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!"
Don't forget forcing everyone to their SaaS offering only to be shown not to have a validated disaster recovery plan that resulted in almost 2 weeks (4/5-4/17) of consecutive downtime for many customers. Cherry on top was the 57 customers they screwed up the backup restore for and brought back older data. By the time they realized it they had to work with the customers to merge the newer backups with the changes they'd made since the initial restore.
I think the concern is more that they have such a small moat. Their product seems too easy to copy. But given that they are first to market, did a very a good job with what they offer and have acquired a lot of customers, that is all worth a lot of money. Is "a lot" $1B? Hard to say.
The brand also becomes a reinforcing moat in an interesting way when you become a household name. When your employees think to themselves "I want to send a quick video update to team X" and they instantly default to downloading Loom, IT's decision for which vendor to buy a solution like this from is practically made for them.
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.
most of the employees came in at later rounds, so play it out. ex: They'd get say $100K in options on paper, but the pitch would be the company is high-growth, so expectation of 2X, 10X, 20X, etc over next few years. That $100K is really $200K next year, $2M the year after, etc.
Except they sold the company at a ~flat multiple over the valuation. If employees got RSUs, then at least they made say $65K after short-term capital gains (30%+). But if as options... no growth over the latest valuation's strike price, so nothing. $65K is not $200K and certainly not $2M.. and $0 is even worse.
FWIW, I'm a happy customer, am happy for the founders, and hope the new features keep rolling out through the acquisition -- our usage of Loom grows every month! The issue here is not the founders, but HR & VC. This is why joining companies with high valuations is a big risk as the VC's have already set inflated prices that ate your potential payout -- you earn on growth over the strike price at time of joining -- and these high markup companies have a lot of revenue to grow into.
That’s not how option pricing works. This is a private company, and it was raising money using preferred shares. The employee shares underlying the options would have been common stock.
At least once a year the company would be required to do a 409a valuation to set the FMV for those underlying common shares and thus the strike price for any options in the next year or less. The 409a valuation for common shares is pretty much always going to be significantly discounted vs preferred for a variety of reasons like lack of liquidation preference, lack of liquidity, etc. These discounts are often 50% plus, but the shares likely have a 1:1 economic value to other share classes in a sale, except the most recent preferred that get to use their preference.
Anyways the reality is going to be determined by each company’s details, but option strike prices at private companies are generally much lower than the current going price for preferred due to the discounts provided by the 409a valuation.
Nothing you said here is wrong, but it also doesn't explain how likely or not employees with those common shares will have made money. Having been on both sides of these transactions, I think it's likely that they made very little on their vested shares, but they likely will have been given new hire packages with Atlassian that will be worth something (RSUs vs options).
Why do I think they didn't make much from vested shares? Simple preference math. While I don't know Loom's cap table, or how each round was structured, I think we can all agree that they gave shares to investors that at least had 1X preference. Given that the sale happened at a substantial discount to their last round valuation, it's likely that preferences ate up most if not all of the proceeds of the deal. There may have been a sweetener of some sort offered to the leadership team, and that may have been distributed to all existing employees, but that would have been independent of the cap table (they're not going to give a package to departed employees that exercised options).
Most employees probably made some money, just not very much.
Early employees would be lucky to get options worth 10-20bps of the company, so assuming $800M was distributed to shareholders after accounting for 1x liquidation preference that might only be $800k-$1.6M before accounting for dilution for the very earliest employees, and a lot less for everyone else.
for companies raising 9 figure later-stage rounds? that's not obvious to me
and relevant to this case, often the investor will do a higher valuation (artificially minting a unicorn etc) for optics/vanity reasons, which eats an additional 1+ years of future growth, eliminating the relevance of a discount here
and for folks who many not have followed terms above: investors get preferred shares, with rights over these discounted common shares. These include things like veto rights over acquisitions, first money out ("if $200M raised, no one else sees any $ until that $200M is paid back"), and for high-valuation unicorn rounds, often something like a participation multiple ("guaranteed extra $100M profit, so no one sees anything till $300M paid"), high interest rate on convertible debt portions, etc. So beyond the obvious dilution hit of new investors, there are a lot of these gotchas that trade a bigger bank account for heightened exit value risks to employees.
The people who come up with 409a prices have every incentive to make it as low as possible provided it is somewhat defensible to the IRS.
I assure you they can get more creative than saying that the last preferred price was at $X, therefore our hands are tied and the common must be close to that. They can take into consideration the preferred preferences, the current state of the business, the time since the last round, etc. For example, the 409a value can keep going down and down if the value of the business is (defensibly) going down and down, regardless of the last fundraising round.
This is a thing I'd love to see data for - the strike price discount at time of acquisition for later-stage companies. These same companies in that megaround companies probably have stock on secondary markets, which might be a good proxy for some of this.
And totally agree wrt creative arguments being viable... Just not clear what ends up happening in practice. Ex: I can imagine a split between paper unicorns vs ones w revenue backing it up being closer to market, and those later ones often switching to RSUs. So genuine curiosity here.
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.
Depends on when the 409a was performed and when the exercise happened. When the startup I work at got our Series A, a new 409a was done and increased the share price by roughly the same multiple of the new valuation, and now I have a wide spread for AMT should I exercise my options because of the new 409a.
So it's possible for employees to have joined after the new 409a when it was valued at 1.5bln and early exercised against that value.
I have a hard time actually visualizing this math. Let’s say you join a 1.5B valued company and get offered $100k in stock options, but at $20k. So an 80% discount.Assuming the company meets the revenue goals maybe 10 years in the future but otherwise no other growth beyond the valuation, is it worthwhile for the employee to exercise the options, not early? Presumably they would have to turn around and pay another $20k in taxes the year that they exercised
Nothing is the best case (if they didn't exercise options). You're right: some lost money on the transaction if they did exercise, outside special consideration.
I don't think you can just say that bout the last raise.
Depends on the exercise price. Exercise price is lower than the preferred price that the investor paid. Due to the fact that investors get preferred shares.
Preferred vs common only matters when the company is sold at loss? The preferred shareholders get priority in terms of being made whole before the common shareholders.
In this case, since series C was 1.5bln and sold for $975m, then the preferred shares were bought during C would be made whole first (assuming the prior rounds were made whole first and there's enough left over for series C preferred) before those who exercised right after the valuation for common shares.
Edit: I forgot that preferred shares also come with liquidation preferences too, meaning that in a loss situation, later employees are highly unlikely to get something
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
Huh? Click button, record video, "file" appears in the bottom corner of the screen, drag that into Slack or the Github editor, done. I would be worried about the links expiring, is Loom really hosting arbitrary unlimited sized video content forever for $12/mo? Damn, it's a good thing they got bought.
With loom you can edit it quite easily. I currently use Kap (on MacOS). Tool quality it not as good as Loom. Needs more maintainers I guess.
For me, something like Loom without the online-first approach would be nice. It doesn't exist. I searched. Screenshot tools are a solved problem, screen capturing isn't.
After a screengrab with quicktime you just > edit > trim and then save as. Transcripting audio and summarizing would be nice creature comforts but I'm in the "billion dollars for what now?" camp.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Maybe in a big company, but actually I completely disagree with this in the context of a small startup. In that context, having a tight team of people who are highly passionate about the product is _essential_.
The only real complex problem a start-up has to solve is making the product successful. Engineers that love "complex problems" with no love for the product / space it's in is usually a recipe for disaster.
Using the product your company makes in the way it is intended to be used isn't "drinking the koolaid". If you aren't comfortable doing that then you really shouldn't be working there.
I mean... you don't HAVE to, you're right. However, hiring for most engineering roles is a filtering problem rather than a sourcing problem. I'd rather hire a Javascript engineer who'll at least _pretend_ to be excited about the job than hire a Javascript engineer who is lukewarm to cold right out of the gate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
Well were you excited to work there? For a startup that usually matters as much or more than technical skills and experience. If the founders are giving you a significant chunk of equity in their company then they want to make sure you are in it for the right reasons, and won't bounce as soon as you reach your vesting cliff.
If you think answering this simple question is a hit on your pride then yeah, you were probably not a good fit.
It is hard to remember how I felt about the company before (as opposed to the product idea). To be even more clear, the request was explicit. Like "we are super passionate about this product here and want people who are just as passionate, send us a video showing how excited you are".
I'm sure some others can't understand and I view it as a mistake. 2 minutes of performative "I can' wait to be a full stack engineer!" or "we're really going to change he world!" energy might have netted me some big payout? If I passed the interview? Who knows.
It's one thing to have genuine passion for working hard, doing a great job, making a great product. There is something else in being asked to make a video performance of that.
It's something like how I hate leet code. It is almost just a hoop you jump through to prove you are willing to jump through hoops. But I suppose it does provide many companies with a lot of value. And some of those companies end up exiting high. Maybe if I was less prideful I could have taken more advantage.
FWIW I don’t think of it as pride as much as setting boundaries. You understood yours and it made you uncomfortable to cross it. I personally think that’s a good thing.
I don't feel like it's necessary to take sides on this one - seems like Loom gave you some signal on what company culture looked like on the inside, and you decided it wasn't a good match. Seems like a positive interaction/outcome for both parties?
In my experience as a founder, excitement to work in a particular area is way more important than experience/skills. Ideally you have both. But lack of enthusiasm for a product, especially a niche product, kills a culture.
Yes startups are all about building great products that users will love. But that love should be organic and authentic, not blind belief.
I suspect that this expectation is likely because most startups are actually bullshit products. Look at all the dumbass crypto startups and now the AI startups. Its become an institution that churns out crap so you need to be able to delude yourself into believing the nonsense to keep doing it repeatedly.
I’m sure they didn’t mean to give you that impression. That’s a good lesson for people making these requests. If the CEO had worded it more evenly (“send me a Loom about what interests you in working for Loom”) you might’ve sent one in, and the people who wanted to demonstrate sheer enthusiasm to maximally fulfill the request still would’ve.
(Also, I still think you didn’t much like the product… :) )
At a startup, you need people who are excited to make the product a success, not just someone who's gonna churn through tickets and tick off boxes. They were probably looking to see if you were going to commit at that level. Totally get why this rubs some people the wrong way, but probably just means it's not a good fit.
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.
This comment misunderstands how liq pref works. Liq pref is about the amount of money invested ($175M), not about the valuation. At a $975M exit and a par-for-the-course liq pref of 1.0, it is very likely that all shareholders will have made money on the exit.
Shareholders who got in before that last round, that is. Employees who joined in the last few years will likely have underwater options unless Loom internally repriced already-granted options.
Why are they underwater? The "value" of their options would have been the preferred share - common share price. So it would have been a fat haircut but likely still netted them some number > common share price, no?
At exit the preferred shares become common, and the common shares increase in value accordingly. I've seen even series E companies that kept their common share price to under 20% of the preferred share price. If you started on day X with a common share price of 20% of the last preferred share price, and the company was acquired on day X + 1 at a discount, say 60% of the last preferred share price after factoring in liquidation preferences, then your profit from the options is still 2x the strike price.
Loom is an odd case because the timing of their last round was simply perfect. It was announced in May 2021, which means the terms would've been set in Jan or Feb, when Tiger and other firms were on a rampage and competition to get into rounds was at its height. That last $130m has to have been on very favorable terms, not just the valuation but e.g. no crazy liquidation preference. So, unless Loom's founders made some inexplicably bad deals, I'd expect even recent hires to still make a little money. Nobody should be getting zeroed out.
As I mentioned in another comment -- no, their options will not be underwater, because the strike on their options is set by the 409A value, which will have been far less than 1.5B. It wouldn't be unusual to see a company that's got its preferred stock valued at 1.5B and its 409A at 400M.
Are you counting employees that joined after the 1.5B valuation?
I am sure they made money but not what was expected (exiting above 1.5B).
How are you determining par for the course liq preference of 1.0? Where does that data come from? I ask genuinely as the small sample of companies I know of personally have liq preferences greater than 1.
Liq pref > 1 was extremely uncommon in the last 5 years.
Employees who joined after the 1.5B valuation will have made money because the strike on their options is set by the 409A, which will have been far, far less than 1.5B. Preferred stock price is not the same as 409A common price.
if they had options, i.e the ability to purchase stock at, say, $10, but the company was sold with that stock being worth $9 only, then exercising those options would lose them money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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
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.
If you have a mac, buy Compressor app from Apple set up Folder watch, use Zoom to start an empty video meeting to show video of yourself, minimize(shift cmd m) and float(cmd alt f) the zoom window, then use MacOS screen record(cmd shift 5) to record.
I can get this screen grab setup up running in 10 seconds. You don’t need Loom for most cases
This is such an on-brand HN response. “You don’t need Loom, just do these [10 inconvenient steps] and it’s the same”.
How do you share and upload those videos? Where are they hosted? Can you set a CTA on the video? Get transcripts? Find who has viewed your video? Add a custom thumbnail? Get comments on your video? Set a description?
These are all baked-in things that Loom handles, not to mention one-click recording that doesn’t involve wiring together 3 different apps.
It’s actually one step if you just want screen recording shift cmd 5 at any time, going to loom you likely need 5-10 clicks to start one. I do agree loom provide auto saves, share but like I said if you have ssd space and don’t need to share instantly..
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
What’s the point in this acquisition? Why do enterprise projects need short form videos (aka Tik Tok)?
Atlassian products are already dog shit slow. Add in the number of plugins that admins add over the years plus processing and hosting of videos … It’s going to be a hot mess.
Would hate to be the person on the project that has diminished vision or completely blind. Screen readers don’t stand a chance against QA’s short form videos with no audio or description of the bug or feature.
Seems like bloat to me. Atlassian trying too hard to become the sole solution for project management.
Text to speech models like Whisper are getting good enough that screen readers would stand a chance. The video itself is still more difficult to caption, but the things that would be shared in video are probably being shared with screenshots right now, so it would not be worse.
They sold for almost 50% less than their last raise but selling a clip recorder product for US$ 1bn is still a big achievement and it is indeed a good software product.
Curious on the multiples they paid though. My guess => US$ 30 MM ARR @ 30x revenue multiple
I consult with a very large variety of businesses and literally my only interaction with loom in the wild is when a few LMS I'm in started randomly started replacing youtube embeds with loom embeds.
Everyone hates it though because the loom embed player is hot garbage and actively distracts from the experience. I've heard much the same from most of my colleagues also going through the LMS courses.
$1B seems a crazy price, but I guess overpriced garbage is right up Atlassians street.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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...)
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.
Loom is an excellent piece of software, but from my perspective in IT I've never been able to justify it's ROI.
I've been always pushing for it to go away as soon as had to start looking at SaaS spend. Looking at the analytics only a few power users really made use of it while the biggest majority of users never used to record or maybe only recorded 1-2 videos a quarter. It was too expensive and video is very expensive to run on the cloud.
Zoom released a competitor recently and that must be killing them. Other companies are also offering cheaper alternatives and egress traffic for video-centric businesses is crazy expensive.
They had layoffs not so long ago, like many companies, and during my last negotiations with them they were very aggressive with pricing. Aggressive to the point of their executive team asking what amount we wanted to pay, and they actually committed to the price we offered...
Glassdoor reviews and Blind comments weren't good at that time either, but that is true for most companies.
I think they couldn't keep the revenue curve up-to-the-right to offer a decent return to their investors and it was turning more into an OK business.
Time to sell, stay there for a year and move on to start their next thing. For Atlassian is a relevant acquisition, especially as they are also focusing more into chasing freshdesk or zendesk as a customer support platform.
I wish them the best, as I said, the product itself was very well designed and engineered compared to any other alternatives out there.
I think they missed to make it relevant and a must have for companies, maybe focusing more to sale to sales and customer experience/support teams which tend to have big budgets compared to other teams.
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.
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.
I like Loom, but once Slack launched clips and huddles there was really no reason to continue using it (nearly 100% of our usage was recording a video clip and posting it to Slack). Wonder what Atlassian has in store for the product.
Maybe it's just me, but in the video, the founder doesn't seem all that excited about the acquisition. It's almost like he's having second thoughts, but it's too late to back out.
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.
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.
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?".
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.
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
You mean the sensational platform for video messaging and screen recording from the geniuses at Loom™? Ah, it's a revolutionary experience that'll transform how you communicate in the business landscape! Boasting an intuitive interface that even your grandma can use, jaw-dropping video quality, and super-speedy sharing capabilities. We're talking about top-notch encryption, folks, not to mention screen and camera recording with pixel-perfect clarity! No more tedious emails or confusing Slack threads. Simplify your life! Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom™ today!
Future will tell, whether Loom becomes enshittified, like basically everything else Atlassian touches or produced. Lets see how much usability will be impacted by putting it behind attrocious Atlassian logins and adding new unwanted features and integrations to it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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...
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!
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Interesting if not surprising to see the criticisms here. We use loom extensively at work and as a remote employee it’s one of my favorite collaboration tools. Sending a video explaining a problem while I walk through code is often much easier than getting on a zoom call, and Loom is absolutely easier and more feature-filled than other forms of screen capture.
The issue that I have is that everyone that praise Loom are talking about how they enjoy using it to create videos. I don't hear anyone saying they enjoy consuming them. Do you?
I can give you the opposite opinion. I hate loom. I've never made a video with it. I've only had the displeasure of meeting a few people who used it for everything. It isn't fun to use. I'd rather have a block of text and maybe some screenshots l.
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.
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.