Billionaire Brothers Want to Build a Cheaper Rival to Slack (bloomberg.com)

Saritha Rai, writing for Bloomberg: A teenage entrepreneur who became a millionaire by 20 before sharing a billion-dollar fortune at 36, Bhavin Turakhia isn't afraid to think big. Now he's putting $45 million of his own money into building a rival to Slack and other office messaging platforms. Flock, a cloud-based team collaboration service, has attracted 25,000 enterprise users and customers including Tim Hortons, Whirlpool and Princeton University. It's a market that has already drawn interest from global technology giants Facebook, Amazon.com and Microsoft. This time last year, few had heard of Bhavin and his younger brother Divyank. That changed when they sold their advertising technology company Media.net, with customers including Yahoo, CNN and the New York Times, to a Chinese consortium for $900 million. The all-cash deal catapulted the duo from mere millionaires into the ranks of the super-rich. "I want to make Flock bigger and better than anything I've built before," Bhavin Turakhia, wearing his signature dark Levi's T-shirt and Puma sweatpants, said at his Bangalore offices.

Comments

All you corporate info are belong to us

[future assassin]

And then we'll cash out once you suckers feed us enough of that info.

I don't get it, why would large companies not control this kind of service themselves for security reasons?

Mattermost!

[flacco]

I use Slack daily at work, and a self-hosted Mattermost instance daily for personal projects with other remote participants. I much prefer Mattermost.

At work I'll frequently make the mistake of trying to format my messages with markdown, because I'm so used to Mattermost offering this feature.

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