Can someone explain to me why this is worth $200m in funding

Can someone explain to me why this is worth $200m in funding

It's an instant messaging program

It's a motherfucking instant messaging program

"Startup geniuses do it again!!!"

please kill me Sup Forums, i can't take mainstream tech anymore

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I think the worst part about slack is that it can't scale for shit. That is what really buffdles me about the whole situation.

I use slack to talk with former coworkers in rooms, it works pretty good for us

I had never previously considered that, but you're right.

Things like Slack are responsible for devaluing the US dollar desu.

thanks OP I kept seeing ads for this shit and had no idea what they what product they were trying to sell

Is # literally a meme at this point?

derp
what product they were trying to sell*

why use slack over any of the other hundreds of preexisting instant messaging programs though

>at this point
It's been a meme for the past 5 years user

They grabbed a huge market share like lightning, offered a solid product across platforms and have a clear and reliable means for generating revenue. They're an investor's dream. That means it belongs in though, not here. The technology aspect is IRC with built-in history.

>closed platform IRC clone with emoji support
Quick, what's another very popular program that has been around for years? I need to clone its features and shill it extremely hard on HN until I get some of that sweet funding.

It's prettier and better designed.

Excel. Go fix Excel, I'm dead serious. Take all of its most powerful features and break them out into tools which don't intimidate corporate users. Give out the platform for free but sell the "cloud" sharing solution. You will be richer than a pig in shit if you can demystify spreadsheets for everyone from the top to the bottom of the business hierarchy.

yeah i dont get this shit. my job recently switched from hipchat to slack and i dont fucking get it, I could code us this shit

(Oh and don't tell me "Google Sheets." They didn't do it right. The tools are no easier to use than Excel and in fact many functions are outright missing. People want to click one button and have a "live dashboard" of their data appear. They want pivot tables and index/match to work like magic. They want data connections to be as simple as two taps on a screen.)

Can you email a list of these features to me? I will fucking make this right now.

flora (at) national dot shitposting dot agency

>not .pizza
Sorry I don't play ball with little league clients.

>good marketing and design
>mediocre alternatives
>SaaS, so non-tech guys can simply subscribe
>easy file uploading and sharing
>support for integration of other services
>free plan as a bait
>too long before realize you became too dependent on slack and there are no export history/files feature

I can see why it's successful, if a company I work at would use it, I would be fine with it. But for now, we use Mattermost, a self-hosted alternative, it works fine as well. No more emails within the company.

That's way too complicated
Also what you describe here already kind of exists, there's a ton of startups in the business intelligence field and most of them struggle to find clients.
Excel will keep on living for as long as businesses rely on spreadsheets filled with macros written 15 years ago.

>That's way too complicated
And yet you say that people have done it "a ton of" times. Must not be that hard to take a stab. But on that point,

>already kind of exists
Where?

>No more emails within the company.

Is this a clever way to get around accountability requirements?

It delivers a stable solution that companies are willing to pay for.

challenge everything m80

It's probably one of the best messengers out there.

being autistic must be so debilitating.

do you have fucking panic attacks over construction companies being worth money, OP?

you have no use for them, and yet people seem to value those companies so highly! what's the deal?!

yes.

you figured it out.

It's basically a modern IRC

Not really. Autistics are actually more prone to get rich off of startup ideas like Slack because idiots like you will buy into them. :)

Why are you so upset?

>Why are you so upset?
I'm not upset. You were the one who asked us to kill you because, as you so melodramatically put it, you "can't take mainstream tech anymore".

it sounds like you're the one who's upset, and now you're projecting that onto anyone who tries to dig deeper at the source of the problem in this thread (whatever disorder you have)

Slack is Canadian

Woah motherfucker, that sounds way too hard/actually useful

Cue the talk by Joel Spolsky where he demonstrates Excel and off-handedly mentions that about one startup per week appear that's just providing some variation on Pivot Tables.

youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

That would be what is known as a hyperbole.

A sign of actual, real life autism is taking things literally when they aren't meant to be interpreted that way.

I don't understand. Why does this bother you OP?

There's lots of software in the world that's clearly not meant for you. Like let's ignore that some software appeals to different people differently; there is a lot of enterprise software out there that's purpose built to satisfy requirements you will never have.

Why does it not immediately connect for you that Slack might be a less extreme example of that?

I could explain how my group uses Slack, but I'm not sure if it would be of any use. OP, have you decided that you just want to die no matter what, or are you actually trying to understand how other people live?

i don't think anyone here thought you were asking for someone to help you with euthanasia over your inability to relate to people. but the fact that you were not being literal doesn't make your reaction reasonable. you're still being an unbelievably melodramatic faggot.

Did you forget to take your lithium today? Most people in this thread agree with me.

Sorry if it bothers you that Slack doesn't make you as special for using it as you may have thought it does.

Everything you can do with Slack, you can do with programs that already exist.

Tell me why a rehashed product should be worth $200M.

>inb4 because that's what people value it as

>A sign of actual, real life autism is taking things literally when they aren't meant to be interpreted that way.

Holy shit, an actual autistic using "autism" as a general insult. Amazing.

What is it about me disliking Slack that is upsetting you so much?

I feel like I've somehow offended your ego.

>Most people on Sup Forums agree with me.
Sup Forums is the most autistic, out of touch group of fucking retards in the universe.

Because a fuckton of people and companies use it. Doesn't surprise me one bit that they got 200m in funding. They actually have a revenue model, unlike 95% of startups.

So... Smartsheet?

So what if a ton of people use it?

Is value really that arbitrary?

The existence of Slack feels like a pretty good case against capitalism. Humans are too retarded to know what they want and why they should want it, evidently.

The flip side of that coin is, people like me can easily get rich because we know that "value" is a social construct (using this term unrelated to leftist politics -- please don't misinterpret what I mean) and can thus exploit predictable human behaviors for our own profits

:)

It's a functional platform that ties into other services without requiring your own hardware to run it. It's an improvement over email in many use cases and there really isn't a better alternative. Remember Google Wave? Some of us thought that had a lot going for it but adoption sucked. This isn't a bad replacement.

You hopefully do understand that VCs may not have a clue about what is IRC? That they're investing to get a market position? That there is also lots of competition in the "leak your business secrets to our cloud platform" market?

Other than that, the valuation of a privately traded startup is never in line with its actual worth, except for the owners. Sure, they're swimming in money right now.

You know Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19 billion dollars right? Nineteen BILLION.

$200 million is meaningless.

>Everything you can do with Slack, you can do with programs that already exist.

Er. Slack integrates several different functions into one, clean user interface, right?

I think you underestimate the business value of a clean, powerful UI.

I repeat, the BUSINESS VALUE. I think you're thinking like a nerd rather than like a manager. The manager doesn't care if ten tools already do the job, he wants every shithead in marketing to be able to seamlessly communicate with each other and fire off crafted marketing blurbs to Twitter, all with near-zero training.

>Everything you can do with Slack, you can do with programs that already exist.
Yeah, but not necessarily as easily, or as quickly, or as intuitively, or with these combinations of these qualities.

There's a lot of software out there that accomplishes the same task as other software. They differentiate on myriad things, like user experience for one.

- Slack does third-party integrations in a way that's easier than IRC is if you're not tech savvy.
- Slack also makes it easier to get someone set up if they're not familiar with the medium (adding an IRC network or channel to your setup is easy if you already use it, but it's decidedly not so if you're new to IRC).
- Slack channels and messages are persistent, so if you're not signed in for some time, you can catch up readily.
- Slack's mobile applications are pretty intuitive out of the box.

Not a single factor I listed above is insurmountable for IRC. You can do richer third party integrations and you can conceivably make third party integrations easier for end users to implement. You can conceivably give someone a starter script and tutorial to get them through the initial learning curve of using IRC, and you can easily set someone up with a persistent screen/tmux session on a central server and have them ssh into that to access a persistent chat log (and then the client would be the ssh client!)

But these are all a lot of extra work for the one man volunteering, at this point, to be in charge of making that all happen. If you're in a team, nobody in the team wants to volunteer for that work, so they're almost definitely going to opt for the package that works out of the box.

Dumbfuck, I"m not the guy you were replying to. I just found it hilarious how utterly moronic your "argument" was and your 8th grade level attempt at throwing down the autism card.

>working for a tech company with people who don't know how to use IRC
If I get a CS degree is this what my future holds in store?

Did you have a bad day at school?

>with near-zero training.

This is key right here. I'm sure everyone here knows how to use IRC and countless other tools. Good luck getting Jane from HR to use that shit.

As shitty as Slack is, I honestly can't think of any other messaging program which is as good for company-wide use. If only they would remove that giphy bullshit though...

>If I get a CS degree is this what my future holds in store?

Hey kiddo, in the real world, people actually want to work instead of shitposting in an IRC channel. Actually, you'll still be doing that if you're the nerd you think you are, but you'll be communicating with the people you work with through a platform like Slack because everyone can easily use it regardless of background. Hate to break it to you but you're going to be working with people who aren't nerds.

This is the best argument in favor of Slack that I have seen yet.

Not fully convinced though.

It's not just this (although this is true too). I'm a PhD student in CS at a good university. Nobody in my research group is interested in managing an IRC server. I'm pretty sure that of the ~20-30 PhD students in the broader research group, at least 5 have done it in the past, so it's not about a lack of skill, but a lack of time and interest.

Running admin for any technical system means setting aside time to do that. We all have work to do - research, applying for fellowships and grants, etc... - and nobody wants to split their focus to implement any of the stuff that Slack does more or less out of the box.

>in the real world, people actually want to work
This is a nightmare. This isn't real life. I'm dreaming and I'm going to wake up soon.

>If I get a CS degree is this what my future holds in store?
If you get a job in tech, you will be paid to work on the code that makes the company money, or that otherwise advances the agenda of the organization in question. In my case, , that means doing research and getting papers submitted and accepted to prestigious conferences. Time spent working on an IRC bot is time spent not working on a paper.

You need to understand that tinkering away with an internally managed IRC server, spending hours configuring your linux setup, etc... will get you fired. You need to be productive toward the previously mentioned end goals, and you get very little time to get up to speed wherever you go. If you're a high maintenance person who needs to spend a few days setting up his desktop environment or a week working out the kinks in a messaging server, someone will suggest an alternative that gets up and running sooner, and "satisfices".

You probably can't even begin to appreciate what sort of pressure you face as a high school student, but post high school (undergrad, grad school, and industry) you *generally* earn virtually no respect for being familiar with obscure systems when more mainstream, more immediately useful systems exist.

When you grow up you'll realize you're being melodramatic over nothing. Being an adult is a net improvement, even with the added responsibilities and expectations.

I mean, being responsible was never that difficult for me, so maybe if you're actually unable to do things like feed yourself or do laundry or something, then it's a net negative, but that's probably why competitive tech companies handle stuff like laundry and whatnot for their engineers - because they would come in smelling like a rat died in their clothing after a few weeks.

this. fuck you and fuck this generation.

this is the primary reason for all the dumb techshit in the last decade.

Because companies actually spend money to use it, retard.

People would be bored if they just did nothing all day. Granted, that personality type exists, but most people still want to do their job to a certain acceptable degree. This gets more and more true the more fulfilling the work is. Which is why I'm not a code monkey.

this is the dumbest shit I've ever seen.

So in other words, value is placed completely arbitrary?

You believe this, and I'm the retard? What the fuck?

"Better designed" doesn't just mean shinier. better design means the things you want are easier to find, feedback from the system is clearer, etc...

On Sup Forums there's what I would best describe as a "layperson understanding" of design to mean something like the equivalent of modern abstract art - that it has absolutely no relationship with function or performance. It's completely insane. Good design means better usability, not just for beginners but also for experts.

I'll spell it out for you. Slack has a certain amount of people who pay for their product. They also have a certain degree of growth, which means they will likely be making more money in the future. Their value is derived both from their monthly revenue and their growth potential. What's so fucking hard to understand about that I do not know. It's not arbitrary.

Value is arbitrary, welcome to capitalism.

If someone won't dig out a lump of coal from the ground for less than $x, then coal is worth at least $x

Actually, what you described is precisely the definition of arbitrary.

I'm just going to assume that you're trolling and that you're not actually this autistic.

What? People make projections based on growth rates, current number of users, number of paid users, current revenue, trends in the market, etc. It's very far from arbitrary. How exactly are you defining arbitrary here? Anything that isn't 100% proven? What actually wouldn't qualify as arbitrary to you in terms of business finance?

Because you're not capable of coming up with a counter argument? Okay, I'll accept your forfeiture.

I see #Slack already hired some shills.

if you think everything people don't speak negatively about must be paying for shills on Sup Forums, you're a fucking retarded faggot.

This always strikes me as being an even lazier argument than the one it's countering. It often shows that the person arguing about something is so disconnected from reality that they're using other people's unwillingness (typically after an entire thread where they put up with your dumb shit) to argue with you further as reinforcement for your own insane beliefs.

You're young, you've already admitted as much, you probably are fine with endless circular arguments. Not everyone else is. There comes a point when people just get fed up with dealing with it. You've also indicated that you're shocked that people would actually do work and not dick around on IRC all day which all point to you caring more about arguing than the argument itself. You'll grow out of this, we all do, but please understand that not everyone wants to deal with this shit when it just goes in circles. Throughout this entire thread you've rejected every single thing everyone has said. You're the minority here. You're the one with no idea what you're talking about. You're the one who doesn't work for a company that uses Slack and sees the benefit. You need to shut the fuck up and learn.

I see #Slack already hired some useful idiots for free.

Yeah? So how do the criteria you listed translate into a monetary value that isn't arbitrarily decided?

Glad I wasn't the only one who noticed.

>people like this are already becoming the main userbase of Sup Forums
*sigh*

Blah blah blah. What makes you think I care about your opinion?

>Yeah? So how do the criteria you listed translate into a monetary value that isn't arbitrarily decided?

Because they can correlate various factors using numbers that already exist to extrapolate them into the future using economic theory that's tried and tested. Holy shit, what DO you know? Even in high school I had enough background to figure something like this out.

If you don't care about opinions why did you make this thread? Jesus christ, did weekend Sup Forums show up early? Oh right, it's a holiday weekend and some people ended up with 4 days off.

Too late, user.

anaplan.com

I don't care about your opinion specifically because frankly, you sound like a bitter idiot who probably unironically uses the phrase "I fucking hate millenials."

Do me a favor and overdose on your anti-depressants.

anal pain?

I'm a millenial, too, asshole. Millenials cover a wider range than just the kids who are in college right now. But glad I was correct enough about you to upset you this much.

Never used slack, but I've had a few people try to shill it to me. What do you mean it doesn't scale?

Meant to quote

Still within the realm of arbitration.

Less talking, more Zoloft swallowing.

You should post here more often

please go back to facepunch dot com, we dont want you here

But Apple situation is really funny. Retards are buying laptops with million x million resolution and shitty Intel Integrated video every 1-2 years, but it still lags.

>but it still lags
Except it does not, Pajeet.

Except when it does. Face it, your shitty laptop video card can't handle resolution this big. Enjoy your silky smooth 5 fps, faggot.

With proof that good M$ has no choice but deposit 15 cents into your account.

Right, just call him shill, that will show him! Because only Microsoft and Apple make laptops!

it's a front end to irc lmao

Didn't the first generation version come with a dedicated GPU as standard?

I have the newest version on intel graphics and I occasionally drive a 4k monitor along with the integrated monitor. never had an issue with lag. without more concrete information about this, i can't even try to help validate your experience. Assuming it is experience and you're not reporting some other person's experience (assuming they actually experienced it).

>Didn't the first generation version come with a dedicated GPU as standard?
yes. also, this is not only off topic of the original point (that Sup Forums is so fucking stupid that they don't understand the value of higher pixel density displays), but it's even off topic of the thread's point, that the OP is such an autistic, out of touch fa/g/got that he doesn't understand that people other than him might like things he doesn't like for perfectly legitimate reasons.

It's IRC for normies. IRC is awesome, of course a company that made it accessible to normies would be valuable.

Proof that Linux is not awesome.