There needs to be a thread on "newish online tools that everyone is starting to depend on or love" because I had never even heard of this domain/product until this news.
Apparently, neither did the Quip toothbrush people.
How is Quip better than good old Google Docs?
EDIT: Just looking at it, it looks very reminiscent of Apache Wave, which I was (unfortunately) a fan of. I wonder if it was inspired by it?
EDIT 2: It seems that Quip, unlike Google Docs, is end to end encrypted, which makes it possible to use on corporate intranets that normally forbid tools like Google Docs for security reasons. Hrm.
EDIT 3: Might as well plug the newest thing _I_'ve heard of. https://discordapp.com/ is a great voice chat client, intended for gaming but surely useful for productive ends. It's Erlang-backed, as well. Seems to have great connection quality and is just a nice, fun app.
Thinking about this just in terms of product...
There are two real competitors on the market - MS Office, and Google Docs. Office is where it is today through sheer inertia. It's a slow-moving and often terrible product. Google Docs feels like a "free product", with a lot of limitations. The market feels like someone could "Slack" it - walk in with a good enough product and just lay waste to the incumbents very quickly.
The shift to cloud-based tools is happening rapidly, pushed by the ubiquity and quality of mobile devices. Salesforce practically invented this market, and they have incredibly deep hooks into the enterprise (and lucrative enterprise licensing agreements). MS Office feels like a clunky antique hobbling users to their clunky old PCs, but Google Docs isn't going to satisfy the corporate power users who are amazingly productive with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.
Mark Benioff is ambitious. This isn't about his RoI for some A round investment. He's already a billionaire. More money is just bouncing the rubble. What's important is he built a company, Salesforce, at the top of the second tier of the software industry. It's important enough to have shaped the industry, and make billions - but it's not Google. It's not Apple. It's not Oracle. And it's not Microsoft. If he wants to break into that tier, he needs to level the company up. Taking over the enterprise productivity app market and consigning Microsoft to the dust bin of history? That might just do it.
And finally... like all large companies, Salesforce may be facing market saturation and a tapering off of growth. It's too big to easily develop breakthrough products in house anymore. Instead, there's growth through acquisition, buying hot startups with the ample buckets of cash you have, to break into new markets.
So maybe, just maybe, this buyout is exactly what it looks like.
I don't understand this valuation. I've only used Quip a bit but it doesn't seem like an amazing piece of software. Do they have a massive user base? Did they do a fantastic job at enterprise sales? Do they have a lot of recurring revenue?
This is an acquisition to get Bret Taylor. I'd expect Salesforce to put him in charge of slowly improving the core salesforce tech stack.
Quip is amazing, I started using it last year when they published a blog post documenting how they build their native Mac app app using a mix of React+cpp[0] and been using it since then, not without issues though [1][2].
[0] https://medium.com/@btaylor/react-with-c-building-the-quip-m... [1] https://twitter.com/bithavoc/status/750419283797237761 [2] https://twitter.com/bithavoc/status/760231521211080704
I'm honestly surprised so many people on HN haven't heard of Quip.
I mean Bret Taylor is a pretty big name, and we've all known that he was working on Quip for a while. There are a bunch of Bay Area companies that use Quip and the Quip team made a big deal about the future of mobile word processing when they first came out.
I'd be less surprised if the general public was unaware, but interesting to see the surprise come from the HN crowd.
Quip talked about how many users they had in a Recode article from Oct 2015 [1]:
> Taylor said Quip has millions of individual users and 30,000 business customers, though not all of those are paying.
So to do some back of a napkin math if they had 15,000 paying customers (50% of their noted business userbase) how much would they make in revenue? I've distributed the numbers across different levels of SaaS monthly bills because most customers will pay for the cheaper packages.
75% (11250 customers) * 5x users = $30/m = $337,500/month
15% (2250 customers) * 7x users = $50/m = $112,500/month
10% (1500 customers) * 10x users = $70/m = $105,000/month
5% (750 customers) * 25x users = $230/m = $172,500/month
Estimated Revenue: $727,500/month
or $8,730,000/year
[1] http://www.recode.net/2015/10/15/11619612/bret-taylors-quip-...
Have to use it on a daily basis and coming from libre office, it feels really weak. Especially the table calculations are not good. They got a bit better in the last months, but still feel like a toy :/
For those who haven't heard of Quip: one interesting data point is that Facebook uses it internally, since they don't use any Google products. I'm sure countless other companies use it too.
MicroPro, the company behind Wordstar, was the dominant word processing company in 1984. They were the largest software company in the world at the time, with about 25% of the industry. They went public in 1984 for a market cap of $165M. That's $482M in 2016 dollars.
What makes this word processor worth $750M?
What are the odds of Microsoft buying Salesforce?
Quip is a turd, a common investor of my past startup pushed me hard to try it and I didn't like it one bit. I never understood the hype.
Seems that Facebook makes extensive use of Quip internally even though it's doing the whole Office 360 subscription doohickey.
"An interesting side-note, though: While this deal means Microsoft will use Office 365 for e-mail and calendaring, they probably won't get much use out of Microsoft Word — Facebook uses Quip, a mobile word processor developed by former CTO and current Twitter board member Bret Taylor, for word processing."
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-facebook-exec-microsoft-go...
See also embedded tweet.
The HN title is misleading because Quip isn't really a word processing app.
It's more like the combination of Google Docs and Slack: realtime documents and chat seamlessly linked.
I hope the product continues to grow at Salesforce. I love it and it runs our business. I need it to get some of slack's integration features and it'll be perfect.
This is a such a big company but I have never heard of it till now.
Man.. I was wondering who would take google wave to the next level. Wished I had even heard about this company 2 years ago.
It seems SF got the fear because of Google and ZOHO. SF cant beat Google or ZOHO where they have deep and broad portfolio..
$750M for a word processing app? Go home Silicon Valley you're drunk!
I'm guessing this means that Bret Terrill will be taking a bigger role working with Twitter, given that he just joined their board as well.
Hopefully this investment will help the guy reach the finish line even though his extremities are all controlled by different keys on the keyboard.
If we speak about Quip as word processor with collaboration and chat capability. You get almost the same word processor capabilities with Etherpad (+ plugins) - sure less polished - for free, open source: http://etherpad.org/ (its root go back to Google Wave)
According to CrunchBase, they've only raised $45M. 16x return after 4 years in business. Well done!
Mark Benioff, Sales Force CEO, personally invested in the original venture round that raised $15M [1]. Assuming that round set a $75M valuation, it implies M.Benioff made at least a 10X with this investment.
I'd assume boards are diligent when it comes to potential conflicts of interest and the $750M valuation is justifiable. But I don't know that for a fact. Does anyone have insight on how boards deal might deal with this scenario ?
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/quip/investors
edit: grammar