Slack raises $200M at $3.8B valuation for business messaging

I&#x27;m honestly astounded that so many high profile corporations are willing to use slack without an on-premise version.<p>Slack is the only SaaS that has access to, and STORES PERMANENTLY, every important private message, group message, document, commit, internal URLs, .... of your company.<p>At some point in the future, slack <i>will</i> get hacked. Every sufficiently popular product does. It&#x27;s only a matter of time. And when it does, the data hosted by slack will be an absolute treasure trove for competitive intelligence, &quot;insider&quot; trading, hacking, and a variety of other bad, bad things.<p>Not to mention, an arbitrary number of employees at slack can read the internal communications of any company using their product. I&#x27;m sure slack has some &quot;security&quot; measures in place to prevent this, but it would only take one rogue employee with the keys to the kingdom to snoop on any data imaginable. This seems incredibly dangerous to me...

I love Slack but I fell like they are making the same mistake as Dropbox have done.<p>They have taken a great business and is pumping it up way beyond it&#x27;s natural growth trajectory and is ignoring what I consider the most important advice for 99% of businesses&quot;: Be patient for growth not for profit as Clayton Christensen is saying.

How do people feel about Quip as a competitor to Slack?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quip.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quip.com</a><p>I was sceptical, but Quip&#x27;s combination of chat and group-editable documents feels actually much better for dev teams than Slack, which ends up very unstructured.<p>(I have no association with Quip at all, but recently had the chance to use it in a Slack-like context.)

Slack&#x27;s one of the many things we use and don&#x27;t pay for because the free version does exactly everything we need. Asana, NewRelic... a bunch of things are the same way. I worry some day they&#x27;ll all dump the free plans and we won&#x27;t be able to afford whatever pricing they come up with. It&#x27;s not like we can&#x27;t pay anything, but have so far found no need for the paid plans. I kinda sorta feel like a free loader. So I guess they have a good number of paying customers? At least with that valuation, I&#x27;d hope so.

For the &quot;irc is just as good as Slack, you should just use irc&quot; crowd, Slack&#x27;s mobile clients are pretty good. Ever tried to get a non techie person to use irc on a mobile device? Ever used <i>irc</i> on a mobile device? The experience is terrible.<p>Slack&#x27;s clients also have persistence, as in shows the most recent history of communication.<p>Not everyone uses screen&#x2F;tmux with irc (though they should).

Wow this is a disaster waiting to happen. They will never generate enough profits to support this type of funding.

Any word on if they had any employee liquidity in the round?

If you are in ASEAN, let use other solution by <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;antbuddy.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;antbuddy.com</a> or a solution for FREE slack at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.antbuddy.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.antbuddy.com</a>

I&#x27;m a great fan of Slack. Large portion of revenue for an b2b app like Slack will come from big corporations and businesses with more than 200 employees.<p>Microsoft&#x2F;Google are heavily invested on large enterprises. These big giants can pull off a product like Slack and sell to all the big clients. Microsoft already sells communicator to large corps. They can switch that to Microsoft-Slack version and bundle it with their office products taking the large (90% revenue) out of Slack pocket.<p>Slack has to go really big to hit enterprises hard or they will be just serving small medium businesses which will have churn burn and less LTV.

One area they could improve (besides the obvious one being video chat) is integration with other bug trackers. The Jira plugin is quite pathetic. Granted, Atlassian owns hipchat AND jira, but hipchat&#x27;s jira integration is excellent. The slack plugin for jira is pretty terrible and is why $employer went with hipchat sadly.

I was a big Slack skeptic when my employer decided to roll it out. But just a few weeks in, it has cut my skype usage by 90% and has resulted in a lot more communication with colleagues than skype.<p>I think Slack is on its way to really challenging apps like skype and gotomeeting for the enterprise use-cases.

I am still looking for more security enabled in it. We can&#x27;t go over to it yet as a company.

Note: not an April Fools joke.

Now if only they had an on-premies solution.

Why does anyone thinks that a centralized chat service is a good idea? I especially don&#x27;t get why open source projects move to a platform they cannot even control or commit to.<p>It makes no sense.

I loved quora response about the valuation <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;How-is-Slacks-rumored-2-76-billion-valuation-calculated&#x2F;answer&#x2F;Patrick-Mathieson?srid=3PV&amp;share=39dba0a2#" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;How-is-Slacks-rumored-2-76-billion-val...</a>

This proves that people are not sane these days! $3.8B for a fancy version of Yahoo! Messenger, wow!

Wondering if any of the current&#x2F;ex-employees were allowed to liquidate their holding?

&gt;insane 3.5X user growth.<p>Is that that insane for a successful startup? I think that comes out at 2.4%&#x2F;week which is a bit lower than YC tends to aim for.

Can anybody explain this valuation?

Just more evidence the media, that for months has been sounding the alarm that Web 2.0 had burst, is almost always useless and wrong. Tech media no exception. I guess it&#x27;s not burst. The Nasdaq stock index is up 15% from the lows in Fed. We&#x27;re seeing a flight to quality, not a bubble burst, which is a subtly that is lost on most journalists.

My guess (wishful thinking): They need money to make and maintain an on-premise version.

This is a ubiquitous business model that will succeed where evernote failed.