I can't tell if you're aware of the coincidence, but did you know that Slack was a pivot from game development just like Stewart Butterfield's previous unicorn Flickr?
"Unicorn" is probably the silliest term of the year. But it degrades to meaninglessness if you include Flickr, which sold to Yahoo! in 2005, for $20MM.
Wow, I got reamed out pretty hard for absent-minded use of a trendy term without thinking about it too much.
In my mind Flickr is up there with the Instagrams and the Ubers of the world because it was a fucking amazing experience at the time. I never even considered the valuation, but Flickr was definitely unique in the UX it brought to the table. I think people forget what the landscape looked like then. Or maybe they just can't get past a knee-jerk reaction to hot-button terminology.
Either way, I think it's fascinating that not one but two companies from the founder of Slack were pivots from game companies, and that's exactly what the GP is complaining about in the clone. Anyone care to comment on that?
> In my mind Flickr is up there with the Instagrams and the Ubers of the world because it was a fucking amazing experience at the time. I never even considered the valuation, but Flickr was definitely unique in the UX it brought to the table. I think people forget what the landscape looked like then. Or maybe they just can't get past a knee-jerk reaction to hot-button terminology.
Absolutely. They stagnated for a while, but when Flickr came out all the other popular photo sites would shrink your image down to a tiny low quality version, ads everywhere. Out of desperation I used to host my photos on a PHP-based gallery app I dropped as soon as I got a Flickr account.
Sorry, my comment wasn't meant to be snarky, but I can see how that's not clear.
I was just musing on the fact that (yes, I don't like the term, but also) "unicorn" was originally a label for startups with huge valuations, generally > $1B. It has mutated since then, but the idea that it would apply to Flickr seemed funny.
I wasn't bothered by your comment actually, it was more that I was at -4 for what I believed to be at least a mildly interesting observation at its core.
Not defending the use of the term, but you have to look at acquisitions in the context of the time. Though $20m seems like nothing notable today, in the post bubble fallout it was a significant achievement.
> Though $20m seems like nothing notable today, in the post bubble fallout it was a significant achievement.
2005 is probably a bit beyond the "post bubble fallout" - nevertheless the previous year Yahoo spent $579M on Kelkoo and in 2003 (which is most definitely "post bubble fallout" era) they bought Overture Services for $1.6B[1].
Creating something that fetches $20M is certainly a success, but let's not pretend this is some amazing acquisition story on par with YouTube.
