Posts

Showing posts with the label Zoom

Slack: Slacking? More like social networking

-
Image
When COVID hit and the lock-downs started, everyone was expecting Slack to "Zoom"; however, as the chart below from  Chartr  clearly shows, Slack disappointed.  It's not due to lack of trying In "Slack got smacked" , I discussed why Slack is NOT slacking on growth and how Slack and Zoom differ. As discussed in  Slack to Microsoft Teams: "Damn You!"  what's limiting Slack and slowing its growth is Microsoft Teams. Teams has reduced Slack’s addressable market and Slack will not come near the heights its investors envisioned when it went public. However, in that same post, I also mentioned that I'm still bullish on Slack.  But, given Google's announcement earlier this week to revamp its G Suite and relaunch it as  Google WorkSpace , does my position change? As if competing with Microsoft wasn't hard enough, right? Although Google WorkSpace includes features that will compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams, I'm still bullish on Slack a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Slack got smacked

-
Last Tuesday, Slack reported expectations-beating earnings but its stocked tanked. This is because Slack didn't deliver the Zoom-like growth that investors were expecting.  Slack and Zoom were both expected to be work-from-home (WFH) winners but their realities are turning out to be very different. While Zoom's sales more than quadrupled compared to the same quarter last year, Slack's grew at 49% - just about the same as the previous two quarters. So why is Slack slacking on growth while Zoom is crushing all expectations? The process to buy Slack is much longer than Zoom's. Slack's primary customers are large enterprises. Convincing these enterprises to buy Slack requires salespeople and involves endless negotiations with IT departments who always start with "but we have Microsoft Teams for free". Zoom is more plug-and-play. Unlike Slack, Zoom doesn't require integration with any other enterprise software or tools. Also, the alternatives to Zoom are a...
1 comment
Read more

Popular posts from this blog

SPAC: Why many unicorns won't hop on the SPAC wagon

-
Image
2020 has certainly been the year of blank check acquisition companies - or SPACs.  That's how Nikola- the sexy electric truck shop-, Utz - the iconic snacks company- and Virgin Galactic went public earlier in the year. Plus, it's also how electric vehicle makers Fisker, Canoo, and Lordstown Motors announced they will go public. Plus Plus, famous investor Bill Ackman recently took his SPAC (Pershing Square Tontine) public in the largest-ever blank-check IPO (it raised A whopping $4B). The objective is to buy a mature unicorn. Ackman actually said Pershing might buy a “mature unicorn” 6 times in the filing. However not all private companies are psyched about merging with SPACs to go public. Airbnb reportedly turned down an offer to merge with Bill Ackman's SPAC, saying it prefers going public via traditional. Airbnb isn't alone. Snowflake, Slack, Shopify and BigCommerce are other flashy SPACs that declined the backdoor to going public and opted for the front door through...
Read more

The business of calm

-
Last week was a long one. The stress of the election coupled with the pandemic has a lot of us looking for ways to relieve anxiety and invest in wellness from the comfort of home. Increasingly, many are resorting to mental health and meditation apps. Calm, a meditation app, topped Apple's health and fitness category on Election Day — and other mindfulness apps like Headspace weren't far behind.  Why are these apps popular? The anxiety-inducing times, along with poor access to mental healthcare and high smart phone penetration are big contributing factors. However, these are not the only ones. For me, the biggest factor is that the companies making these apps have finally figured out that they are content creators and not just app makers. The features that were available through these apps 5 years ago were a lot more rudimentary compared to what we have today, and so was the content. These apps have heavily invested in improving their content. It's telling that the biggest a...
Read more

Bad signs for the epic market rally

-
In the previous post, I discussed reasons that the stock market is rising despite the economic devastation of the pandemic. In this post, I’ll discuss ominous signs from the market rally: Top 1% account for most of the gains: The market is very top-heavy. 1% of the stocks in the S&P 500 - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft - account for more than a fifth of the S&P 500’s market value. While those tech giants have gained around 40 percent so far this year, the 495 other stocks in the index have collectively lost a few percentage points. This is bad because the US workforce is concentrated in the other 99% of the stocks. Insider selling is booming: Some leaders of corporate America are skeptical about the sustainability of this rally and are rushing to cash out. According to CNN Business and TrimTabs Investment Research, insiders have dumped more than $50 billion worth of shares since the start of May. The same source also notes that August is on track to be the thi...
Read more