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.<p>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.<p>Huge props to the team on this valuation but I'm still quite confused.
My favorite thing about Slack is how they've thought of all the little things. My go-to example is that when they send you a notification email, it includes links to silence further emails with a single click.<p>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 <i>pleasurable</i> product to use.
How did Slack blow up so quickly? I remember when I first read about it on TheVerge, that same morning the head of our sales team messages the CTO and suggests our company try it out. Next thing I know, every other company is using it.<p>From my perspective, it went from nothing to huge success overnight.
A friend shared the thought that Slack is a little bit of a scary company to invest in because it was very easy to adopt.<p>"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.<p>I wonder about this. Will people move to the new, better thing and ditch their existing product? Is that an existential threat to Slack?<p>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).
Can someone with more experience comment on the terms of the investment itself? Why would people invest in this company if they haven't even begun to spend the $120M of their series D money yet?<p>For those of us outside of Silicon Valley who don't have the same funding climate, what's it like?
For those that are confused about the value of Slack – It's not just about text chat. It's about comprehensive search and combatting organizational forgetfulness and knowledge drain. If we put it on Slack, it's archived "forever" and a team member a few years from now can start with a Slack search before re-inventing the wheel.<p>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.
Do platforms like Slack really offer a great benefit to a business? Maybe I'm being cynical, but it seems that if you had a dysfunctional organisation then this is not a silver bullet, and if you had a well functioning organisation you would manage just fine with old fashioned tools like email and Dropbox.<p>> Support for private groups and 1:1 direct messaging gives you complete flexibility. Private things stay private, so just the right people see them.<p>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?<p>There are other things that bother me, such as<p>> The “ambient awareness” that comes from increased transparency cuts down on the need for meetings.<p>> “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.”<p>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?<p>I've just never come across Slack in London yet, so maybe I'm yet to understand what it's like in practice.
Ignoring the question of "why are they valued so much," I have a more immediate question... what do they need all this money for????<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
For those wondering how/why Slack took off so fast, read this: <a href="https://qz.com/335321/slack-is-everywhere-growing-fast-and-still-works-great-heres-how-they-did-it/" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/335321/slack-is-everywhere-growing-fast-and-s...</a>
I've not used Slack. How does it differ from Yammer and Jive? I ask, because those two work collaboration platforms have their own valuations. Yammer was bought for $1 billion by Microsoft. Jive Software's current market cap is $404 million.<p>I'm curious what the key differences are that drive a $2.8 billion valuation relative to the lower valuations of those two companies.
This is a case where I see the outrageously high valuation and really do think it's reasonable. They're allegedly adding $1m in annually recurring revenue every 11 days, which is just phenomenal for this young a product. They'll be in range for an IPO in less than 2 years if they want. Slack has just really nailed it and is moving really quickly.
Huge props to the Team at Slack. They've made a great product.
My personal opinion is, tools like slack and others can get quite distracting with the constant notifications.
I foresee in the future where startups are doing products that reduce/manage the "noise".
I don't understand why so many businesses use a product with such a weak SLA as their main mode of communication. Both Hipchat and Slack have terrible uptime guarantees, and you should stay away from them.
It's a great product. Really enjoy using it. But with this much attention and hype it makes me worried about who is going to come in and buy them and ruin it.