Without knowing the specific of their last round, does anyone have an idea of what selling at roughly 2/3 of their previous valuation likely means for their employees?
I know that VCs typically have some kind of "upside protection" in later rounds that guarantees them first money out in the event of a sale on some multiple of their investment, but I don't know what terms are common.
Frequently Investors and Founders get money before Employees.
Investors frequently have clauses (warrants/ratchet) to increase their position if the sale wasn't at some threshold, which will affect (to downside) the basis for Employees payout.
If the Employee thought the stock was at $150/share at 1.5B they will get less than $97 on payout.
The startup system is pretty rigged against accidentally making anyone rich who is a mere employee. That money is for the investors, not the working class. The days of the office assistant making millions on stock are long gone. There's options with huge tax implications, long vesting periods, the investors get preferred stock, they get guaranteed multiples, if there's a down round there's a carve-out that you won't be part of.
Not only do the investors have priority shares over employees, each investor can negotiate a guaranteed multiple. For example if they put in 100 million for 10% ownership but also had a 5X multiple guarantee and a sale price of 1 billion then the 500 million they walk away with ends up being 50% of the sale price. That part of the agreement isn't made public as far as I know.
If I want to found a VC-funded startup for which a successful exit is much more fair to the employees, how do I do that?
Will the investors insist that it all come out of the founders' percentage of the pie, or can I argue that the better-incentived employees mean a bigger and more likely pie, so VC terms shoudl be less grabby?
Will VCs react negatively to "being soft on" employees, even if it all comes out of founders' slice?
Do early employees get ISOs, other options, RSUs, or something else?
The only good answer to this is 1) don't raise more VC money than you really need, and 2) don’t raise money at a valuation way above what your company is actually worth.
The problem in the scenario here is that they sold for below the valuation of their last funding round, and the size of their last funding round was ginormous.
When you raise hundreds of millions at a $1.5b valuation, you’re expected to sell above $1.5b at some point in the future. Any less and you didn’t live up to the opportunity that you pitched investors (and the financial outcomes for everyone deteriorates when you sell for way less than your valuation).
Not an expert here, but I have worked at a couple startups. The answer I would give is probably not: VCs basically work on a premise like this: 1 in 25 investments will return 100x, 5 in 25 will make they're money back, and the rest are just a wash. The only way the make money is if the company is mega successful, so they're not really interested if that's not a possibility. That being said, not every person at a VC is going to be super greedy or anything like that, it's just the nature of the business model for venture capital.
Pragmatically, read "Venture Deals" and "Founder vs Investor" before you start your company. Then hire a reputable law firm and imagine you're an employee rather than a founder, and setup the initial structure in an employee friendly way. When raising your first round, have some non-negotiables that carry the structure forward. You can DM me on Twitter/X if you want more specifics based on my experience.
Successful startup companies can and should compensate employees well with both cash and stock. It's only incompetence and greed that endangers this outcome. VC expectations are a red herring, only bad VCs are so short-sighted as to deprive a founder of one of the major tools of team-building (truly valuable company equity).
As a founder, there are forces you have to fight against from first principles using your moral compass via a thoughtful fundraising strategy, but it can be done.
I don't think VC money cares whether you are soft on the employees. They are there to buy as big a slice of a small pie before it gets big. Anything you keep for yourself or give to your employees is pie that could be theirs. If they show up and you've already promised half the pie away they'll pay less for what's left, or you won't be one of 100 slices in their pie portfolio. Maybe you can convince them the motivated employees will lead to more growth, but it's not the type of thing they are normally swayed by.
I think the end result is that it's probably not possible to pay employees with meaningful equity anymore so you'll have to go back to paying them the old fashioned way with money. I know I'm no longer willing to take RSU lotto tickets and a pay cut to work at a startup.
A 1x liquidation preference (meaning investors get their money back before employees and other investors “below them in the capital stack” get anything) is most common. A 1.5x preference is less common. A 2x preference is rare in VC (more common in growth equity). Anything more than that is extremely rare, and a startup that was hot at the time (meaning multiple investors were competing to invest) would likely not give investors anything more. A 5x pref is unheard of. There are other types of preferences too - google “participating preferred stock” to learn more.
So someone spent $205m in 2021 and got $133m back in 2023? My guess is that Atlassian does a similar write down in a few years time. I hope the winners in this deal try to make the world a better place.
It's fascinating that it's a 1B business. I thought it was just uploading screen recordings to the cloud (basically UI around uploading. Like macOS QuickTime + YouTube private video upload)
As Atlassian consolidates Loom into its platform, engineers will soon be able to visually log issues in Jira, leaders will use videos to connect with employees at scale, sales teams will send tailored video updates to clients, and HR teams will onboard new employees with personalized welcome videos
Well, being able to screen record a reproduction of a bug is practical, and it's easy to do it in macOS or Linux, but I'm not sure about this on Windows.
Maybe a unified tool with a better integration will allow better bug reports, but pep talks by management at scale? No, thanks.
Yeah I’m aware of Blackhole but honestly these sorts of hacks are fine for me a software engineer but not for regular users which is what trivially easy means to me.
There is no good reason it’s not possible in Quicktime to record the system audio along with the screen.
I tried Loopback as a paid user, and it wasn't nearly as stable/reliable as you would reasonably hope if you're an ex-Windows user converting to MacOS.
It still boggles my mind that there is no "Stereo mix" built-in.
>engineers will soon be able to visually log issues in Jira
I see this issue all the time in bug reports and it can be pretty helpful to see a short video on how to replicate the issue. Depending upon the type of user submitting those reports they are often _more_ helpful than straight text because I don't have to have as lengthy back-and-forth Q&A on getting more details.
Good grief. If the age of YouTube has taught us anything, it's that creating good video of something takes a lot more skill than writing something decent about something. Trying to find the relevant issue in a bunch of unrelated info, within a long writeup, which a user necessarily edits, at least a little, by the nature of writing something out? Pretty easy. Trying to find it in a rambling, 15-minute video? Welp! Good luck, Jira people.
The best thing about video is it tethers me to the speed of the content the rambling, 15-minute video content creator mandated; not the speed I can peruse an article.
Also the first person to invent Ctrl+F for video will be a billionaire.
Not quite Ctrl F, but Loom does use some AI magic to summarize videos and automatically add sections so you can skip to the interesting bits quickly. Only used it once recently, but it perfectly divided my video according to the 3 points I was addressing.
> Trying to find the relevant issue in a bunch of unrelated info, within a long writeup, which a user necessarily edits, at least a little, by the nature of writing something out? Pretty easy.
This sentiment is one of the reasons why so much documentation is not good.
Writing good, usable, technical documentation is HARD.
I doubt people will record 15 minute videos to report an issue. From my experience people are much better at recording a relevant video vs. describing the issue in our text.
The standards are not nearly the same. A team-internal Loom is not intended to be a viral polished social media clip.
Here's a sample scenario from one of my previous jobs: a PR is not getting reviews. After a day I record a three-minute Loom where I walk through the problem and the solution, and post it on the team's channel. A few hours later the PR is approved, without any synchronous work and without me having to spend twenty minutes thinking out and typing out a blog sized post on Slack on the same topic. If anyone ever feels the need to dig out that commit again, the Loom is still accessible.
Loom found a way to solve real problems without more typing or more meetings, and that's why it's been successful. Slack, by the way, has a "record a clip now" feature that I liked even more than Loom for the purpose; but by that point we already standardized on Loom and Loom is better at organizing clips.
I am going to assume that the userbase of Loom doesn't need to pad videos to 10 Minutes because the algorhithm only suggests videos that have enough space for ads, and I've never heard "Make sure to like and subscribe" and "You can edit your privacy settings here. Speaking of Privacy, did you know that your ISP can read all your stuff? Sign up for a free month of BarfVPN using my link" in any of the videos attached to pull requests or bug reports.
Video is one of those things everyone thinks everyone else would want but when faced with using it themselves they find it violently annoying. i.e. ideal for enterprise sales.
That said there is a niche of user testing video capture and so on, but that is not what this is.
I wish people would just record a video and showing what is causing them a problem. It's better than writing "I'm trying to do x and it doesn't work". At least on a video I can see the exact error message, the view they are on which browser they are using etc.
You can condition people to give you all this information but it's an uphill battle, so I'd rather just get it myself from the source if possible.
I feel like there's a misunderstanding here where people think engineers will now record videos instead of writing their usual issue description. This is clearly not the use case of Loom.
My experience has been contrary to expecting developers to create videos (which is a good idea too). This approach of video first, and video tickets are prioritized has been my only approach for almost 15 years.
It started with Jing from Techsmith that had one key feature like loom - record and auto upload to the cloud and put the URL into your clipboard ready to paste into an email.
It’s surprising use of video in this way isn’t more ubiquitous.
Loom might actually be able to do the very thing you are saying it can’t. They have a few AI features that seems to auto generate a title and summary recently.
Jing was such a brilliant simple concept. For years I used to make it mandatory for my team to install it.
I can't fathom how Techsmith couldn't make that work (although maybe it was just too competitive with Camtasia)... Loom is basically the same thing but limited to a Chrome extension? Or am I missing something?
I am still dreaming of something that would allow a user to file a ticket, have them record audio and video like loom to describe the issue and what they were trying to achieve, and then dump a screen record of the last minute before opening the ticket as well as as much info about the machine's state as possible. And/or maybe connecting to helpdesk with video directly. Existing software comes close but is not quite there yet.
Azure DevOps has a browser extension that can this except record audio of the person speaking what’s happening. Also, the user experience is fine for like… power users, but it’s not super fun to use.
Disabling a built-in, non-networked feature and then replacing it with a cloud-linked, self-updating 3rd-party one doesn't seem like it would improve security.
I would love to have this, as someone that has to use Jira. Instead we have to extensively talk to QA (not too bad) or BAs/POs (usually bad) to figure out what someone's problem is.
We actually do some of that with Loom, mainly recording app bugs for others to repro, or demoing new features so code reviewers know how to test the feature. The videos are often short, less than 2 mins.
You mean the latest masterpiece of fantasy storytelling from Lucasfilm's™ Brian Moriarty™?
Why, it's an extraordinary adventure with an interface of magic, stunning, high-resolution, 3D landscapes, sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point 'n' click control of characters, objects, and magic spells.
Even after more than a decade, I still don't see what the "infamous dropbox comment" fundamentally gets wrong.
1. Why would I want to host my sensitive data on someone else's servers instead of my own servers and storage hardware?
2. Why shouldn't someone have a physical media backup for time-urgent, sensitive files? Last I was in school, if I had a final presentation, I would absolutely store it both on a hypothetical cloud storage volume and a backup on a thumb drive. If I were still in school today I'd do the same thing. Would you really risk your final course grade on the possibility that Dropbox is down when you are up to present? And nevermind the arbitrary and random account suspensions that all SaaS providers are infamous for (looking at you, Google).
The answers to your questions are in relative market sizes. Yes, there are millions of people who agree with your two points. There are also millions of people who disagree. (The second set is likely much larger than the first point, but that doesn't matter.) Millions of people is frequently a market.
Your arguments are not related at all to the original infamous comment.
Your points are valid ones about data privacy, and redundancy of important data. And how Joe public doesn't seem to notice those.
The original infamous comment dismissed a tool that made a task easier for regular users because the server nerd says: "I can build it in my shed out of rsync and bash using a server I maintain, why should I use this?".
Yep. Given the multiple we can safely assume the growth has leveled off, and Atlassian will say they can use their channel to reinitiate growth.
Maybe they are right. Or maybe it ends up in the junk drawer. Either way they captured a potential next generation competitor for a relatively low cost to them.
Let me guess, you could build it in a weekend? It's obviously more than about the video recording tech. Compliance, team permissions, sales, enterprise contracts and making it work on all devices are not trival.
I gave you an upvote bc I mostly agree, but as a counterpoint...
Atlassian is a big company that is successful at what they do, bigger than Loom and presumably with more resources. So I am confident they could have just copied Loom's business model and maybe even implemented better to fit their needs, since they have staff in place. It would certainly involve staffing up where needed, but I think they could have pulled it off and saved money. Also, with an acquisition, now they ave to integrate Loom into the broader Atlassian org, which wont be trivial.
So there are legit trade-offs with an acquisition.
That being said, spending $1B on a acquisition also saves time.
It's not just about saving time. Acquisitions like these also help companies like Atlassian increase brand value because Loom is extremely popular and is a great product. Now Atlassian gets to claim all of that under their brand.
I suspect this will become a more-and-more common occurance as deep fake videos become more ubiquitous. There will have to be some mechanism to validate the origin of the video is truly from the content creator. If the video was created offline and uploaded after the fact, who knows if it's generated audio super-imposed over a deep fake?
In that case it's possible to generate a deepfake offline, then open the video in a player and record that. I doubt online-ness by itself will do anything if it's still just a video signal leaving the machine.
I think both tools could use some serious UX love. The processes folks introduce around them - that's a different topic obviously. You can enforce atrocious processes with Trello or ClickUp but I find these much less bad.
If you have influence on what tools you use at your place of work, then consider trying https://www.shortcut.com/. It's UX is IMO fantastic (and it's UI is fast) while being a lot more full-featured than something like Trello.
(not associated with the company - just a happy customer who feels like they ought to be more widely known than they seem to be)
I think my team looked into that, among good few others. There is a decent number of tools that would work better for dev/product teams, but if you want to have one solution for the whole company, the list is shorter. We're currently living with ClickUp.
There is an associated cloud service called Cleanshot Cloud – all licenses get a small amount of storage for free, or you can upgrade to Unlimited for a monthly subscription.
Alternatively, because it's a great native-first app, you can just set the saving directory to an existing cloud provider on your machine like Dropbox and let it handle uploading and serving the file.
Bummer. Our sales and customer success people really like Loom, and users often send us loom recordings to report issues or suggest features. I’m not happy it’s Atlassian.
Probably much much lower. If this was 2020 or 2021, perhaps, but multiples haven't even in that high in the public market for high growth companies for the past few years
You can do approximate math from Series C, where they raised $130M at $1.5B valuation - announced in May 2021. The ARR multiples in 2021 was 50X NTM ARR. They potentially hit $30M by end of 2021 (raised sometime late 2020/early 2021).
Now even if they grew at 40-50% YoY CAGR (which is on the bullish side) - $60M-$70M ARR, approximately giving them a 10-12x ARR multiple for NTM revenue, put them squarely in the median to high-end valuation mutiple for PLG companies growing at 30-50% YoY (https://www.meritechcapital.com/benchmarking/historical-trad...)
Oh great, that’s what Jira and Confluence needed in order to make them more sluggish, less responsive and more user unfriendly… a video messaging platform integration. Good grief, who thinks of these things :-(
With 1 billion and a team of software developers, I would put Jira and Confluence back on the right road, not acquire a video company ;-)
The loom integration has been useful to attract some users who don’t use Jira otherwise.
I just wish Jira-1369 would get solved after 20 years because users refuse to adopt Jira or confluence when they’re getting waterboarded with notifications instead of a timed digest that can be set.
The original JRA-1369 was opened in 2003. Addressed a little in 2019, but not the digests to solve it all. Odd since plug-ins have to. closing this is one way to improve optics I guess.
Ps, I don’t hate Jira. Wasn’t a huge fan and it took a few years to see the light of what it does that so few platforms do when it comes to being able to absorb complexity as it evolves.
Managing evolving complexity is a real thing, and the pain can be reduced by having more in one tool vs not. It’s a tough space, and I think Aha.Io is one tool suited to win their prize and grow into Jira’s space.
Their worst sin remains how many people are subjected to an out of the box install compared to one that is setup to your processes. Tweaking it makes such a difference.
> Their worst sin remains how many people are subjected to an out of the box install compared to one that is setup to your processes. Tweaking it makes such a difference.
This is true, I hated out of the box Jira, and I tolerated it after I tweaked it for our org. Honestly, it probably shouldn't even work out of the box. It should just start with a single ticket that describes how to configure it, that you can't close until you configure some ways to close tickets.
Totally agree. I was on the out of the box side for too long.
It is a little too complicated to setup in the beginning but it has more first principles to learn before combining maybe due to the complexity it can handle.
You have to fill in the mandatory metadata correctly (both on the meeting and in the linked Epic, you did remember to link an Epic right?) or the meeting won't start. Just imagine how pretty the Atlassian admin's productivity dashboards will look now!
In what world is loom something no one asked for? I, and my team, use it everyday and have at my past two jobs as well. For engineers it’s a life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting (or asking what some piece of code does) and also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA.
Coming from a deep, shameful corner of ignorance, but what's special about recording a screen and sharing it via the comms tool of choice (IM, Slack, Signal, e-mail)?
I do love the idea of sharing a screen recording of features though.
I still haven’t purchased Dropbox. When the choice came up, it seemed important for our backups not to be made in USA.
So, indeed, a very cool replacement was SSH.
I still don’t know anyone who didn’t leave Dropbox after they jacked up the prices. A USB key is much cheaper (and reliable, at the rate at which Dropbox nukes accounts that they deem not compliant with whatever policy).
Most people I know just went with their cloud provider's sync solution once everyone added one (GDrive, iCloud, Amazon photos, OneDrive, Creative Cloud, etc.)
Can't remember the last time I saw a USB key in use anymore.
The cloud stuff is convenient, but it quickly became a commoditu
Dropbox is still better in some small ways (like delta syncs) but it wasn't enough I guess.
True! It's still a useful product, but the pressure to keep getting huge-r is always there I guess. I knew someone who worked there and they seemed pretty desperate for new initiatives (like the failed Paper). Most of their competitors have online storage as part of their product portfolio. I don't know of anything else major that Dropbox does...
As others have pointed out, it's not the recording that's the hard part per se; more so the entire workflow from hitting firing up the recording tool to getting the final recording -- possibly edited -- into the cloud for sharing in some seamless flow.
Lots of ancillary stuff involved. I know a team that went down this route and built a competing tool and the hardest part was working out the streaming upload and storage. Then you layer on things like permissions, lifecycle management, etc.
Also recently Atlassian released a Whiteboard (read Miro/infinite canvas) feature in Confluence cloud, so this could become another tool in the set that they release to keep people collaborating on their platform and not heading elsewhere.
Loom makes it very easy to voice over and annotate a recording, with both individually editable in a way raw screen recordings don't support, and to share the result via a link.
It's not (yet?) heavily used among engs where I am, but we love it anyway for massively shortening the feedback loop with designers who can drop a 30-second demo of some prototype UI at the head of a Slack thread and asynchronously receive the kind of nuanced feedback that'd usually need to start off with a (necessarily synchronous) huddle.
I think lots of people haven't realized that video clips like Loom are actually built into Slack. The button that looks like a video camera below the input text box does it.
It's not a full replacement, but it's the one you already have.
Anecdote: It's so well hidden or underpromoted that exactly 1 colleague has sent me a video recorded via Slack in its feature's existence. (employee count: mid 000's)
Personally, I'm not 100% sure those videos are a net benefit for teams. It definitely reduces the effort required by the person creating the video, but comes at the expense of requiring more effort from the people consuming the content. While there are certainly cases where showing is easier than telling, more often I find the quick videos are more verbose and less well organized than a doc or a message. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I [recorded a video] instead."
Who knows, maybe the counterfactual isn't "wrote a concise doc," but rather "didn't share the information at all," in which case I suppose Loom et al is a positive.
> but comes at the expense of requiring more effort from the people consuming the content.
Before that you got an issue saying "There's a bug on the notification list" and you needed to figure out how to reproduce it. Now you get a video showing exactly how to reproduce it.
It's a life changer and the opposite of what you describe.
Like I said, there are definitely cases where showing is easier than telling, and bug reports often fall into that category. But as an alternative to more durable documents (design explorations, PRDs, etc), I often find that docs are more thoughtfully organized.
Oh sorry, I don't mean replacing the documents entirely. what I've seen is loom videos replacing sections of those documents (where in the past you would have expected screenshots + text to explain decisions or a design). To me, there may/may not be more total information, but the information density is much lower. I think my hierarchy as a reader is: document with good screenshots and text > doc with good loom video > doc with bad loom video > doc with no screenshots / bad text.
> requiring more effort from the people consuming the content
This hasn't been my experience; if anything, quite the opposite, in that it's enabled my team to contribute much more actively to design. The effort of providing actionable feedback is admittedly slightly higher, but that's not a bad thing; needing to (and having time to!) write up feedback seems to yield more actionable results than doing it verbally in the moment, and for things that do really need talking through we have several sync touchpoints during the week with our embedded designer.
Of course, in contexts where no such touchpoints exist or where design and eng generally don't have a close relationship, I could see Loom being difficult - but I'm not sure I'd blame that first on the tool; if Design and Eng communicate only by throwing things over a transom at one another, I think the tool much more likely exposes problems you already had and didn't know about.
Loom gives a much better UX and easy to use and more important ability to share. They probably have a huge user base that other businesses interested in acquire.
Actually the bigger q is where is Loom's moat? I've used loom too and I agree that being able take a video and do "mini editing" is useful but I guess I wouldn't pay for it given cmd-optiom-5 on osx. But still the real thing is where is the moat? I ask this because until recently I hadn't given much thought to "having paid users who will feel stupid to move off" was not a big deal but clearly it is?
To play devil's advocate though from a numbers point I think loom has about 20m users so this is $5 per user. But if acq is for a billion then I'd assume their actual revenue is something like 100m. So $5 /user/year. I guess in that sense once a user has paid that low price they are not thinking of moving off for a year so it is plenty of upsell opportunities for atlassian. Ofcourse depending on usage just the video hosting could cost them more than $5/user/ year? Interesting stuff!
If I remember correctly, they also host the edited videos and the recipient gets a link to their hosted version.
That's the reason I didn't sign up (I wanted to send the video over Slack directly), but it does functionally add a moat where all your videos are on their servers, like YouTube.
It is not a very well done feature. It is among the most deterministic pieces of software I have ever used. Tella.tv and Screen Studio are well done pieces of software, but not Loom
In this day and age you'd be surprised how "valuable" deterministic is. Imagine I go to a LinkedIn feed and just see the same feed on refreshes instead of engagement driving randomness?
I understand that stuff like Loom exists and people use it. But people are saying it makes no sense, not that it doesn't happen.
> also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA... life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting
Developers who don't know if what they write works or who can't express a bug in words... they're in trouble. You don't need experience for that. Non-developers / non-pros doing QA is symptomatic of greater problems.
> life saver being able to share a quick video
Who is supposed to be watching these videos? In your honest, no-BS assessment, when you're staring at these Zooms you might be doing professionally with like 9 people and only 1 of them is an engineer, and he's offshore: like isn't that the problem?
Nah, Loom is a really valuable tool. I cannot count the number of meetings I've been able to skip because I could just send a video out for comments. It's also much better than screenshots for providing context to Jira tickets and bug reports.
Loom is the best option currently in the market for doing screencast recordings and demo recordings. I use it extensively, and started out using other alternatives like complex configurations in OBS. Loom is not only a superior UX, but the built-in web editor works perfectly without requiring the heavy weight of installing, learning, and using (and often paying for) a more pro-grade video editor for doing simple tasks.
This may be because I'm a PM now, because I didn't do this type of thing as an engineer, but I have grown a huge appreciation for visual tools because "a picture is worth a thousand words". If I can show somebody the behavior that I am talking about, actually get a record of a bug happening, or build a demo that doesn't feel like a slide deck and is showing actual product experience, it has a deeper visceral impact on customers and engineers, and speeds up resolution time or identifying directionality of design.
I don’t use it but I have a family member who uses it extensively and has a love-hate relationship with it (perfect for it to be owned by Atlassian). It’s a great tool _when it works_ and they’ve told me they would switch in an instant if there was something better. I guess it crashes and loses data for them semi-regularly, sometimes they have to contact support to find something the web/app lost.
Personally I use, and love, CleanShotX but I don’t need to record my face and I’m not even sure if you can draw on the videos you create like you can in Loom. I use it mostly for annotating pictures. And before “macOS has this built in”, yes they do and what they provide is way better than nothing but it doesn’t hold a candle to CleanShotX. It’s way clunkier and hard to make edits once you’ve added something to the screenshot, CleanShotX is a breeze and being able to record video as a gif is awesome for bug tickets or documentation.
This is a bummer. I really liked Loom. I was surprised to find some really neat video tools now by Prezi. Who else is doing good stuff around quick async collaboration?
It's kind of silly but at my work we're using Gather. Walking your little pixel art character around the "office" is silly at first, but it's really lowered the friction to short video interactions. It's way less friction than sending someone a link and waiting around for them to join a meeting.
Doist Inc. with Twist (https://twist.com). A sane replacement for slack that focus on making your life easier, and get actual job done by levering the concept of "threads" to make them first-class citizens that bridge the gap between instant chat where direct communication is needed and task manager where you need to declare a discussion to be open or closed.
They side with the "Deep Work" philoshopy, and encourage (written) async collaboration.
Twist is much nicer than Slack in my opinion. The signal to noise ratio tends to be much better, and I find myself distracted by it far less because information I need is much easier to find when I need it.
We just started a beta of a product that is a drop in loom replacement and “smarter” in that we completely index not just what you said but what you showed on screen (OCR) and what you did (captured actions) to make everything easier to find, easier to get quick answers from (built in chat assistant who “watched” the video already) and auto generate things like docs out of it. Looking for beta users and feedback on feature requests, check out a post about it here: https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 or drop me a note diamond@augmend.com
My side project, Teaminal, lets you do agile meetings like standup, sprint planning, and retro asynchronously. Stuff like status updates or planning poker aboslutely doesn't need to be done on a call.
I know screen recording tools are widely used in the engineering world... I always thought they were more impressive for how much they culturally normalized screen recording in the rest of the corporate world.
Isn't there a Mac app which can record your programming presentation or demo video and turn into slides using AI? That feature could be next step for Loom acquisition.
We're a new startup that has recording -> docs, not slides yet, but it's easy enough to go that direction. We just started a beta of a product that is a drop in loom replacement and “smarter” in that we both generate doc artifacts and completely index not just what you said but what you showed on screen (OCR) and what you did (captured actions) to make everything easier to find, easier to get quick answers from (built in chat assistant who “watched” the video already), etc. Taking on new beta users and feedback on feature requests, check out a post about it here: https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 or drop me a note diamond@augmend.com
At 25M users it's about $40 per user, and Atlassian needs some kind of screencast data to bolster their future in training project management models. Also, they can afford it, so it's a good time to get into the market.
Hopefully they aren't paying for all those ghost users from the pandemic hype. Could be a good acquisition but Atlassian somewhat known for just buying useless crap.
Waiting for a future, where you cannot simply look at a ticket, but have to skip through a video over and over again, just like with voice messages that people send on messengers. Instead of having to think about clear writing in tickets, one has a vague not well defined speech in a video. Then maybe they will add automatic transcription and again people will think "Now it's all fine!", which of course it won't be.
We just started a beta of a product that is a drop in loom replacement and “smarter” in that we completely index not just what you said but what you showed on screen (OCR) and what you did (captured actions) to make everything easier to find, easier to get quick answers from (built in chat assistant who “watched” the video already) and auto generate things like docs out of it. Looking for beta users and feedback on feature requests, check out a post about it here: https://www.augmend.com/blogiverse/augshare-0-2 or drop me a note diamond@augmend.com
You can try out Jumpshare (https://jumpshare.com). We are seeing many people move to our platform from Loom. I am the founder so feel free to ask anything.
As a loom customer, color me very surprised. I did not expect it to have such a strong business since we generally just sporadically use it and it's a vitamin not a painkiller. Just goes to show how you can't accurately evaluate companies based on your own limited experience. Congrats to the team
Atlassian has a record of failed acquisitions:
Bitbucket, HipChat, Trello, OpsGenie,.. and the list goes on. Add Loom to that list.
In this market, when every single collab company is struggling, Atlassian goes and acquires a collab company when there are so many companies in the DevTools space or get your pick in AI. Spending a billion on a video sharing tool? Unsure what they were thinking and who all are advising the founders. I see the Aussie connection though..
They didn’t spend a billion for the tech, they spent it for the huge userbase already full of fledgling enterprise leads. It’s a lead generation acquisition. I do hope they don’t ruin the product, though.
OpsGenie, until the really bad way they handled an outage last year, it was, sometimes begrudgingly, widely used, recommended sometimes even.
Trello, on the other hand, seems like what everyone wants to use but no organization seems to want to let people use. Everyone that uses Trello seemingly, likes it
Can Atlassian just for once first go and stabilize their existing product lineup before trying to shoehorn yet another thing into their offering?
I mean, it's basic stuff that just isn't possible on JIRA Cloud for example, like setting a global sender address for notification emails - something perfectly possible on on-premise installations, but on Cloud you have to do that for each project and you can't even set it up as a default for new projects.
Or maybe what about a first-party Terraform provider. Or a support that's actually worth the name instead of underpaid callcenter employees that seem to have to strictly follow some sort of script instead of actually being allowed to use their brains or to properly read what customers write them.
That billion $ they just dumped out on this acquisition could have been invested into their existing products.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 384 ms ] threadSources: - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/loom
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenli1/2022/03/14/nearly-bro...
- https://twitter.com/andrew__reed/status/1712458243883110599?...
(Edit: formatting)
I know that VCs typically have some kind of "upside protection" in later rounds that guarantees them first money out in the event of a sale on some multiple of their investment, but I don't know what terms are common.
Investors frequently have clauses (warrants/ratchet) to increase their position if the sale wasn't at some threshold, which will affect (to downside) the basis for Employees payout.
If the Employee thought the stock was at $150/share at 1.5B they will get less than $97 on payout.
Not only do the investors have priority shares over employees, each investor can negotiate a guaranteed multiple. For example if they put in 100 million for 10% ownership but also had a 5X multiple guarantee and a sale price of 1 billion then the 500 million they walk away with ends up being 50% of the sale price. That part of the agreement isn't made public as far as I know.
Will the investors insist that it all come out of the founders' percentage of the pie, or can I argue that the better-incentived employees mean a bigger and more likely pie, so VC terms shoudl be less grabby?
Will VCs react negatively to "being soft on" employees, even if it all comes out of founders' slice?
Do early employees get ISOs, other options, RSUs, or something else?
The only good answer to this is 1) don't raise more VC money than you really need, and 2) don’t raise money at a valuation way above what your company is actually worth.
The problem in the scenario here is that they sold for below the valuation of their last funding round, and the size of their last funding round was ginormous.
When you raise hundreds of millions at a $1.5b valuation, you’re expected to sell above $1.5b at some point in the future. Any less and you didn’t live up to the opportunity that you pitched investors (and the financial outcomes for everyone deteriorates when you sell for way less than your valuation).
Or do I have to look like much more a traditional fundamentals investment, than a semirandom lottery ticket (or growth scam to exit)?
Successful startup companies can and should compensate employees well with both cash and stock. It's only incompetence and greed that endangers this outcome. VC expectations are a red herring, only bad VCs are so short-sighted as to deprive a founder of one of the major tools of team-building (truly valuable company equity).
As a founder, there are forces you have to fight against from first principles using your moral compass via a thoughtful fundraising strategy, but it can be done.
I think the end result is that it's probably not possible to pay employees with meaningful equity anymore so you'll have to go back to paying them the old fashioned way with money. I know I'm no longer willing to take RSU lotto tickets and a pay cut to work at a startup.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capit...
It's worth listening to if you want to understand this stuff better.
Having just listened to this book, I would guess that this sale has not been a great outcome for the founder and employees.
Kill me please.
Maybe a unified tool with a better integration will allow better bug reports, but pep talks by management at scale? No, thanks.
Blackhole is Free and Open Source.
Also, Rogue Amoeba has a product called "Loopback". It's not cheap, but it's another alternative: https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/
There is no good reason it’s not possible in Quicktime to record the system audio along with the screen.
It still boggles my mind that there is no "Stereo mix" built-in.
I see this issue all the time in bug reports and it can be pretty helpful to see a short video on how to replicate the issue. Depending upon the type of user submitting those reports they are often _more_ helpful than straight text because I don't have to have as lengthy back-and-forth Q&A on getting more details.
Also the first person to invent Ctrl+F for video will be a billionaire.
At least YouTube (desktop web) lets you open the (often auto-generated) captions as a transcript on the side.
Also has captioning, transcripts and summarization.
For when a bug doesn’t seem possible, video remains invaluable.
This sentiment is one of the reasons why so much documentation is not good.
Writing good, usable, technical documentation is HARD.
Here's a sample scenario from one of my previous jobs: a PR is not getting reviews. After a day I record a three-minute Loom where I walk through the problem and the solution, and post it on the team's channel. A few hours later the PR is approved, without any synchronous work and without me having to spend twenty minutes thinking out and typing out a blog sized post on Slack on the same topic. If anyone ever feels the need to dig out that commit again, the Loom is still accessible.
Loom found a way to solve real problems without more typing or more meetings, and that's why it's been successful. Slack, by the way, has a "record a clip now" feature that I liked even more than Loom for the purpose; but by that point we already standardized on Loom and Loom is better at organizing clips.
That said there is a niche of user testing video capture and so on, but that is not what this is.
You can condition people to give you all this information but it's an uphill battle, so I'd rather just get it myself from the source if possible.
I feel like there's a misunderstanding here where people think engineers will now record videos instead of writing their usual issue description. This is clearly not the use case of Loom.
It started with Jing from Techsmith that had one key feature like loom - record and auto upload to the cloud and put the URL into your clipboard ready to paste into an email.
It’s surprising use of video in this way isn’t more ubiquitous.
Loom might actually be able to do the very thing you are saying it can’t. They have a few AI features that seems to auto generate a title and summary recently.
I can't fathom how Techsmith couldn't make that work (although maybe it was just too competitive with Camtasia)... Loom is basically the same thing but limited to a Chrome extension? Or am I missing something?
I used to recommend to clients to pre-install the free Jing on all of their pcs, was awesome.
Those are Atlssian’s customers.
Have been using it for a very long time (I still miss Jing!)
There is no emailing back and forth meaninglessly. The user just records and talks about what they want to do and what hats happening.
The support side sees exactly how the user is doing it to make it instantaneous to replicate the issue.
There is no need for the user to give detailed screenshots and type up a whole scenario.
I already use windows game mode for screen captures. Why would I need a separate application for that?
Why, it's an extraordinary adventure with an interface of magic, stunning, high-resolution, 3D landscapes, sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point 'n' click control of characters, objects, and magic spells.
Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom™ today!
1. Why would I want to host my sensitive data on someone else's servers instead of my own servers and storage hardware?
2. Why shouldn't someone have a physical media backup for time-urgent, sensitive files? Last I was in school, if I had a final presentation, I would absolutely store it both on a hypothetical cloud storage volume and a backup on a thumb drive. If I were still in school today I'd do the same thing. Would you really risk your final course grade on the possibility that Dropbox is down when you are up to present? And nevermind the arbitrary and random account suspensions that all SaaS providers are infamous for (looking at you, Google).
Your points are valid ones about data privacy, and redundancy of important data. And how Joe public doesn't seem to notice those.
The original infamous comment dismissed a tool that made a task easier for regular users because the server nerd says: "I can build it in my shed out of rsync and bash using a server I maintain, why should I use this?".
That's what Atlassian is paying for. The ability to cross-sell.
Maybe they are right. Or maybe it ends up in the junk drawer. Either way they captured a potential next generation competitor for a relatively low cost to them.
checks website
Oh yes they put AI which is actually ML in it. Hence the money. Yep just keep pumping that bubble I'm sure it'll work this time...
Along with existing integrations into other enterprise software (like confluence, jira, and zoom)
The compliance work for storing and distributing this data is already done.
The staff of experts that don’t need to be sourced by recruiters.
The new ability to prevent sites like Monday from integrating with it.
Not to mention the existing loom customers.
Reducing an entire company down to the simplest form of their product and comparing that to the price of the company is kind of dumb.
Creating a video service where uploading the video includes next to no waiting is not trivial.
That would be hard enough to build at this scale for the OP and most people.
There hasn’t been one like it before.
Win+G, drag & drop
Atlassian is a big company that is successful at what they do, bigger than Loom and presumably with more resources. So I am confident they could have just copied Loom's business model and maybe even implemented better to fit their needs, since they have staff in place. It would certainly involve staffing up where needed, but I think they could have pulled it off and saved money. Also, with an acquisition, now they ave to integrate Loom into the broader Atlassian org, which wont be trivial.
So there are legit trade-offs with an acquisition.
That being said, spending $1B on a acquisition also saves time.
> Loom works wherever you do.
> Get Loom for Free
> For Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android
Looks like Loom does not work wherever I do.
(not associated with the company - just a happy customer who feels like they ought to be more widely known than they seem to be)
it is true that $975M is too high a price for a screen recorder when they could have bought a licence to Cleanshot for $19
Does cleanshot auto upload and process the video as well?
Alternatively, because it's a great native-first app, you can just set the saving directory to an existing cloud provider on your machine like Dropbox and let it handle uploading and serving the file.
See the thing with something like loom is it just works.
I used mono snap for a while for example.
Native apps to capture are great but they seem to get acquired.
Maybe it’s easier now to do but it definitely was faster than a native app locally uploading to the cloud as you record.
Nope, nope, nope.
Now even if they grew at 40-50% YoY CAGR (which is on the bullish side) - $60M-$70M ARR, approximately giving them a 10-12x ARR multiple for NTM revenue, put them squarely in the median to high-end valuation mutiple for PLG companies growing at 30-50% YoY (https://www.meritechcapital.com/benchmarking/historical-trad...)
With 1 billion and a team of software developers, I would put Jira and Confluence back on the right road, not acquire a video company ;-)
The loom integration has been useful to attract some users who don’t use Jira otherwise.
I just wish Jira-1369 would get solved after 20 years because users refuse to adopt Jira or confluence when they’re getting waterboarded with notifications instead of a timed digest that can be set.
Open: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-1369
Closed: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369
The original JRA-1369 was opened in 2003. Addressed a little in 2019, but not the digests to solve it all. Odd since plug-ins have to. closing this is one way to improve optics I guess.
Ps, I don’t hate Jira. Wasn’t a huge fan and it took a few years to see the light of what it does that so few platforms do when it comes to being able to absorb complexity as it evolves.
Managing evolving complexity is a real thing, and the pain can be reduced by having more in one tool vs not. It’s a tough space, and I think Aha.Io is one tool suited to win their prize and grow into Jira’s space.
Their worst sin remains how many people are subjected to an out of the box install compared to one that is setup to your processes. Tweaking it makes such a difference.
> Their worst sin remains how many people are subjected to an out of the box install compared to one that is setup to your processes. Tweaking it makes such a difference.
This is true, I hated out of the box Jira, and I tolerated it after I tweaked it for our org. Honestly, it probably shouldn't even work out of the box. It should just start with a single ticket that describes how to configure it, that you can't close until you configure some ways to close tickets.
It is a little too complicated to setup in the beginning but it has more first principles to learn before combining maybe due to the complexity it can handle.
On the other hand, having used Loom a few times, I admit I can completely understand why. Loom is an almost unbelievable piece of software.
I do love the idea of sharing a screen recording of features though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
So, indeed, a very cool replacement was SSH.
I still don’t know anyone who didn’t leave Dropbox after they jacked up the prices. A USB key is much cheaper (and reliable, at the rate at which Dropbox nukes accounts that they deem not compliant with whatever policy).
Can't remember the last time I saw a USB key in use anymore.
The cloud stuff is convenient, but it quickly became a commoditu Dropbox is still better in some small ways (like delta syncs) but it wasn't enough I guess.
There is always room for a smooth paid service compared to the rough free one. Android and Linux vs twice-more-expensive Apple.
Funny, I don't know anyone who did.
[1] https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026
I'd guess that a big part of it is customer acquisition and then raising prices or ramping customers to other Atlassian products.
Lots of ancillary stuff involved. I know a team that went down this route and built a competing tool and the hardest part was working out the streaming upload and storage. Then you layer on things like permissions, lifecycle management, etc.
It's not (yet?) heavily used among engs where I am, but we love it anyway for massively shortening the feedback loop with designers who can drop a 30-second demo of some prototype UI at the head of a Slack thread and asynchronously receive the kind of nuanced feedback that'd usually need to start off with a (necessarily synchronous) huddle.
It's not a full replacement, but it's the one you already have.
Who knows, maybe the counterfactual isn't "wrote a concise doc," but rather "didn't share the information at all," in which case I suppose Loom et al is a positive.
Before that you got an issue saying "There's a bug on the notification list" and you needed to figure out how to reproduce it. Now you get a video showing exactly how to reproduce it.
It's a life changer and the opposite of what you describe.
This hasn't been my experience; if anything, quite the opposite, in that it's enabled my team to contribute much more actively to design. The effort of providing actionable feedback is admittedly slightly higher, but that's not a bad thing; needing to (and having time to!) write up feedback seems to yield more actionable results than doing it verbally in the moment, and for things that do really need talking through we have several sync touchpoints during the week with our embedded designer.
Of course, in contexts where no such touchpoints exist or where design and eng generally don't have a close relationship, I could see Loom being difficult - but I'm not sure I'd blame that first on the tool; if Design and Eng communicate only by throwing things over a transom at one another, I think the tool much more likely exposes problems you already had and didn't know about.
I find the loom extension redundant and glitch prone
Loom does this while the video is being recorded to give you the link as fast as possible.
To play devil's advocate though from a numbers point I think loom has about 20m users so this is $5 per user. But if acq is for a billion then I'd assume their actual revenue is something like 100m. So $5 /user/year. I guess in that sense once a user has paid that low price they are not thinking of moving off for a year so it is plenty of upsell opportunities for atlassian. Ofcourse depending on usage just the video hosting could cost them more than $5/user/ year? Interesting stuff!
I use both loom and cmd opt 5, but my CS and sales team would not be able to effectively use cmd5 (editing, hosting, comments, etc.)
The moat for us is that it just works and is cheap enough that moving off is literally not worth my time.
That's the reason I didn't sign up (I wanted to send the video over Slack directly), but it does functionally add a moat where all your videos are on their servers, like YouTube.
It’s a very well-done feature, but there are increasingly other platforms (Slack, Dropbox) that offer features 80% as good for free.
> also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA... life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting
Developers who don't know if what they write works or who can't express a bug in words... they're in trouble. You don't need experience for that. Non-developers / non-pros doing QA is symptomatic of greater problems.
> life saver being able to share a quick video
Who is supposed to be watching these videos? In your honest, no-BS assessment, when you're staring at these Zooms you might be doing professionally with like 9 people and only 1 of them is an engineer, and he's offshore: like isn't that the problem?
I don't recall having the need to use video to express anything that comes to code.
Perhaps user interface stuff, yes. But code? Can't remember...
This may be because I'm a PM now, because I didn't do this type of thing as an engineer, but I have grown a huge appreciation for visual tools because "a picture is worth a thousand words". If I can show somebody the behavior that I am talking about, actually get a record of a bug happening, or build a demo that doesn't feel like a slide deck and is showing actual product experience, it has a deeper visceral impact on customers and engineers, and speeds up resolution time or identifying directionality of design.
Personally I use, and love, CleanShotX but I don’t need to record my face and I’m not even sure if you can draw on the videos you create like you can in Loom. I use it mostly for annotating pictures. And before “macOS has this built in”, yes they do and what they provide is way better than nothing but it doesn’t hold a candle to CleanShotX. It’s way clunkier and hard to make edits once you’ve added something to the screenshot, CleanShotX is a breeze and being able to record video as a gif is awesome for bug tickets or documentation.
They side with the "Deep Work" philoshopy, and encourage (written) async collaboration.
Link: https://www.teaminal.com
Separately, I'm a big fan of cleanshotX.
Now you can attach videos to jira tickets, seems a bit overkill.
In this market, when every single collab company is struggling, Atlassian goes and acquires a collab company when there are so many companies in the DevTools space or get your pick in AI. Spending a billion on a video sharing tool? Unsure what they were thinking and who all are advising the founders. I see the Aussie connection though..
BitBucket and Hipchat, for sure.
OpsGenie, until the really bad way they handled an outage last year, it was, sometimes begrudgingly, widely used, recommended sometimes even.
Trello, on the other hand, seems like what everyone wants to use but no organization seems to want to let people use. Everyone that uses Trello seemingly, likes it
I mean, it's basic stuff that just isn't possible on JIRA Cloud for example, like setting a global sender address for notification emails - something perfectly possible on on-premise installations, but on Cloud you have to do that for each project and you can't even set it up as a default for new projects.
Or maybe what about a first-party Terraform provider. Or a support that's actually worth the name instead of underpaid callcenter employees that seem to have to strictly follow some sort of script instead of actually being allowed to use their brains or to properly read what customers write them.
That billion $ they just dumped out on this acquisition could have been invested into their existing products.