Slack Is Going Public At $16 Billion Value (npr.org) 123
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: In just five years, Slack has grown to have more than 10 million users and has become a verb in the process. "I'll Slack you" is shorthand for sending a message via the workplace chat platform. On Thursday, the company will take that popularity to the New York Stock Exchange, where its shares will be publicly listed for the first time. At a starting price of $26 per share set Wednesday, Slack Technologies would be worth about $16 billion. Instead of having a conventional initial public offering, Slack will enter into the market as a direct listing, which means the shares will simply be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Most firms that pass on an IPO are widely known companies that are in good financial shape. Fortune explains what it means to enter into the market as a direct listing: "Unlike an ordinary IPO, a direct listing means the company doesn't issue any new shares and doesn't raise additional capital. It's primarily a way for company insiders to sell some of their holdings to investors, while bypassing the formidable fees and requirements of using an underwriter."
How do they come up with this shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: How do they come up with this shit? (Score:1)
I know. My bank account is worth...... one quadrillion dollars. Yeah, that sounds about right. Who will buy shares from me at this valuation? Anyone? Hello?
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Because nobody learned lessons of the dot-com era.
The investors all point at Google or Facebook that all went up even after a crazy IPO. They, however, don't point at the mass of others that tanked almost immediately.
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The problem with shares is that a company will normally sell a fixed quantity of them. After the sell them the company has the money in its pocket. So after they sold all their stock, if the price dropped to near zero, they will still have the profit for all the sales of the stock. It would be the person who is trying to sell the stock would suffer the consequences.
Now stock normally gives the owner voting rights so if the stock price drops too much, the investors may have some control over the company to f
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Sorry - but I have to chime in on this issue . . .
IPO or LISTING and subsequent stock sales ==> $_MONEY_$ for printer-paper (STOCK)
Stock drops, and _SOME_ of the $_MONEY_$ is spent re-acquiring MOST of the devalued stock
BOTTOM LINE - company has repurchased a lot of the stock, and has $hitload$ of money from the high IPO / SALE vs the devalued repurchase of most of the 'floated' stocks.
Sorta' sounds like Business As Usual to me . . . .
and - even if the IPO - whatever - valuation DOESN'T dr
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They're just fucking making it up at this point!
Oh, it's going to get a lot better . . .
. . . wait for it . . .
. . . soon to be announced . . .
. . . SlackCoin!
That should give Facebook's Libra a run for the money.
Literally.
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Step 1: Make a product or offer a service.
Step 2: Sell product or service for more then it cost you to provide.
Step 3: Profit
A low capital company that sells a lot of stuff is going to have a higher net-worth, Then a high capital company who needs to make sure their prices are on par with competition will have a lower net worth.
Now these High Capital companies are often invested in as well, is because if worse comes to worse, the capital can always be sold, and a larger percentage of your investment would b
Re: How do they come up with this shit? (Score:2)
This is what happens when an important industry is 95% owned by a small handful of inbred upper class twits. Surveillance Valley oligarchy FTW!
Slack Is Going Public At $0 Value (Score:1)
Slack Is Going Public At $0 Value
That's the correct headline, at least if you go by my valuation and not their made-up BS.
Re: Slack Is Going Public At $0 Value (Score:4)
I use Slack. It's objectively worse than any traditional alternative, such as email or IRC. My company has just got into its late stage Slack use, wherein nobody has notifications enabled anymore, so it has degenerated into email with a shitty client interface.
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" it has degenerated into email with a shitty client interface"
This.
Incredibly, the *only* thing keeping Slack from being the same as some 1995-era proprietary email system is the fact that it has multiple inboxes by default. Which makes it worse than email. And even worse when you look at the stats for just about any organisation, and see that over 80% of messages are either private chats or DMs, Heck, it wasn't until last year that you could even CC anyone not in a channel. You had to first invite them to
Re: Slack Is Going Public At $0 Value (Score:2)
Ha! If your CEO is using Slack, you are probably at a tiny company. Slack is alright until you get more people on it. You'll see. Or you will if your company grows.
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The CEO isn't using slack, either. He is sending emails to the ALL_EMPLOYEES list, and is not expecting any replies or discussion.
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I'd pay at least $100 for Slack, knowing that some sucker would easily pay me $200. repeat ad infinitum.
What's wrong with XMPP, again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone remind me why we're trying to centralize all the old things the internet used to do in a de-centralized way? Only now with extra middlemen surveillance and monetization?
Re:What's wrong with XMPP, again? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Can someone remind me why we're trying to centralize all the old things the internet used to do in a de-centralized way?"
To better facilitate middlemen surveillance and monetization.
In a world where we are concerned about cyber infiltration and corporate espionage the last thing anyone should go near is slack.
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Mattermost and Zulip are wonderful alternatives.
XMPP still is the best if you're not worried about 'push' messages to mobile devices. The OS leaders in that area are actively trying to strangle communications apps in the name of extended battery life.
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I believe SIMPLE [ietf.org] can do push, on the assumption that since SIP can do it and SIMPLE is built on top of it. Sadly IETF is willing to standardize multiple protocols (XMPP, MSRP+SIMPLE, IMPP) that basically solve the same problem, even if few are willing to implement them.
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The problem with XMPP is there are too many choices of providers and integrators and software. Companies really don't like that. They just prefer to have a single choice and license scheme. It is stupid though, because the cost of a XMPP deployment is $0 and requires very little resources and maintenance, and you have full control over your internal communications. I used to work in the XMPP space and realized that companies really don't care about open standards or choice.
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Early stage, everything gets done, there is an attempt to do it well, and budgets arent barriers to doing things right.
Late stage, procedure gets done, there is no attempt to avoid procedure hurting the business, and budgets are the only thing that matters.
Re: What's wrong with XMPP, again? (Score:2)
Early stage they use the cheapest, easiest solution that sorta kinda meets the need.
Later stage they _might_ have the money, forethought, and political will to choose a solution that actually meets the need.
I build new Slack in Open Source (Score:3)
The reality is that it should not be possible for Slack to exist in this world where RocketChat is a thing. But here we are.
Maybe but just look at it [rocket.chat].
If I want to use something that is almost an exact Slack clone, why wouldn't I just use the real thing and get probably better support and probably more stability and more features?
The fact even that marketing screen shot doesn't show you another sidebar to switch between domains is a big clue as to the level of things you may be missing out on....
You also hav
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If I want to use something that is almost an exact Slack clone, why wouldn't I just use the real thing and get probably better support and probably more stability and more features?
Because with Rocket Chat you can host it yourself and avoid the aforementioned middlemen surveillance and monetization. If that isn't important to you then go ahead and use Slack.
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I agree about the surveillance, but as far as monetization goes, it's not free to host your own stuff. Slack is 12.50 per user, per month for the "Plus" version. Assuming you had 500 users, that's $75,000 a year. Sounds like a lot of money, but the system you host yourself isn't completely maintenance free. Somebody has to spend some time setting everything up, and then they have to do all the maintenance. Even if you don't have somebody dedicated to looking after it (which could easily approach the same co
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It doesn't cost $75,000 per year to run a messaging server that supports 500 users. You can even run it in AWS if you didn't want to bother with in house hardware. How many "maintenance" hours are there in supporting a messaging server? People have just gotten lazy.
Ain't nobody got time for that (Score:2)
Because with Rocket Chat you can host it yourself
Yes you can do that, but who has time for that crap anymore? I don't care how simple you think it is, keeping any server up and running takes effort and who has time to be the person on call to fix it, to update it, to secure it, to fix it when (not if) it goes down and everyone at the company is screaming for communications to resume?
Yes if you have a dedicated IT team maybe that could be managed, but for approximately no company is cast a core function of
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I know companies using IRC internally that simply wrote a custom module for their IRC server to log all messages on channels that had to be audited (or just all messages, not sure).
Are any such modules available publicly?
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XMPP does save something server side because backlogs work in rooms if history is enabled. I think it would be interesting to do an extension to make it work more broadly in private chats, but it might be easier to switch protocols than fundamentally alter XMPP's architecture.
I'm of the opinion that business requirements are counter to the needs of the public where free speech and privacy would be more important than legally mandated logging.
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You've inadvertently flagged the real problem with XMPP: It doesn't store messages server side, or it does store messages server side, depending on which protocol extensions a given implementation happens to have. For anything that you might want to do with XMPP, there are 2-10 different XEPs with varying levels of support, that describe how to do it.
XMPP badly needed a high-quality reference implementation of a server and a library for implementing clients. Instead it got two crappy reference implemen
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Every XMPP implementation has a server-side logging/auditing component. Give me a break.
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It turned out big business generally doesn't like de-centralization and big business has the big money that makes things happen.
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Actually, there's a very easy explanation.
XMPP is significantly more difficult to set up. XMPP also requires maintenance, and coordination between multiple parties if you want to do federation.
With XMPP, you need to know the server, the port, set up an account, etc. And lets not get into the various feature capabilities that one node may have that another does not.
The problem with XMPP is that it is made by geeks that assume everyone else who would use it is also a geek. Guess what? Geeks make up a very
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One word: Control.
Three more words: Take it back.
Re: if all uses were paying... (Score:1)
How about from their actual earnings report: 400 mil rev - 139 mil exp = 261 mil net annual profit.
If shark tank has taught me anything, it's that valuation is a 2 to 4 times annual revenue kind of game. Only fools use 10 to 20 times valuations.
261 mil * 2 = 522 mil
261 mil * 4 = 1,044 mil
Slack *might* be worth $1 billion, but $16 billion is just them trying to be funny or something?
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Where did that number come from? (Score:3, Insightful)
Slack offers a bloated, unstable client that connects users to a network where there is no 'user base'. There's nothing of value here except the established customer base. Have these investors even used the slack product before?
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Counterpoint (Score:5, Informative)
Slack offers a bloated, unstable client that connects users to a network where there is no 'user base'.
That is.... so wrong.
Well not the bloated part. But everything else, shows you don't seem to use Slack much.
I've tried a LOT of collaboration/chat tools. I generally work remote and have for a decade or so, I rely on tools like this to communicate with teams and clients and other technical people.
Simply put, there is nothing as good as Slack. There's nothing nearly as good as Slack, at connecting the very real other people you work with without having to talk to them some other way. How can you say it connects a user to a network with "no users" when inherently for any Slack instance you are always connecting a group (however small) of people with a desperate need to talk to each other more easily and continuously?
Does it go down sometimes? Yes, but it's pretty infrequent there are outages where you cannot communicate.
There's nothing of value here except the established customer base.
Curious, do you think more or fewer people will be working remotely over time? Do you think that every single company where people need to communicate with each other uses Slack already?
How can you say there is no growth potential here?
The initial valuation may be exaggerated but there is a very real value to Slack and very real room for growth going forward, so then the question is just - how much?
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That seems horribly close to IRC channels.
By the way, any half decent IM tool has channel or groups support. So nothing new here.
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This Yugo is functionally equivalent to a Tesla. So nothing new here.
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I use Slack every day and have done across multiple jobs (sw dev).
It is utterly utterly average.
+ You can chat (every IM I have used does that)
+ It keeps group chat history (ok, so do a lot of others)
+ It has lots of apps (ok, so this is not new)
- It is slow, clunky, boated and arrrrg (like everything in the world)
- It's not really that integrated for your average user. Yes, you can plug stuff into it, but Mary from accounts just doesn't care
16 Billion for average seems an overspend.
But that said, if peopl
What does Slack do that regular IM doesn't (Score:2)
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Hard to say as I've not used Lync, but basically I just find much less friction in using Slack to communicate with others compared to other clients I have used.
Some of it may be the instant video/audio calls built into the client as well.
Yes lots of other things will work OK, I've been able to use other chat clients to work. But it seems like scores of little things make other chat clients less easy to use, or more frustrating, where Slack mostly feels like it's out of the way and more like I'm really talk
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Slack requires no client. It uses a web browser.
I've never seen a web console application I've particularly wanted to use. Especially for something as integral to my day as this. Having browser window controls around an application just sucks bad. Even discord has clients.
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I use slack every day.
There is nothing that it does that IRC cant do better, cheaper, more reliably, and with better security.
Sure, its slightly better than its commercial competition, but thats not saying much.
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Great. Another Uber.
Good luck with that. Slack is to (or wants to be) chat as Gmail is to email.
Are you kidding me? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is April fools now on the summer solstice? "I'll Slack you" is shorthand for sending a message via the workplace chat platform. == $16,000,000,000
Re: Are you kidding me? (Score:2)
Not when you realize the phrase "I'll Slack you" only comes up so frequently because you need to clarify whether you sent it via email, text, Slack, or whatever. If you don't, then the recipient will never see it, because Slack has fundamentally destroyed your company's ability to communicate electronically without in person voice prompts.
IRC? (Score:1)
Who knew IRC was worth $16 billion? (Score:1)
Somebody should tell the investors that IRC has been around since the early '90s. Slack is just IRC with a clown suit on.
Hellooooooo short (Score:2)
No lock in, free competition. Short it. (Score:1)
We used to use Slack where I work (free version only). It was great and a lot better than the XMPP OpenFire server we used to use. (No screenshots, uploads never worked right, no markdown, etc). Slack worked pretty good, but there was an outage every 3-5 months for a few minutes, but nothing catastrophic.
Then someone installed Rocket Chat, which is pretty much equivalent to Slack, but Open Source, and you can just host it yourself. So who cares about Slack? What's the big feature of Slack that makes it
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What's the big feature of Slack that makes it work 16 billion dollars?
Hype and eyeballs. Just like during the dot com bubble.
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RocketChat limiting you to 1000 notifications/month (deployment-wide) in the free version is kind of a killer though.
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This "some effort" literally means obtaining iOS and Android dev licenses and compiling and deploying your own mobile apps.
Meanwhile, 1000 notifications per month for a team of 50 means you get 20 notifications per user per month. So basically you run out in 1-3 days.
Microsoft Teams! (Score:1)
IPO racket (Score:2)
Everyone who is concerned about the Venture Capital investors foolishly making a big mistake, don't you worry. They just got all their money back and a lot more, they are out of Slack now forever. They couldn't care less if Slack tanks tomorrow. The suckers are people like you and I who at some point might decide to try in get in on an IPO to make a few bucks, or trade Slack ponzi scheme style not worrying about the underlying product or company, but hoping to make a a few bucks on an uptick of the stock
Reinventing the Wheel (Score:2)
Slack is great, but I don't understand how a fancy IRC client that somehow managed to take over a gig of memory is worth $16 billion.
SEC filing (Score:1)
approximately doubling revenue each year, but costs increasing inline with that (so also approximate doubling).
then take a look at the section around Emerging Growth Company (JOBS): "take advantage of certain exemptions from various public reporting requirements, including the requirement that our internal control over financial reporting be audited by our independent registered public accounting firm pursuant to Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the Sarbanes-Ox