Mattermost Raises $50 Million For Its Open Source Slack Alternative (venturebeat.com) 38
An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat:
Mattermost, a startup developing what it characterizes as an open source messaging alternative to Google's Hangouts Chat, Atlassian's HipChat, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, today announced the closure of a $50 million series B funding round. The round was led by Y Combinator's Continuity Fund, with participation from new investor Battery Ventures, as well as existing investors Redpoint and S28 Capital.
The capital infusion follows a $20 million series A in February and a $3.5 million seed round in February 2017 and brings the Palo Alto, California-based company's total raised to roughly $70 million. As part of the round, Twitter COO Ali Rowghani will join Mattermost as board director and Battery Ventures' Neeraj Agarwal will join as a board observer. The raise comes as monthly downloads of the open source project pass 10,000. To date, more than 1,000 contributors have helped translate Mattermost into 16 languages.
The capital infusion follows a $20 million series A in February and a $3.5 million seed round in February 2017 and brings the Palo Alto, California-based company's total raised to roughly $70 million. As part of the round, Twitter COO Ali Rowghani will join Mattermost as board director and Battery Ventures' Neeraj Agarwal will join as a board observer. The raise comes as monthly downloads of the open source project pass 10,000. To date, more than 1,000 contributors have helped translate Mattermost into 16 languages.
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I would just take the $70 million, and add a few things to IRC protocol. Pure profit! And you would end up with a better product!!
Open source email clients? (Score:2, Insightful)
How popular are open source email clients? They exist. Usage is low.
Why would we expect an open source Slack alternative to do relatively better?
Also, isn't the user experience of Slack the main reason it gets used? How many open source tools have great GUIs and a slick user experience? Seems like they mostly don't.
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Matter most, rocket chat, to name a couple. And this isn't just a client, it's a service you can host yourself which is what really distinguishes it from the list in tfa
Because users really love "a service you can host yourself"?
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Because users really love "a service you can host yourself"?
My company sure does. We ran HipChat Data Center version self hosted until they cashed out and sold to Slack.
Why should our employees be chatting on someone else's system we have no control over? We switched to Mattermost, and self host it on our own servers. We've been quite happy with it.
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I recommended slack to a friend, but his employer won't touch it because they do military work and have higher security requirements. If they could self host, then they may use it.
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Did you suggest IRC? You can secure the hell out of that, Or even roll your own server with your own preferences and services included. Roll a small front end and even allow your employees to connect with their already favorite client...
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Because users really love "a service you can host yourself"?
When a small VPS is $25/month I surely do prefer host-your-own services for informal groups or a small tech businesses (like a consulting company).
We use mattermost at my employer... (Score:3)
Policies against using cloud services had us deploy mattermost internally.
It's pretty much just like using slack, not really behind slack usability wise.
Open source email infrastructure is used a lot. It's certainly closer to being worth $50 million than slack is being worth $20 billion. Admittedly slack's brand strength is what is really valuable and it has that much more than mattermost, but I don't think that is enough to say it is worth $19.95 billion more.
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How many open source tools have great GUIs and a slick user experience? Seems like they mostly don't.
It isn't "mostly", it is none. 0. Not a single one. The FOSS community is openly hostile to good GUIs and scoffs at the existence of things like "user experience". Given that their work is best suited to back end stuff, not anything that normal people will interact with directly. Even then most of it doesn't scale like a Windows based system would so only enterprises that are broke and short sighted and/or willing to make performance concessions in trade for ratifying their own misguided worldview use the
Re:Open source email clients? (Score:4, Informative)
It isn't "mostly", it is none. 0. Not a single one.
But yet Mattermost looks and works much like Slack. Now, whether Slack's UI is considered good or bad is a separate question, but in terms of Mattermost's usability, anyone who uses Slack would feel right at home. Additionally, it's free and you can host it yourself if you so wish (we do).
We had employees who wanted to switch to Slack once HipChat was discontinued (we ran that self hosted). We didn't want our internal comms on someone else's system we have no control over so went with Mattermost self hosted. Haven't had a single complaint and our employees didn't have any issues figuring it out.
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IRC, Roll your own GUI, the back end is there already. All your GUI would need would be something like link handling for previews and image rendering. And could incorporate something like ZNC so you could save $amount of backlog when new users connected. I could do it for only $35 million... Wish I knew some VC's.
The tools are there already open source, you just need to glue some shit together.
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Slack were the first to do that massively successfully, and now they are cashing in on it.
I understand the jealousy, but not the hate. Anyone is welcome to "just IRC and some UI and some glue". I wish you the best of luck - honestly.
#announcing #chat (Score:1)
Come get it here. Hashchat, or #chat for short.
#it #will #turn #your #every #word #into #a #hashtag #automatically.
#many #innovation #so #progress #wow
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Thats a feature.
Why? Slack is Over Glorified IRC Client (Score:1)
Slack really doesn't do much more than many IRC clients.. it does a few things a little differently but one could easily emulate that using IRC.
Most specifically, keeping history and side channels.
Slack originally linked with IRC and they recently removed that. Slack is clearly an unethical "embrace and extend" scheme.
Matthew
Re: Why? Slack is Over Glorified IRC Client (Score:1)
I always feel like Slack is a less comfortable version of IRC that I can't use HexChat, Bitch-X, or telnet with.. fuck the protocol is that simple.
We've gone horribly backwards. The worst part about knowing what you're doing is watching everyone else reinvent the basics because they didn't see if they existed already.
We had (more popularly) decentralized IRC, OTR without central servers managing things, private TeamSpeak-type servers..
Now we send everything to & through one of the big ones.
IRC is robust AF (Score:1)
When the large multi-campus network is screwed up at my work, network engineers around the world use IRC to coordinate because none of that other web shit is up and working for everyone at the same time.
MatterMost, FTW! (Score:3)
Open-source, and you can host your own! There will come a day when Slack is hacked, and a lot of people will regret being on that platform. Also: why do we keep reinventing IRC?
Slack Is Way Better Than IRC (Score:4, Funny)
It has a flat pastel colored web interface. w00t!
And it has an API that lets you script bots. I know IRC does too, but Slack's is more modern, so it's obviously superior. Also using the API, you can integrate Slack with other things and other web services. Yea, you could do the same with IRC, but I heard that it looks more complicated and some of the other services already have Slack integration, so there's no need to develop anything at all.
Security? Ain't nobody got time for that shit. Look how I can automatically bring my trouble ticket into Slack, fire a powershell script to try to fix it, and then send alerts through Zapier and IFTT to page me that the powershell script failed. Rube Goldberg would be so proud of me, and it's all thanks to Slack.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you don't use Slack, you're just old and in the way. Maybe you should retire and let younger people that better understand tech take care of business.