Profile of Bhavin Turakhia, who made millions selling an adtech firm and is now investing $45M of his own money to build Slack rival Flock, which has 25K users
Bhavin Turakhia pitching Flock as a cheaper messaging platform — Entrepreneur has 140 pairs of sweatpants and T-shirts Tweets: @harrymccracken Tweets: Harry McCracken / @harrymccracken : After the first two tech products called Flock failed, you'd think people might conclude the name was a jinx. http://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Turakhia's bet lands mid-arc in the team-chat land grab: Slack had already raised $160M by 2015, when Butterfield was still weighing what to do with it (an interview on spending that round), and would go on to a first-day pop valuing it near $20B (its direct listing close). Against that war chest, Flock's 25K users and its founder's own $45M make it a price-led flank attack rather than a scale contest.
The profile also carries a warning label from the corpus itself: two earlier tech products named Flock failed, which McCracken flags as a possible jinx — and the name keeps colliding, since a separate UK-based Flock later raised a $38M Series A for commercial fleet insurance.
First-order effects
- Slack now faces a rival whose entire pitch is being cheaper, aimed at the cost-sensitive slice of its base — though at 25K users Flock is competing for converts, not defending share.
- Turakhia's self-funding removes the fundraising clock that constrains VC-backed challengers, letting Flock price aggressively without burn-rate scrutiny.
Second-order effects
- The challenger field fragments by angle rather than head-on assault: Quill attacks on focus (its Sam Altman–led seed), Threads on asynchronous chat (its Sequoia Series A) — leaving Slack's pricing umbrella intact while each rival claims a niche.
- A credible cheap alternative gives buyers leverage in renewal negotiations with Slack, pressuring the category leader to defend on bundling and enterprise features instead of list price.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, team messaging consolidates around one scaled incumbent while well-funded niche challengers persist at the edges — a structure where price alone rarely displaces a network-effects leader.
- Bootstrapped founder capital versus venture-scale capital becomes a recurring contest shape in software categories: personal-exit money buys patience, but the corpus shows the winners so far have been the ones raising hundreds of millions.
The trend: Workplace-chat challengers keep arriving — self-funded or VC-backed, pitched on price or focus — while Slack converts its fundraising lead into category dominance all the way to the public markets.