Loom is probably the simplest billion-dollar piece of software, but it's also excellent software and I am happy they're getting paid.
Screen recording before Loom was a pain. You had to open up some program, start it, save the file, upload the file somewhere, and share it. And if you had to edit the recording at all ... probably start over.
With Loom it's all one click and it's ready to share the instant you hit the Stop button. At my company we make and share dozens of Looms per day and it's a key part of maintaining a remote culture.
My immediate reaction was that value-wise it was a joke, how can they be worth $1 billion?
I agree with what you're saying here though, one click, ACL controlled and simple to use videos.
Concur with the enablement of the remote culture. I would have thought Atlassian could clone that so simply.
The Loom software is super buggy though, I have to open their site or extension or desktop app multiple times before it starts working, but when it does work the editing is just about OK. I have thought about using Google Meet to record my desktop, I've heard the editor in that is pretty good, and you can stop, start, trim/edit & share in Google Drive or share further with a link.
> My immediate reaction was that value-wise it was a joke, how can they be worth $1 billion?
It's probably way more about the in to the large install base of users to start pushing other Atlassian suite products on.
"Hey there happy Atlassian (formarly Loom) customer, since you're now in our ecosystem where products go to die, may we interest you in a Jira or a Confluence? They come with a complementary week of consecutive downtime on the house!"
I had to uninstall the desktop app it was uploading 6MB chunks at random times for no reason I could figure out. I hope this is an opportunity to improve their local software but not holding my breath lol the Atlassian Godzilla.
People pay for it. It’s probably something like 30x revenue or whatever growth valuation but still the point stands: it’s good enough to have quite a few paying customers.
> I have thought about using Google Meet to record my desktop, I've heard the editor in that is pretty good, and you can stop, start, trim/edit & share in Google Drive or share further with a link.
Options from the last raise would be under water, but they operated for years before that raise. There are likely a lot of employees doing reasonably well.
How does it compete with macOS screenshot in recording mode? Because that sounds basically the same flow just drag/dropping the output file into Slack.
Click button, record video, paste link into slack/github vs click button, record video, figure out what to do with the useless huge file; also annotations and whatever ai they managed to put in there to summarize the transcript
macOS doesn’t record video well at all. QuickTime is the vehicle for it, often crashing, or not stopping the recording. It’s been like that for years. I don’t use Loom, but I’d never ever recommend trying to record your screen on macOS using QT.
Loom is part of ours (our company is fully remote, no offices). One use-case is we use it to create demo videos of our work and attach it to our git pull requests so reviewers can see how to test our code changes. Others might be things like showing buggy app behavior.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I applied to Loom several years ago while they were still tiny. The CEO sent me a Loom thanking me for applying and asking me to send him back a Loom describing why I was excited to work for his company. Something about that rubbed me the wrong way at the time. I didn't reply and dipped out of the interview process.
I like that. Much faster than writing a cover letter or application email and shows you understand what they make. I take it you weren’t that interested in their product.
I thought (and still think) their product is a great idea.
Some people here seem to think my objection was being asked to use the product. It was actually the content of the message I was asked to send that bothered me. It wasn't "explain how your experience would be useful in this role", or "explain your feelings on the technical aspects of this product". It was something closer to "show me how excited you are to work here".
I don't know why but at the time it felt like being asked to grovel. My stupid pride, I guess.
Nope. Loom was last valued at $1.5 billion in 2021, so with this acquisition a lot of people's options undoubtedly got totally wiped out due to liquidation preferences.
At some point, companies become big enough that innovation is a risk (Innovater's dilemma). Atlassian is likely at this stage. Ofcourse, loom's tech is nothing impressive, one could argue that only a small segment of enterprise Loom customers would be willing to convert to Atlassian ecosystem. Nonetheless, the show must go on and Atlassian has to choose action instead of inaction to please the stock market. Good exit for loom though!
I think it's more likely that Atlassian gives it away for free to its client base .. groups like Linear are coming after them and tools like Loom make a material difference in getting quality work out the door. we use it for outward facing and training material, but the royal honey is when you can async-align on product initiatives down to the pixel. Video is a powerful story telling tool in today's remote world.
Figma on the other hand will have to sway towards Atlassian territory to add value to the tech bit of the pipeline. the dev mode has made it clear they are headed that way, on their own terms.
I just wish that more founders prioritize enterprise customers and clear the way to onboard by investing in compliance (SOC-2) reporting early! it's a total showstopper and that's unfortunate for all sides.
Atlassian is not afraid of innovating, they can’t. They just hired the worst developers again and again. Good students go to Canva, dropouts go to Atlassian.
Talk to partners. Everyone is pulling their hair at the new APIs. It’s architecturally bad, inside their systems. Even the architects are outputting crap! The best programmers of the company!
I’ve move my data outside Atlassian to prevent loss…
In 25 years, Atlassian is by far the worse platform I had to write code for. Worse than Oracle. You smell the pile of turd you are sitting on at every corner. For obvious reason, they embraced the corporate agile movement and can't coordonate anything. Their software is a patchwork of nonsense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
Screen recording before Loom was a pain. You had to open up some program, start it, save the file, upload the file somewhere, and share it. And if you had to edit the recording at all ... probably start over.
With Loom it's all one click and it's ready to share the instant you hit the Stop button. At my company we make and share dozens of Looms per day and it's a key part of maintaining a remote culture.
I agree with what you're saying here though, one click, ACL controlled and simple to use videos.
Concur with the enablement of the remote culture. I would have thought Atlassian could clone that so simply.
The Loom software is super buggy though, I have to open their site or extension or desktop app multiple times before it starts working, but when it does work the editing is just about OK. I have thought about using Google Meet to record my desktop, I've heard the editor in that is pretty good, and you can stop, start, trim/edit & share in Google Drive or share further with a link.
Perfect fit for Atlassian’s portfolio then
It's probably way more about the in to the large install base of users to start pushing other Atlassian suite products on.
"Hey there happy Atlassian (formarly Loom) customer, since you're now in our ecosystem where products go to die, may we interest you in a Jira or a Confluence? They come with a complementary week of consecutive downtime on the house!"
Surely loom can't be any worse than google chrome
Depending on liquidation preference clauses I don't think any employee outside the founders will make much from this sale.
Options from the last raise would be under water, but they operated for years before that raise. There are likely a lot of employees doing reasonably well.
I guess I don't get it.
is it? We don't do this at my company and I feel we have a good culture
Brilliantly made.
And I'm completely sold on the value of this software. Screen recording is the best way to log software design defects.
Sources: - 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Maybe a unified tool with a better integration will allow better bug reports, but pep talks by management at scale? No, thanks.
That said there is a niche of user testing video capture and so on, but that is not what this is.
Kill me please.
Those are Atlssian’s customers.
I already use windows game mode for screen captures. Why would I need a separate application for that?
Dead Comment
Drinking the koolaide doesn't mean you'll be a productive member of the team.
Pretty pointless of a filter
Some people here seem to think my objection was being asked to use the product. It was actually the content of the message I was asked to send that bothered me. It wasn't "explain how your experience would be useful in this role", or "explain your feelings on the technical aspects of this product". It was something closer to "show me how excited you are to work here".
I don't know why but at the time it felt like being asked to grovel. My stupid pride, I guess.
Checks notes
Millions of dollars.
Deleted Comment
Figma on the other hand will have to sway towards Atlassian territory to add value to the tech bit of the pipeline. the dev mode has made it clear they are headed that way, on their own terms.
I just wish that more founders prioritize enterprise customers and clear the way to onboard by investing in compliance (SOC-2) reporting early! it's a total showstopper and that's unfortunate for all sides.
E.g. automations for their products will cost soon meaning you need to upgrade your product to next tier. After we implemented everywhere...
Talk to partners. Everyone is pulling their hair at the new APIs. It’s architecturally bad, inside their systems. Even the architects are outputting crap! The best programmers of the company!
I’ve move my data outside Atlassian to prevent loss…
Now you can attach videos to jira tickets, seems a bit overkill.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.