Slack raises $120M Led by Google Ventures and KPCB at $1.12B Valuation

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/31/slack-confirms-120m-fundraise-led-by-google-ventures-and-kpcb-at-1-12b-valuation/

by BIackSwan • 12 years ago

212 170 12 years ago

Our (small) team adores slack. I didn't even realize what the pricing was when we first started - I thought it was free forever with some freemium features. Then all the sudden we hit our quota (after a month of heavy, heavy use), and paying for the full subscription was a no-brainer. The product truly is fantastic, and we'll pay for it all day long.

warcode• 12 years ago

It is free forever, as long as you don't require more than 10,000 searchable messages in the archive or over 5 external integrations.

damon_c• 12 years ago

In my experience and having tried everything since Google Wave, Slack is the first platform to come along that has really significantly reduced email usage while improving team communication.

I predict that it is really going to be huge.

jonathanwallace• 12 years ago

I feel like Slack is what Campfire should've been. Or what IRC with a fast, searchable history and a decent GUI is.

stevebot3• 12 years ago

Having used Slack I found it ammusing the way they describe it:

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.

thearn4• 12 years ago

$1.12B kind of blows my mind, but me and my team really do love the service.

pkorzeniewski2• 12 years ago

Everyone praises Slack here but I find e-mail + IM completely sufficient and I work in a very large company.. Something urgent? Use IM. Something can wait? Use e-mail. It's that simple.

Synergyse• 12 years ago

The integrations, history and ambient awareness it creates are what makes it unique.

pkorzeniewski2• 12 years ago

Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well - services send you e-mails when something happens (which you can filter to different folders, you get desktop notifications and so on); you have a full history as well and at least at my company we have an "off-topic" group, which can be easily filtered out if you don't want to be bothered. To be honest a live chat seems to me like a bad idea at a company, because it just encourages people to spam. I don't know, maybe I just prefer an efficient use of simple tools.

AndrewKemendo• 12 years ago

ambient awareness

This was a new term for me so I looked it up and quite frankly that sounds like a terrible overload of info.

joshmlewis• 12 years ago

I typically have Gmail open with Chat and Slack. My team also has Gmail Chat but we find it easier to organize conversations, files, etc with Slack. It let's us have a channel for each project, a scrum channel for what everyone's working on, direct messaging when you need it, etc. Uploading files from Dropbox and other integrations like Github are also useful.

hvs3• 12 years ago

I work at a small company (<10 employees) and we use HipChat all day. Since we are geographically dispersed, it helps to maintain the inter-team communication that is hard to do remotely. We probably only use it for 40% "work." The rest is random news items and discussions about sports.

bryanlarsen• 12 years ago

We probably only use it for 40% "work." The rest is random news items and discussions about sports.

Which probably means that you have a coworker or two that's passively annoyed at you and/or actively ignores the channel.

smikhanov• 12 years ago

The rest is random news items and discussions about sports

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.

stevebot3• 12 years ago

The web hook integrations add a lot of value. Plus consider that most communication is archived and searchable but multiple users. Not the case with email + IM.

rabino2• 12 years ago

Searchability is a huge + from me for using Slack. That's hard on email + IM. Specially if you were not in the original loop.

trustfundbaby• 12 years ago

I used to think the same but with IM, you have to find out the right account and add it (someone might prefer their personal gmail over corporate or whatever) ... but with this, everything is right there. completely replaced any need for im for me.

dkrich2• 12 years ago

I don't understand- that only seems to hold if everyone agrees to use Slack.

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?

enraged_camel• 12 years ago

Slack's value comes from integrations. The way it compiles all the information from a variety of services in one place and presents it in one format (chat messages) removes a ton of overhead and inefficiency.

B5geek2• 12 years ago

I must be in the minority (based on the comments that I have read), but I hate it. The other day the PHB announces to the office: We are going to use Slack and move away from IM, Skype, etc. So I signed up. What I don't like: -you need to keep a a tab open all the time,

-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! =)

vertex-four2• 12 years ago

you need to keep a a tab open all the time

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.

fyolnish2• 12 years ago

Yes I think you have the philosophy of the web nailed perfectly. Let's all have a chrome tab running continuously

jscheel2• 12 years ago

I don't know about linux support, but they have native apps. This is much better than having an extra tab open all the time. As for your other concerns, you have listed a bunch of technologies that "already [do] that." Sure, there are plenty of them, but it's nice to have everything together.

cmorgan31• 12 years ago

Yes, as jscheel points out the native apps are far superior to the in browser option. We also link it into our production services such as pivotal, circleCI, etc to send notifications for build failures of deliverables. It's definitely a service that gets better the more you integrate it with your workflow. One stop shop and ease of use has also been a big selling point for my team

famousactress2• 12 years ago

That's a bummer. I use Slack on Mac+iOS with the "native" app (which really just frames the web app but helps integrate notifications, etc.)

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 :)

cpr• 12 years ago

Under the upper-right menu there's a "@ Recent Mentions" item which might solve your para. 3 problem.

j_horvat• 12 years ago

Hm, that's a shame about the notifications. Their Mac desktop app (obviously doesn't apply that much to you) is pretty decent, I just keep it in the same workspace as my email client. I just see it as another way of communicating mostly, nothing necessarily too special. My favourite feature though is their service hooks, we have separate channels for Twitter (posts anytime our Twitter posts or gets @mentioned), Github for any activity on our repos, so I get notifications anytime someone pushes, creates an issue, etc. Obviously GH already sends email but this way all the communication is centralized, plus I hate email notifications.

andrewvc• 12 years ago

I love it on the mac. I'm sure running it in the browser would suck It's more ephemeral than email.

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.

graycat• 12 years ago

Could the fickle finger of fate easily cross their Buffet moat, i.e., could this be a short term fad that fades?

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?

simonw2• 12 years ago

I think they do. We introduced slack at my employer a few months ago and we now have nearly 400 users on there. Traffic to our core mailing lists has dropped to almost nothing, I've replaced several weekly status meetings with low traffic slack channels and most of my co-workers now consider it indispensable. It's also been crucial in helping us establish a new remote office and some other remote workers.

If it's anywhere bear as transformational for other companies, I can see it continuing to grow for a long time.

jumby• 12 years ago

Do you realize you can connect w/ any IRC client?

<groupname>.irc.slack.com

Google the internets for username & password setup.

Domenic_S2• 12 years ago

Holy crap, really? Even the beardiest of necks should like it then!

yep: https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec...

calbear81• 12 years ago

If only someone could resurrect Microsoft Comic Chat.

dingaling• 12 years ago

Do you realize you can connect w/ any IRC client?

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.

throwaway57523• 12 years ago

Look at all the sibling replies.... You just have to get a Mac - works great there! It's like Windows of 15 years ago, redux.

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.

timtadh• 12 years ago

At least with hipchat I managed to get desktop notifications working in KDE + Firefox. I tried connecting to hipchat via the XMMP interface but it was horrible and didn't work very well. <rant> I fail to see what any of these "new-fangled" chat systems bring over IRC with a bot that tracks all the convos for history searching. </rant>

fyolnish2• 12 years ago

Please explain the secure part

eli4• 12 years ago

Yup, I evaluated Slack and HipChat about a year ago and went with HipChat mostly because of Slack's lame Windows user experience. (IMHO, the Slack client also had too many bells and whistles. I would've like a default "simple" mode that just is an IM client with group chat.)

sanderjd2• 12 years ago

people that might not be able to set it up otherwise

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!

JonoBB• 12 years ago

I can't help but feel that HipChat have somewhat got the rug pulled from under them. Yes, they have done ok in their own right, but they've missed a few tricks as well.

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...

kingrolo2• 12 years ago

I'm on Linux and I've created a Chrome application shortcut for it (File>Create application shortcuts). At least means I don't accidentally close the tab and can launch it with Kupfer/your launcher of choice.

shwinnabego• 12 years ago

I think your comment conflates purpose and efficiency. This might be because you've only used slack for a few days now, and haven't realized its full power.

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 :)

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

While email can be used for group communication, it's not ideal for the typical and 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).

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.

osconfused• 12 years ago

I also had slack forced on me after moving from IM to partychat, to hipchat and now slack. I didn't think it was all that great at first. However, it's really grown on me. It works really well for teams that include contractors and it's not the same level of distraction as IM.

Florin_Andrei• 12 years ago

I can't say I've fallen in love with it, but it's okay. The Mac app provides decent notifications - but I actually don't use it that much, I've installed the Android app on my phone and that works pretty well.

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.

sly010• 12 years ago

I am not the fan either, especially that even the "native" version is just a packaged web browser, and some features (like file upload) were broken when I tried. Unfortunately I do think it's a trend. Maybe someone who actually uses it could tell me why and also what makes it a 1B company?

phillmv• 12 years ago

Not a big user but:

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".

OhHeyItsE• 12 years ago

I'm with you. Maybe I'm too old to 'get it'. The progression of chat tools I've used for work collaboration: AIM -> Jabber -> HipChat -> Slack. HipChat & Slack have some convenient features like emailing you if someone @'s you while you are away. Otherwise, I've used them all exactly he same way. I really don't get the hype.

kimar2• 12 years ago

I find the design and polish of Slack to be significantly superior to that of HipChat. Feature-wise though, I'm with you and couldn't pinpoint the differences.

leonardb• 12 years ago

Honestly, there is now way on earth I'd allow my company to use Slack given their Termination clause. It's a nice idea, but total loss of control of your data is just not worth it.

<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>

patio11• 12 years ago

"We can terminate your account for any reason" is a legal term which should be in every SaaS's (default) terms of service. Your lawyer will be happy to explain why. If you'd like a less formal explanation, consider what happens when you get a phone call at 4 AM in the morning which begins "Hello, is this the owner of $COMPANY? Great. This is Sgt. Stevens with the $CITY police department. I have a lawyer named John Smith in my office here. Mr. Smith alleges that you're assisting in the violation of a temporary restraining order."

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.

smackfu• 12 years ago

Of course, once they terminate the TOS for any reason, the next line of the TOS doesn't seem especially relevant.

tapp• 12 years ago

I had the same general reaction when we tested it at our office, but I'm open to the idea that perhaps I'm missing the point.

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.

dcre• 12 years ago

I think the category he means is chat-based collaboration with a ton of seamless third-party integrations. Enterprise collaboration is too broad and elides the differences between Slack and, say, email or a wiki.

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.

bostonvaulter23• 12 years ago

I think he's referring to real-time enterprise collaboration. Things like Slack and Hipchat (and maybe Google Wave, but obviously that wasn't successful).

cwp• 12 years ago

The thing that I find really pleasant about Slack is that it syncs state between multiple clients really well. If I get a direct message and read it on my phone, my desktop client doesn't show it as unread. It doesn't send push notifications to my phone when I've got the desktop client open. It seems to strike a good balance between getting my attention for stuff that matters and letting me ignore stuff that doesn't.

Other group chats I've used don't do this as well. Skype is particularly awful in this regard.

joshgachnang• 12 years ago

That's one of the main shortfalls I find in IRC as well. If it weren't for that (and basically requiring a bouncer/remote tmux session), I'd probably stick to IRC for quite a bit longer.

chambo622• 12 years ago

For the most part, this is true, but they don't have it working quite right on Android. Opening the app from the launcher doesn't clear active notifications as it would if you launch the app by clicking on the notification. I've also gotten into a broken state where it tried to open one #channel in the wrong organization and just gave up until I quit the app and tried again.

Hopefully with this new money they can invest a bit more in their Android development efforts.

baddox• 12 years ago

My experience is quite the opposite. I frequently get push notifications to my phone 15 minutes after reading and replying to PMs on my OS X native client.

kimar2• 12 years ago

My experience has been the exact opposite. I was reluctant to try yet another collaboration tool despite my teammates enthusiasm but after giving it a chance for a few days, I found the OSX and iOS apps extremely functional and well designed making Slack a real pleasure to use.

andrewliebchen• 12 years ago

I think this comment will be dragged up in the future every time there's a post about the success of Slack, not unlike that first thread about Dropbox on HN.

javery• 12 years ago

The most interesting things to me is that Campfire was around before this and Hipchat before that. It goes to show that execution is everything, Slack has completely crushed it from a feature and integration standpoint and the polish is amazing. We switched from Hipchat and we didn't really have a good reason - it just felt better.

If Campfire was growing $1MM a month I am pretty sure 37signals would now be called Campfire and not Basecamp.

coldtea4• 12 years ago

and the polish is amazing

Polish? It looks and feels like a ho-hum single page app (which it is).

dasil0032• 12 years ago

Oh please. Ho-hum? Name 5 web apps that with more impressive UX.

ThomPete• 12 years ago

Its shows that timing is everything.

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.

1123581321• 12 years ago

I think the biggest difference is that 37signals wasn't willing to offer an indefinite free version as a hook. Chat seems to be something that needs more room than a free trial and a low feature ceiling to catch on. Even a long free trial doesn't have the same effect as indefinite because it creates fear of wasting or misusing the trial. Humans are funny that way.

hanley2• 12 years ago

We switched from Hipchat and we didn't really have a good reason - it just felt better.

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.

rwc• 12 years ago

I made the same jump. Can't understate the value of "it just felt better" -- everybody who uses Slack in our organization has the same reaction, and it's dramatically increased desire to use the application. And, of course, buy-in is half the battle with getting these products to achieve their goal.

tg32• 12 years ago

In my experience, if a tool provides any business value at all, worrying about $6/employee is a complete waste of time. If Slack saves each employee 6 minutes per month then it has paid for itself.

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.

jlees• 12 years ago

We switched from Hipchat and we didn't really have a good reason - it just felt better.

Exactly the same here. The whole experience (especially the first run flow) was delightful and we immediately felt great about the decision.

zippergz• 12 years ago

Interestingly, I use Hipchat with one team I work with and Slack with another, and far and away prefer Hipchat. The Mac Slack app feels like a web page inside a chromeless browser window. The Hipchat Mac app feels like a real app (albeit one that doesn't really comply with all of the Mac UI conventions).

macNchz• 12 years ago

Mac Slack app feels like a web page inside a chromeless browser window

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.

bostonvaulter23• 12 years ago

I think one of the things that got slack going is that they have an actual free tier. I've wanted to use something like campfire or hipchat among dev teams before but I wasn't able to get someone to sponsor the lowest tier so we could just try it out. Also the devs were reluctant because everyone was in the same office.

tzakrajs• 12 years ago

How Atlassian of them.

rabino2• 12 years ago

I'm so happy for them. Great team and great product.

yarone• 12 years ago

Multiple folks have told me that Slack is the very first app that they check when they wake up in the morning. And then they use it for hours every single day.

To me, that's an incredibly powerful fact. Not many apps comsume user attention like that.

lbotos• 12 years ago

While that's true, I mean I _have_ to as that where the communication for my team happens. It's not like Slack did anything particularly inventive. They just happened to be "not HipChat" (Which we used to use but Slack just had that "cool new" factor)

jdimov• 12 years ago

That's exactly the point.

"Just" being a "not Google" just might make you a trillionaire.

kbar13• 12 years ago

s/Slack/<insert any IM service here>/g

Your statement is still true.

massel• 12 years ago

Serious question, can someone explain why a team using Hipchat should switch to slack?

tonyhb• 12 years ago

The major benefit of slack over hipchat is slack comes with integrations by default. IE: instead of having to use Zapier or such to hook into Trello slack can handle it for you.

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.

jamiequint• 12 years ago

search actually works, which is a big win

hanley2• 12 years ago

HipChat integrations can be frustrating/lacking and I often find myself resorting to Zapier. The integration with JIRA is a joke and a huge pain to setup/manage for large workflows, which is especially surprising since HipChat and JIRA are both part of Atlassian.

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.

jscheel2• 12 years ago

For the people who say group messaging is fine in email: are you all masochists? Seriously, if I have one more 45-email thread between 3 different people, I'm going to smack somebody. There is a time and place for email, but group chat is not it.

OoTheNigerian• 12 years ago

HipChat slacked (I know..;) ). They had this IM for business covered. Then The Slack people came in and took the integration thing seriously.

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 :)

jusben1369• 12 years ago

We switched from HipChat to Slack (my devs just made the "executive decision" one morning last April and we were done!) As a "Biz" guy I liked HipChat more. I thought it was cleaner and simpler to use and initially had better support for Android. And then when they added video/voice support (after we stopped using it) I cried a little as that's the only reason I still keep Skype open. Still I suspect Slack will use these $$'s to solve voice/video and I love the backstory so it's likely the right long term option for us.

adieth• 12 years ago

I don't understand why so many people use Slack, while it is completely lacking voice and video.

Looking at HipChat and Slack now, I would select HipChat because of the video and screen sharing features.

brianstorms• 12 years ago

IRC FTW. Slack gets big, gets acquired, integrates with Outlook, SAP, etc., becomes Outlook & SAP, nobody ever got fired for using Slack, etc., etc., Stewart becomes a billionaire, yadda yadda.

Meanwhile, IRC.

dasil0032• 12 years ago

Why would I forego the use of a tool that gives me dramatically more productivity right now than I could get even spending 100 hours configuring and managing an IRC server on the prediction that some years from now Slack is going to suck?

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.

philsnow• 12 years ago

It takes less than an hour to set up an IRCd, even with SSL.

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.

Domenic_S2• 12 years ago

Connect to slack over IRC! https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec...

pbreit• 12 years ago

At over $1b valuation, Slack has priced itself out of the M&A market for awhile.

serve_yay• 12 years ago

I'm not debating the arc you describe, but it does so many things so much better than IRC. It is a zillion times nicer to use.

ravivyas• 12 years ago

What I really like about Slack is that it reduces the amount of office email. I also love the number of integrations they have.

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.

nc• 12 years ago

Wonder if they'll offer to buy MetaLab now.

kingrolo2• 12 years ago

Also, the Slackbot is the friendliest bot I've come across.

chatmasta2• 12 years ago

Slack has been around since February 2014. An eight-month-old company raising $120M is damn impressive, no matter how you spin it.

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!

seanlinehan• 12 years ago

~$15k per current customer

chatmasta2• 12 years ago

Sounds like a bargain.

hobofan• 12 years ago

Slack has been in beta since August 2013 [1] and Tiny Speck exists since 2009.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/12/slack-exits-beta/

blumkvist• 12 years ago

Anyone remember Yammer?

cjbarber• 12 years ago

Wow.

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.

[1] http://www.breakoutlist.com/slack/

gtirloni• 12 years ago

First thought: "Why is Google VC investing in Slackware?"

Made my heart rate accelerate I little bit.

general_failure• 12 years ago

I will add this to the list of things that I thought can never be worth so much :-(

/me just do something already

burpee2• 12 years ago

I don't really see how this is worth a 1.12B valuation - even with this amount of users. I also think that the pricing for Slack is over the top.

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.

misuba• 12 years ago

Slack is massively better at dealing with documents.

arnauddri• 12 years ago

dealing with documents is a billion dollar feature?

burpee2• 12 years ago

I don't really see the difference. Care to elaborate?

thinkingkong• 12 years ago

I know you should take money when you can, but part of me is wondering if this is indicitive of some kind of "winter" coming for VC funding. If slack is growing that quickly, why not wait another 6 months and drive for a better valuation?

llamataboot• 12 years ago

The growth seems baked into this (really high) valuation to me.

bostonvaulter23• 12 years ago

There's a lot of money in replacing (a significant portion of ) email with an actual better solution.

mwarkentin• 12 years ago

I've been using Slack by myself as a replacement for email notifications from various services for my side projects and open-source projects. Works quite well!

bsjolund• 12 years ago

Nice to see a decent Flowdock competitor, but I still don't see a reason to switch.

lucisferre• 12 years ago

We switched for largely arbitrary reasons. I do really like the Slack experience, I'd say I prefer it in some ways. But Flowdock was also great, no real complaints there at all.

yesimahuman• 12 years ago

A sign that the switching costs are maybe not that big. We went from campfire to hipchat to slack. And each time we were happy to move on despite a history of chat messages (old documents aren't that useful since anything important is in Dropbox). Interesting phenomenon.

dkrich2• 12 years ago

I just don't see how SaaS at this scale can ever be profitable. Asana, Slack, and the like have to support large teams while the enterprise sales cycle is extraordinarily expensive. If you're Oracle and can charge $5k a seat plus consulting fees, then sure, I understand it. If you're an also-ran SaaS business charging $8 a user, you're never going to be profitable.

All of these are just different spins on the same communication features. There's nothing that's really defensible about any of them.

marcog1• 12 years ago

Asana engineer here. With such a large market size, we can scale the sales process to make it inexpensive. We only have a couple sales people. User operations, i.e. keeping customers, is larger but still in all less than 10.

lazzlazzlazz• 12 years ago

There are no discernible improvements over HipChat. I don't understand what the fuss is about. We're in a bizarro-world.

rdl3• 12 years ago

I basically hate every one of these services that I've ever used. Crashy, resource-intensive clients.

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.

ottumm• 12 years ago

I believe you can use IRC clients to connect to both HipChat and Slack.

rdl3• 12 years ago

XMPP clients (e.g. Pidgin/Adium).

But they block OTR (at least HipChat does), and you lose most of the functionality.

d0m• 12 years ago

I'd love to know more about why did Slack were able to get so much traction and raise that much money compared to Flowdock/Groove.io/Hipchat.

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.

But still, the difference in term of traction is massive, am I missing something?

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?

notatoad• 12 years ago

Is Slack actually as popular as it seems to be? I feel like i hear a lot more about HipChat in various forums/reddit/HN than I do about Slack, but i hear a lot more about Slack on blogposts and news articles. Is it actually being used more, or is it just being written about more?

pbiggar• 12 years ago

The difference in traction is insane! Slack has 15,000 companies paying them in a few weeks after launch. In the article it says they have $1m/mo revenue - that's incredible for such a young company.

Investors are making a bet that this is indicative that slack are going to take over the entire enterprise communication space.

mahyarm• 12 years ago

Also, mobile integration. Your not going to easily get push based notifications for irc on your iphone as far as I know.

fourstar• 12 years ago

The issue with slack is that they have these NUX notifications all over the place. If your product is that complicated, there's probably a deeper issue.

inthewoods3• 12 years ago

Is anyone on this thread using Slack (or Hipchat et al) outside of development? I've seen it be useful (along with Hipchat) with development and, to a lesser extent, design (UX/UI) - but outside of that no one seems interested. Just curious if others have the same experience. I was talking to a VP of Sales from another company that had adopted Flowdock and asked her what she thought of it - her response: "I hate it." Saw the same reaction to Salesforce Chatter.

With $120m, I hope they bring group video chat to Slack and a dedicated windows client.

Slack raises $120M Led by Google Ventures and KPCB at $1.12B Valuation

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