with less features.

So Slack is going to continue eating all your resources, because anyone who cares will switch to a leaner Slack client before they switch away from Slack.

dunpeal• 8 years ago

I'm guessing they don't care so much because most of their paying users are captive audience. If your work decides to use slack, it's not like you can't opt-out.

So they focus more on server-side features that ensure they'll be chosen in the first place.

eagsalazar2• 8 years ago

Their video offering is laughably bad but I'd bet that isn't because of electron. Otherwise I'm surprised people hate the electron app so much, on my 2014 mbp it works just fine.

filoleg• 8 years ago

Agreed. To support that point, Discord's videocall functionality is probably the best I've seen, despite using electron as well.

phyzome• 8 years ago

Counterpoint: I've found it to work better than Google Meet. But maybe that's not saying much.

(Is there any video conferencing software that doesn't suck in some way?)

lordnacho• 8 years ago

I don't know about "just fine". I think its benefits outweigh its problems. I need to stay in touch with my team, and I need those integrations.

But even simple stuff like "send when internet connection is back" isn't there, like what WhatsApp has.

It also doesn't load very fast for something that you'd think is mostly text. Change teams and you see the spinner a lot. Also when you've come back to WiFi it seems to take ages to get your updates.

A lot of these things seem to be "fixed" by killing the app and restarting, which is something of a smell.

Also seems to use a lot of memory. Not a huge problem on my machine, but I like elegance.

zerr• 8 years ago

Same here but for Windows...

Reedx2• 8 years ago

Heck, I'm still waiting for Photoshop to be able to launch and display a static 50KB image in a reasonable amount of time.

russdpale6• 8 years ago

Same for windows, and linux. I refuse to install it and instead use the web app as if it were email. Fortunately, I don't have to use it for work.

IMO, the only thing slack does really well, is the threading. But I've ever only been a part of one group that actually used that feature. Every other group uses it like a chat room.

baddox• 8 years ago

I'm still very curious what combination of variables leads to these complaints about Electron apps. I have never experienced any of these issues, and I have heavily used Electron apps like Slack, Discord, and Visual Studio Code for years on both high-end and modest Apple computers.

Electron apps appear to be one of the biggest pain points for people in tech and the HN community, and I find it so bizarre that I relate to exactly zero of those complaints.

gumby• 8 years ago

What about getting those video calls to work on iOS?

carlsborg• 8 years ago

Can slack messages be considered "personal data" under GDPR?

wglb• 8 years ago

Only if they contain information that personally uniquely identifies a person.

The information in the individual slack account is most likely PD under the GDPR.

tootie2• 8 years ago

It seems to me that Slack is very vulnerable. Their core product isn't all that innovative and already has credible competitors who could probably beat their price. In fact, I don't understand how they beat HipChat so soundly. I wonder if their next tack will be to start digging a moat of proprietary tooling now that they have a critical mass of adoption.

growtofill2• 8 years ago

Atlassian tried to beat them with Stride and failed.

debacle2• 8 years ago

HipChat, flowdock, yammer, etc.

plasma• 8 years ago

As a former hipchat customer atlassian just totally missed the mark.

The updates they put out for Hipchat during slacks rise were new emojis.

seanalltogether• 8 years ago

We used Hipchat a lot back in the days. I remember the biggest frustrations for us was that there was no multi-team support, so co-workers were doing crazy workarounds with multiple copies of the same application on different icon and bundle ids. Additionally HipChat was down quite a lot from what i remember.

jwalton• 8 years ago

digging a moat of proprietary tooling

You mean, like disabling XMPP and IRC integrations? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/09/slack_cuts_ties_to_...

Reedx2• 8 years ago

Aren't the bots and integrations of those already moat-like?

Even if a lot of those exist elsewhere and you're not using custom bots, hooking everything back up is a pain point. Along with having to export/import data, getting everyone to sign up and get used to a new service, etc. I think it's probably going to take something that's not just a little better, but significantly better and different.

DeonPenny• 8 years ago

As someone who was a huge hipchat fan that got moved to Slack. It's integrations, bots, and a delightful UI. They figured out UI better than any chat. Sometimes it's just building the right product.

paulpauper• 8 years ago

So much for that inevitable/impending Web 2.0 'bubble burst' that the financial and tech media has been predicting since 2012. Nothing has changed from now and 4 years ago .same high valuations.

bumholio2• 8 years ago

This is one of those recent tech success stories that just leave me scratching my head. I simply can't understand the value Slack is bringing and why would anyone pay for an absolutely metoo product. They are either deviously smart or the market is in full bubble mode.

ryandrake• 8 years ago

After Facebook and Instagram I pretty much gave up and stopped trying to figure it out. Maybe I’m a dinosaur but I don’t get the appeal of most software products that have come out in the last decade. It seems the formula is simply:

1. Spend investor money faster than your competitors.

2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there.

3. Load up on hype, marketing. And buzz/PR.

4. Once you have a critical mass of users, lock them in.

addicted• 8 years ago

Facebook and Instagram make money and have lots of data.

I thought the $100bn valuation for them was low and turns out that was right because they had acquired all this data for free. Data which at the time no one valued (and even today don’t value enough) but was worth a lot.

Slack has lots of data, but if they try to monetize it, I suspect they will lose a lot of their users (the data they have is what people would consider private, while the whole point of the data shared on Facebook/instagram is to make it public). And I suspect their avenues for making money are closing out. O365 users get Teams for free, and it’s only a matter of time before Google includes something equivalent in Google Apps for Work.

I suspect Slack’s best bets for justifying their valuation is hoping Google buys them out or includes Slack in a Apps for Work tier, or if they’re really lucky, Amazon decides they truly want to make a play for the enterprise communications market and buy Slack as the centerpiece for that.

phailhaus5• 8 years ago

2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there.

You are fooling yourself here. For all the snarky hate Slack gets around here, it's far better designed than any chat app I've had to use so far. It's for work, it doesn't have to be compatible with other chat apps (in fact, that would be a security issue). Searching through your history Just Works, integrations Just Work, and user-friendly features like reactions make it more fun to use (and prevent cluttering up chats with unnecessary chatter). The fact that Slack was able to destroy its established competitors should give you a hint that they're doing something right. People like using slack. My friends have made their own workspaces with it just to keep in touch, because it's so well designed.

bumholio2• 8 years ago

I can understand Facebook and Instagram, they can make money by using strong network effects. It's essentially the same thing Microsoft did, monetize a common platform and exploit the lock in effect.

But Slack largely lacks that. A startup might setup a free Slack instance, then run into its limitations and pay for extra service. But aside from some institutional inertia, nothing stops a company from switching. You don't need Slack to reach your public, unlike say Facebook. It's a chat tool, an average one, and you can easily migrate out of it. As a repository for essential business knowledge, Slack is not a good solution and could even be harmful compared to things like a wiki or documents stored in a revision control system.

And as a pure SaaS offering, there is no way in hell Slack is worth $7 billion. You can replicate its functionality for less than $100 million, and get native, fast apps. There must be something else, but I just don't see it.

akeck• 8 years ago

Hmmm. The story I keep hearing is companies switching from Slack to Teams, not because Teams is better, but because it's more or less integrated into O365 and has various compliance certs already. 7.1B seems a bit high when competing with MS.

chrismeller3• 8 years ago

Ugh. Have you tried using Teams? I’m forced to now and I want to kill cute, fuzzy woodland creatures every single day.

Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.

nwsm• 8 years ago

I missed the part where you detailed any of your problems with it.

marcinzm2• 8 years ago

Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.

But compliance may be. For example, Slack charges a lot of money and requires a lot of users for actual HIPAA compliance (as in signing a BAA, everything else is marketing fluff). Teams, from what I can tell, comes with a BAA out of the box.

pcmaffey• 8 years ago

The potential for deep Github integration too.

drb913• 8 years ago

What does a deep integration between a chat app and a vcs provider mean?

paulie_a3• 8 years ago

Integrations with O365 might be a feature for some but a lot of people have abandoned that ecosystem entirely. I can't think of a single person that uses it professionally or personally.

rch• 8 years ago

We honestly tried to like Teams but ended up with Slack, I think partially since everyone (including me) was already using it for other projects.

Remember MS tried to push Yammer to businesses as well, so not everything they do works out.

ruffrey• 8 years ago

I have used slack, hipchat, irc, and many other chats over the years for dev teams. Joined a new small company and we are struggling really hard with MS Teams.

Teams is unique in how it "ticks all the boxes" but has enough small flaws and unfinished implementations that it makes for a really, really awful tool. There are fundamental problems with the software. To name a few:

- The notifications are wildly inconsistent - sometimes I'll get 5-6 email notifications for a single message that I already saw, sometimes I'll get email + app notifications for messages I am currently viewing, sometimes I'll get no notifications via email or app, for stuff that happened when I was offline. - The way every message is like a new "post" and there can be replies - this is a unique idea, but just really bad to use in practice. When people reply to a post, it gets bumped to the bottom, so posts end up out of order. Also, all the replies to the post automatically get collapsed, making it really annoying to find anything. - The mac app decided to stop displaying new messages (for WEEKS) in certain channels including our service errors channel - I finally gave up and can only use it on the web. - the O365 file integration regularly crashes the browser and mac app. We share a lot of spreadsheets and this just sucks. Sharepoint sync on the mac breaks all the time. It spins and fails to track updates. - O365 collaboration in the browser is brittle, especially disappointing compared to where Google Docs was 5+ year ago. - The Teams search cannot find documents by name. - The messages seem to be backed by email files in sharepoint, which makes a mess in sharepoint (not that it isn't kinda a mess already).

After using the google suite at many companies for many years, and having the standard on-prem microsoft stuff, I have to say Teams is not a viable solution for a software team. Teams "ticks all the boxes" but the execution can't compare to Slack.

tpaschalis• 8 years ago

My experience with MS Teams contradict what I've mostly seen on HN.

Coming from a Linux background, I had lost touch with the Microsoft ecosystem for the most part of a decade and would actively avoid Microsoft related stuff.

When I got a new job, I had to use the whole SharePoint/O365/Teams stack, instead of Slack, in medium-sized teams. It feels much more lightweight and responsive, chat history and search works way better than Slack (for now, at least), and is miles ahead of Skype in terms of not dropping messages, and you know, actually allowing you to chat and call.

I'm not using the O365 integration extensively, and generally view/edit documents as they're supposed to (files), but in the cases I've needed to make some changes in an Excel file, I didn't have any issues.

Of course it suffers from all the problems that an ephemeral, short-term memory chat application does in an organization, but that's to be expected.

Edit : Not affiliated with MS in any way. If I can answer any questions, let me know.

maturz• 8 years ago

I've been using teams since launch, it's a step up from Skype for business (mostly, they have for some reason decided to drop support for talking with regular Skype). I would say tho that they are still lacking a lot of important features. You can see a lot of examples of this here:

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com

They can also be very slow getting around to fixing things even if they are very important. They only just recently fixed so status works and notifications stopped working for more than a week without getting fixed (patched this week).

aviv• 8 years ago

Now they can afford the Dialpad.com acquisition they have been after.

jahaja• 8 years ago

What is the lowest acceptable number of employees that a company that's planning to go public can have? Sometimes I wonder if this rapid inflation phase is just a check boxing exercise.

mrchess• 8 years ago

Someone tried to run this investor scam on me during Slack's funding process. Replace Google with Slack, and the scam was nearly identical in execution. Be careful out there! http://mobile.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/business/con-artist-exp...

dawhizkid• 8 years ago

Slack refuses to sign BAAs for healthcare cos (for HIPAA compliance) & does not offer an on-prem solution (which Hipchat did but Slack will sunset in 6 months or so)

cntlzw• 8 years ago

We went from Hipchat to Teams and now Slack.

Hipchat was solid. App was great to use and did not consume many resources. Integration with other tools was ok. Of course things like Atlassian were nice. Webhooks, API worked for me. Even writing simple notifications worked.

We then switched to teams because we already use Office 365 and the guy in charge likes MS. Enough said. Teams and Office 365 has weird UI experiences and it feels sluggish. Did not like it t all.

At the moment we use Slack. You can switch from workplace to workplace. Slack is viral. You need to have it. All the integrations. UI is more polished than Teams but overall I am not a fan. It feels sluggish like Teams at times.

a-b• 8 years ago

Switched whole organization from slack to https://zulipchat.com - so much happier!

sitepodmatt• 8 years ago

I wonder if any of investors are backed (indirectly maybe) by memory makers Kingston, Samsung, Micron VC arms etc.. Just a thought..

rkrzr2• 8 years ago

If self-hosting is an option for you, I can highly recommend looking into Mattermost as an open source Slack replacement.

We have been using it for the last 2 years and it has been working pretty much flawlessly for us. Upgrading it is really painless too, since it is just one Go binary that automatically applies DB migrations when it detects that you moved to a new version.

eapartridge• 8 years ago

Interesting! How do you find Mattermost does in terms of integrations with GitHub etc? I see that there seems to be a bit of a community around it, but I wonder how stable / reliable / usable they are?

rkrzr2• 8 years ago

Mattermost's webhooks are actually compatible with Slack's data format[0]. We use this e.g. for the Travis CI integration, which is working well.

I don't know about other integrations, but I think most Slack integrations should work out of the box with Mattermost, since the data format is the same.

It's also easy to add your own webhooks to automatically post to a specific channel. We e.g. use this to announce deployments via Ansible, where the deploy script simply POSTs to that webhook what is being deployed and by whom.

[0] https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/webhooks-incoming.html...

shaan7• 8 years ago

Will that be enough to do a dark theme? :P

acconrad2• 8 years ago

I'm new to venture deals (just read the book of the same name) and I have a question:

Slack seems to be in peacetime: aggressive growth, buying things like HipChat. If they're dominating the market, why would they need to raise money?

gkanai• 8 years ago

why would they need to raise money?

The thinking is that the more a hot company can raise, the longer they can stay public.

In the current cycle, IPOs are more rare than in previous cycles (partly because FAANG are acquiring more companies and partly because companies are waiting longer to IPO) so having more cash on hand gives the company that much more runway.

acconrad2• 8 years ago

Did you mean private?

So even if they are a market leader, give them more cash? I get why Uber does it because they have serious commoditized competition with Lyft, but Slack does not seem to have even a close 2nd place.

paxy• 8 years ago

In previous rounds, Slack’s CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield has said that the company raises “opportunistically.” That is, it doesn’t have to raise money because it’s already making money and still has some in the bank, but as long as VCs are knocking, it’s worth taking the funding if it’s coming in at good valuations because you never know what might lie ahead.

EpiphanyMachine• 8 years ago

I wish they never bought screenhero and effectively killed it. The version of it in the slack app is less featured and significantly less preformant.

QML• 8 years ago

I've been having trouble coming up with an analogy until now: my main gripe with Slack is that it brings over the concept of open office from meatspace onto digital space. I don't think I'm the only one with this sentiment; it's harder to concentrate on work when notifications go off; even if its not pertinent to me, I feel an urge to stay in the loop on things.

Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

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