Depth report

　　

Slack Technologies Inc., a Canadian company The latest round of large-scale financing has been completed, with a valuation of more than $7.1 billion for the company, which is more than 40% higher than the previous round of financing a year ago.

    Slack said on August 21, 2018 that this round of financing of US$427 million was led by Dragoneer Investment Group and General Atlantic L.L.C. Other participants included T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. , Wellington Management, Baillie Gifford, Sands Capital and existing investors. WSJ Pro Venture Capital previously reported that this financing is nearing completion.

    Since its inception in 2009, Slack has previously raised $841 million. SoftBank Group Corp. led a round of investment in Slack last year, valuing the latter at $5.1 billion. As of this round, Slack has raised nearly $1.3 billion in total.

Slack is similar to social media, but its advantage lies in its simple interface

    Slack is a social media-like application. Its advantage lies in its simple interface and the integration of functions from cloud storage to collaborative establishment of spreadsheets in its conversation flow. It can help professionals to chat, and use hundreds of integrated applications to complete more work. Slack said it now has more than 8 million daily active users, including 70,000 paid teams that use the inter-office messaging platform. Slack currently has more than 1,000 employees in 8 offices around the world.

    Slack revenue has grown rapidly. The company said that its recurring income reached US$200 million last year, and it is growing at a rate of 100% every year. In terms of sales strategy, Slack's bottom-up distribution strategy can give it an advantage.

    While Slack is developing rapidly, it has also intensified the fierce competition. Data from Pitchbook, a private company research organization, shows that so far this year, private technology companies in the United States have raised $19 billion in new capital, more than last year's total. Companies such as Facebook are also developing platforms similar to Slack to capture this trend, gain new customers and revenue.

Won the welcome of the financing industry

    This round of valuation also emphasized Slack's position as a leader in this field. There were other corporate social network applications before, such as Hipchat and Yammer, but they were not as popular as Slack. According to TechCrunch reports, HipChat will even be acquired by Slack to improve its ability to compete with Microsoft's Teams.

    Slack is a tool for corporate internal communication and collaboration. Its purpose is to integrate all kinds of scattered information: emails, information, files, etc., whether it is internal communication information or files, as long as it is uploaded to Slack, it will It can be retrieved through its built-in search tool. In addition, they have integrated services such as Twitter, Zendesk, Crashlytics, and Heroku, integrating their notification reminders, bug tracking and other data into the company's internal information flow.

    Slack's mainstream features also include: searching for members of the team, group chats, and document sharing. It is characterized by sharing, allowing team members to share files in the cloud in one place, including Google Drive, GitHub, etc. On the first day it went online, more than 8,000 companies registered. Thanks to a large number of users’ word-of-mouth promotion, Slack’s monthly growth rate has reached more than 50%. After using Slack, many users have stated that their emails have been reduced by at least 50%. Does this mean that with the continuous promotion of Slack such applications, email will become the yellow flower of tomorrow?

Slack targets corporate pain points

    When you open the mailbox, people will find that it is filled with all kinds of mail from different places. Some of them were sent from family, friends, colleagues, and some were from partners at work. They were invited to attend a summit and reminded that 42 more bugs need to be fixed.

    Ten years ago, these "human" emails probably accounted for 50% to 60%, but now it has dropped to 8% to 10%, because people will find that the remaining emails are not sent by "humans", and It's a machine. Some of them are promotional emails, shopping receipts, and some are reminders from social media.

    But developers have also developed many tools to try to solve these problems, such as Xobni. After trying a dazzling array of tools, people will find that this is an inherent problem. For mailboxes, it is impossible to efficiently disseminate complex information with many people and many groups at the same time.

    Slack is aimed at this point of collaboration within the enterprise. It tries to integrate all the information interfaces in the work, thereby improving the efficiency of internal collaboration and improving the utilization of information. On the Slack interface, people can see that the middle part of it is the conversation content, which is similar to a general communication tool. On the right side, you can find the files involved in the conversation at any time. At present, Slack has integrated Google Drive and Google+. Various communication services, team collaboration services, development tools such as Hangouts, Twitter, Dropbox, Asana, GitHub, RSS, Trello, etc.

Make sure everyone on the team uses Slack

    It is worth noting that among the various data of Slack, one item is that users spend more than 10 hours a day on Slack on average.

    Now on most people's mobile phones, you can find more than 10 communication tools: QQ, Line, WhatsApp, WeChat, Momo, Hangouts, Twitter, Instagram, and even Snapchat, Miaoshi and other applications. Because different tools have different attributes and characteristics, people will use these tools to chat with different people. This is the reason why various social tools can coexist and there are more needs that are constantly being explored.

    Slack also has the attributes of certain social tools, but it is aimed at internal employees or teams. And importantly, if a user wants to use Slack, it must ensure that everyone in the team uses it, otherwise it will lose its meaning, and the user must stay online at all times, otherwise he will have no way to keep in touch with his teammates.

Stewart Butterfield

Ambition to break the spring with Slack

    The founder of Slack is Stewart Butterfield. He was born in Lund, Canada in 1973.

    Back then, Batfield and several small partners were ambitious and planned to create a grand career on the Internet. They co-developed an online game called Glitch. However, as the saying goes, "If you want to plant flowers, you don't want to bloom, you don't want to plant willows and willows to make a shade". I didn't expect that Glitch didn't get hot, but the auxiliary Flickr got hot. That was 2002 when the Internet bubble was filled.

    Then, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo, and Batfield joined Yahoo. However, life in a large company is not easy. Batfield believes that Yahoo has not given Flickr enough resources and opportunities. In 2008, he wrote a letter of resignation, asking to go back to his hometown to raise alpaca, and then left.

    There is also an old saying: If you lose your horse, you know what is wrong. Batfield raises alpacas, and remembered that when he was developing Glitch, he and his friends developed a tool for internal team communication based on IRC. In order to make this tool more efficient, they continued to add features on it: View files, search files, new mail reminders, etc. As a result, Batfield, who is unwilling to be lonely, started his own business again, and this time it is Slack.

    Batfield said in an interview that the core function of Slack still refers to Gmail, which is the search function. When thousands of pieces of information are archived, if they can be retrieved effectively, people can say that the previous integration work is valuable.

    He specifically mentioned an example here to illustrate the importance of this feature: when a new employee joins, he is no longer faced with a brand new and empty mailbox, he can log in to Slack and view all previous Chat history and various files. This can help an employee quickly understand the company's situation, reflecting the value of information integration.

    However, it is clear that there are many differences between Slack and email. Slack is just a tool for internal collaboration, while email can communicate with the outside world, especially when communicating with people who are unfamiliar. Many people still choose to send an email first. So does Slack plan to integrate email functionality?

    Batfield revealed that Slack is indeed developing some features to better integrate email. But Slack's goal is not to become an email client (Email Client), its goal is still to gather all the information. So when a user receives an email and wants to share it with the team, he can choose to copy the email content and paste it on Slack.

    This thing still sounds a bit silly, so Batfield is also planning, the next step Slack will be able to support the direct import of mail, and will continue to improve the function of asynchronous reply.