I think Github, Notion, Retool, Slack, probably Figma, hit revenues quite quickly as they launched and became profitable or at least close to breakeven.
Slack says it may not turn profitable; IPO filing reveals $139 million in losses, Microsoft primary competitor
The Slack IPO filing shows annual revenue of $400.5 million, up 60% from the prior year, with a net loss of $138.9 million, for the 12-month period that ended Jan. 31. Slack's actual fiscal year-end date has yet to be determined.
Actually the Slack I remember from when it first came out is more or less the same product they have now. I'm not really sure what all of those people were doing for all of those years.
I never liked IRC. But to not like it and pay for it? I do not understand.
Am I a fossil?
It's got a lot of enterprise features that companies like, like SSO integration, message retention policies, security certifications like HIPAA and FedRAMP, and more.
There are also a lot of pre-made apps for integrating with corporate apps like Jira, Gmail, Salesforce, etc.
It's fine, I haven't looked at a lot of other options, but it seems more usable than Google Hangouts (or messenger or whatever they call it now) or Microsoft Teams.
I think a lot of tech companies struggle to break into the non-tech world. Slack might be ubiquitous for SWEs but my SO who works in traffic engineering will probably never use it (they use Teams).
They do. They acquired ScreenHero for screensharing, and then fucked up the integration.
> https://www.xda-developers.com/slack-working-on-video-suppor...
They've only just got it right - check out Huddles. No doubt with their next yearly annual conference they'll be releasing the video version for this.
Is that a case of business people making technical decisions?
That I understand. Do not like, but I understand
They need to scale their systems, maintain reliability, scale their processes, build internal tools, run experiments, work with 'legacy' code and within the existing architecture, etc.
It's not surprising product development has slowed down. In almost all cases it seems like the speed of product development is asymptotic.
The problem generally starts when you hire a bunch of people without fixing broken processes first, these people then push back against fixing said processes, and the rot sets in.
It used to be that you spend your Series A and B figuring out the business, and from Series C forward you've got your unit economics dialed in and are just pushing the "growth" button as hard as you can.
Nowadays you get all the way to IPO without ever achieving positive unit economics: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash... You have companies raising (or trying to raise) Series E, F, G while they lose money on every transaction and make it up in volume.
I suspect OP is talking more about that phenomenon - companies that are way too far along to not have positive unit economics on their core business.
If bleeding money scares you, then a startup is probably not the right fit, a huge number of startups fail.