When I worked at Uber we used this an it was internally called "uChat". I have two things to note about this:<p>1) When uChat was first rolled out the team who ran the rollout did everything they could to make it seem as though they had created uChat from scratch and that it was an internal tool, even though everyone knew it wasn't. The rollout was comically inefficient and the platform didn't scale at all to Uber's size. The uChat team then tried at an all-hands to talk about what a great job they had done building uChat which was followed by a slew of questions around all of uChat's massive failings such that the CEO started grilling them a bit. It was both embarrassing and strangely funny to watch what was either their total lack of self-awareness or their blatant misrepresentation of everything they had done.<p>2) When I left Uber in November of last year, uChat was still pretty dysfunctional. I use Slack today in my new role and it's a MASSIVE step up.
Glad to see them doing well. Working for a company that legally cannot use services that are not self-hosted can be quite a challenge and Mattermost really is a godsend in that regard.
Is it really not possible to bootstrap this or raise through debt? Why do you need $20m to compete in this market?<p>I wish more companies would avoid taking large outside investment, but maybe that’s unrealistic.
I really hope they make the free version of mattermost a bit more safe to use. Currently, any user can archive the channel and the security is really scary.
Does the thing they're trying to to build really cost more than 20M to build?<p>If so, why? That sum buys a lot of engineering and sales hours.<p>And if not, why raise so much?
I'm a big fan Mattermost but it really needs to spend this money on:<p>-making decent mobile apps. I know the current Android one is awful
-introducing end to end encryption for conversations
Mattermost is open core and doesn't federate. Matrix.org / riot.im is the better alternative, even if it has taken them a longer time to get to this point.