From what I've heard, Slack hit a pretty big infrastructure wall when it came to big organizations. Teams just didn't scale past 1000 people. So they've had to rebuild significant parts of the product in order to target large corporate customers.
Looking at some of their latest API updates, you can see glimpses of enterprise support. (eg moving away from handles to user ids likely enables active directory integration).
Back to the question: Why raise money? Because enterprise whales are a much more solid backbone than thousands of 20 person startups, and they still have some eng investments they need to make to handle someone like Walmart in an on premise installation with 10s of thousands of users.
Atlassian is about to replace Hipchat with Stride.
But the real competition is Google or MSFT, since they have email and docs deployed to just about everyone and can try to capture that attention by offering something _just_ good enough for a lot less.
At Slack Frontiers last week (their first ever conference), they had a number of speakers from large orgs that use Slack, including Fox and Oracle. That size business is probably what they're working hardest to capture.
The parent is talking about the size of Slack teams, not the Microsoft product "Teams" which you seem to be talking about. (Why would Slack have to rebuild anything because of MS?!)
So if the VC money is there for the taking, why not?
- Additional capital will add to the war chest to fend of competitors such as Microsoft Teams, HipChat and Google Hangouts Chat. With the deep pockets of Microsoft and Google, more cash can aid in innovation, R&D, marketing, etc.
> So if the VC money is there for the taking, why not?
- dilution
- possible obligation to pay dividends
- although probably not here, giving a board seat / some control
I think the basic question here is, how can Slack productively spend $250MM over the next couple of years--do they have a vision that exists in some proportion to that kind of capital? Slack is a nice platform, yet it's hard to imagine _hundreds_ of good developers toiling away on mobile apps, desktop apps, webhook integrations, etc.
> So if the VC money is there for the taking, why not?
Disclaimer: I am not a startup founder. I am not an investor. I have zero knowledge about how these things work besides from what I've read here. That being said, I thought the meta for raising money was (is?) that you don't raise money if you don't need it or don't anticipate you will need it?
I mean if you're Dropbox, you have massive infrastructure spending even in your early years that means as you get people to learn to embrace "the cloud" in early 2009, success is you have tons of users who use your product for free with a small fraction converting to a paid account and a smaller fraction using it at work (fancier paid account) I can understand the need to raise money. However, I thought raising money means the founders lose control of the majority of shares. My understanding is if you don't need the money, don't raise it because it is a liability. I can't imagine slack's infrastructure spending being anything near dropbox's (or maybe I am wrong?)
Now that I think about it again, I am sure I have made a mistake somewhere in my assumptions. I'd love to be corrected. Thanks
Edit: How did Snapchat and Uber founders manage to retain control even after many rounds of funding? Is that applicable here? Can I use the same thing if I ever become a founder?
From what I can tell the major competitor to Slack is Basecamp - a profitable company with 50 or so employees?
What is Slack doing with all this money? The slack I used at work was an html version of irc - is there more?