20 ms·

Slack Says It's Filed to Go Public

500 points by chollida1 8y ago

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
> The company is choosing the unusual method for going public because it doesn’t need the cash or publicity of an IPO, the person said at the time. So why is it going public? Is there a benefit to a successful company?
- nemothekid 8y ago
  To provide liquidity to employees and investors.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    More than the cash it currently has? It's a grab for an even bigger pile of money? edit: Ah, missed the employees angle.
    - koolba 8y ago
      It would be cash for individuals who till now have illiquid options or private stock. Not just the company’s war chest.
    - 1123581321 8y ago
      The company could only use cash to do dividends or share buybacks, and the company is worth more than its cash on hand (maybe 10-20x as much more in Slack’s case.) A public offering makes it possible for effectively every shareholder to sell their shares for the full value without the company having to make a strategic financial decision to return cash to shareholders.
    - nemothekid 8y ago
      The "cash" who has? The employees don't have cash - they have stock. You can't pay rent with stock. This is a good move by Slack to provide a return to the employees who have stuck with them.
      - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        Ah, ok, so the employees will be getting money for their stock? That makes sense now.
        shimms 8y ago
        If they choose to sell it. Whilst markets exist for selling shares in private companies, it’s harder and there is a smaller pool of people looking to buy. On the public market, any shareholder can sell their shares (relatively) easily, and since it’s a public market the pool of potential buyers is much bigger. Employees don’t automatically get money for their shares, being public just makes it easier for them to if they decide they want to.
        icelancer 8y ago
        They'll own stock they can trade publicly. It's their call now, rather than holding on to a bunch of fictional dollars.
  - msalomon 8y ago
    That seems like a dumb reason
    - Johnny555 8y ago
      Not if you're an employee or investor.
      - LeoNatan25 8y ago
        If only the current economic system would encourage dividends rather than stock.
        icelancer 8y ago
        Dividends do not solve this problem.
        pathseeker 8y ago
        What do you think dividends are paid on?
    - aetherson 8y ago
      They're the owners of the company. They get to (collectively) decide when they want to cash out.
  - Tiktaalik 8y ago
    Good news for the Maserati dealerships in Vancouver which had been suffering recently from the Chinese government crackdown in moving money out of the country.
- e9 8y ago
  Just from top of my head: 1. Investors and employees cash out 2. You have huge leverage with stock compensation that now is real cash 3. You can buy other companies because you have access to funding(sell company shares instead of taking a loan, etc) I’m sure there are more benefits
  - YetAnotherNick 8y ago
    Why can't liquidity of existing stocks be provided without becoming public? Seems like easier task than going public and coming under myriad of different rules.
    - lozenge 8y ago
      When you have over a certain number of shareholders you have to follow strict reporting rules, giving your company all of the costs of being public but none of the benefits.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - ves 8y ago
      Providing enough liquidity at scale is hard without the public market.
    - sjjshzvuiajhz 8y ago
      A public market gives you access to millions of potential buyers, so you get the best price, with minimal fees. That’s liquidity. A private company could try to provide something like that without using the public market, but it won’t be nearly as good.
    - epa 8y ago
      They can, that is what's called "Private Equity". Private equity companies (similar to how Warren Buffet operates), usually want control, which changes a lot of how the Company may be run. Public companies are generally controlled by a group of investors, none of which has majority control.
- jorde 8y ago
  Spotify's CPO gave a good digest of the reasons recently: https://youtu.be/jTM7ZCKEUGM?t=2340 https://youtu.be/jTM7ZCKEUGM?t=2340 In short: * Need to go public if the company is too big * More fair for employees stock holders
ergothus 8y ago
...and my confidence that Slack will continue to be useful and a good experience for me just plummeted. Does this mean something is wrong with our market, or just my expectations?
- duxup 8y ago
  It says something about the system of rolling out companies with high valuations that don't seem sustainable outside of major changes that alter the product's desirability. But people will buy this and other stocks regardless so I'm not sure there's any incentive to change that.
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  It means somethings fucked with the VC system and they're finding companies that should be worthless.
  - anongraddebt 8y ago
    I agree. I also think we're going through a bizarre period in tech. I know I know, that's historical bias and all, but it doesn't mean living through it feels any less bizarre. A trite example is my use of Slack. I don't use it for messaging, though I've had the opportunity both in professional and non-professional settings to do so. Rather, I use Slack as a kind of RSS feed because people and organizations whose content I value have given me that opportunity on Slack. It's my favorite content notification feature because it is all in Slack, rather than being assaulted with notifications from all angles. Another trite example is my use of text messaging over the past year or so. Messaging is largely my social media experience now. I have - largely through no fault of my own - many different distinct group text messaging threads that are basically permanent. In Jan. 2018 that was not the case. Now, I can't get rid of these people I care about in meat space, from my messaging inbox! These group threads last for months and when one goes dead or silent another replaces it the next day. Each participant is posting in them on a daily basis (often 5+ times a day), with pictures and videos as well, and often long paragraphs of text. I do think the VC industry is showing signs of being broken. However, I also think companies are shape-shifting faster and more frequently then before.
TheBill 8y ago
Nothing is wrong with the market: Slack may have decided that this is the best way for them to create liquidity. There is also a cap (2000) on the number of shareholders a company can have before they have to abide by what amounts to the same reporting requirements as a publicly traded company. Slack also get the advantage of the usual market pop of acquiring companies share prices that usually amounts to a significant % of the cash value of the transaction.
- KZeillmann 8y ago
  Yeah I don't get why so many other commenters seem to think a direct listing means the company's all of a sudden about to die or its product is all of a sudden going to turn to crap. If this is the best way to achieve liquidity, that sounds good for them.
  - lugg 8y ago
    Their product kind of did turn to crap. 30% cpu at idle with 5 accounts. 50% if I enable emojis. Like I'm sorry but it's essentially IRC. There is zero excuse for being that much of a hog. You can blame it on electron if you like (I do) but it doesn't change anything for the end user.
    - adamnemecek 8y ago
      [deleted]
      - sbov 8y ago
        They weren't saying its just IRC so it isn't a viable business model. They're saying its just IRC so it shouldn't be a CPU hog. Your link is not really relevant here because it talks of business viability not program performance.
    - bduerst 8y ago
      Apparently they've fixed a lot of the CPU issues, it's just still in Beta: https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memory-gone-the-answer-slack-9e5c39207cab https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memor...
dawhizkid 8y ago
I find myself increasingly preferring email over chat
asien 8y ago
Fascinating how « Good » apps turn to utter shit when they are touch by VC money. Slack really follows the same pattern as everything that exist in the valley : - Create simple software that people love to use - Raise hundred of millions - Stop innovating / fixing bugs / adding new features and solely focus on customer acquisition - Go Public ans Cash Out - Leave the company and ignore millions of frustrated users - Repeat
- s3r3nity 8y ago
  Are the latter points true? I mean, I personally do not like using Slack at work, but I have to admit it has a lot of really smooth UI and Product features that seem polished. I don't think I encounter bugs on a frequent basis at all, and my coworkers don't seem frustrated by using it. But I guess I'm just one point of anecdotal data?
  - itslennysfault 8y ago
    I can second this, and I have a bias against it. When it came out I couldn't wrap my head around why people were excited about it. I've used IRC for like 20+ years and I didn't see it as much of an improvement from IRC. However, I currently use it every day and honestly have no complaints. I still don't know why a chat app is worth so much, but it does what it's supposed to (lets me talk to others in my company in a single place), and basically everything you could think of has an integration for it. I haven't had an even remotely annoying user experience since the early days, and as a "slack hater" I've been actively looking for things to complain about.
certmd 8y ago
Matt Levine on Slack direct listing from a few weeks ago... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-11/direct-listings-are-a-thing-now https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-11/direct...
- airstrike 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I swear, if you want to understand Wall Street, all you really need is Matt Levine. It's more informative than seemingly anything else out there.
  - davepeck 8y ago
    Agreed. Levine has a unique ability to peer deep inside the underlying mechanisms of modern finance and explain them clearly. Levine's writing reminds me somewhat of John Brooks, although Brooks was perhaps more interested in personas than mechanics. (If you've never read the Business Adventures collection, it's worth picking up!)
  - mruts 8y ago
    I don't think I've ever come across any written material on the internet that's better than Money Stuff. Matt Levine is a hero (and clearly very smart and measured in his thinking).
- mylons 8y ago
  great read. levine points out that lockout periods are basically a condition for traditional IPOs by the lead investors, and isn't required in a direct listing. assuming direct listings become a thing, inevitably there will be a big firm that does it and doesn't require a lockout period. i cannot wait to see what happens in that case.
  - aston 8y ago
    Spotify skipped their lockout period, with pretty boring results.
spacejesus 8y ago
Now we will watch big business and political agenda replace what we now know as "slack". It will be given a new name though once gone public... It will be called "slack-in"! Reminds me of snapchat.. lol
neom 8y ago
The interesting thing about these direct list IPOs is that if you have confidence your investors will hold, you don't need the bank for stability, you have stability as a result of such low volume. I'm no pro but I think the real risk is introduced when you don't know your investor base well, hence traditional underwritten IPOs have worked well. If the company doesn't need to raise money, seems like a fine way to let the little guys find liquidity. Will likely follow a similar chart as $ESTC.
- drewr 8y ago
  Not sure if the comments were supposed to be connected, but just to be clear, Elastic NV (ESTC) did a traditional IPO. Spotify was the first to do this direct IPO and Slack would be the second.
  - neom 8y ago
    Yah sorry, I started my thought about small cap IPOs that I think have similar revenue and then made a disconnected point, thanks for clarifying.
- lmm 8y ago
  Most companies need to sell themselves to investors - that's part of what the "roadshow" is about. Slack is a lot more visible than most B2B companies - people will be lining up to buy their shares without needing a banker to sell them on the company, in a way that wouldn't be the case for many businesses.
cpursley 8y ago
Hopefully they raise enough money to build a native desktop app.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  You mean three native desktop apps.
  - snuxoll 8y ago
    Qt /thread
    - gfwhukku 8y ago
      Qt is not native. Native doesn't mean "it's not written in JS" or "it's fast". Native means "it uses the GUI toolkit of the target platform". And Qt doesn't do that, it merely mimics its appearance.
      - darkengine 8y ago
        GTK isn't any more "native" than Qt -- they're both abstractions atop X (or Wayland, or Broadway).
      - IshKebab 8y ago
        You are incorrect. Toolkits like Qt are exactly what people are talking about when they say "native". How many apps do you think still use X11 graphic primitives? Did you even know they exist? How many programs use native Win32 controls? Not even Microsoft does that anymore.
        gfwhukku 8y ago
        >How many programs use native Win32 controls? Not even Microsoft does that anymore. So because Microsoft has lowered the bar, now everything can be called "native"? There's a reason many people hate UWP.
edoo 8y ago
After 30 years the market is finally prime for a managed IRC service.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  $7B IRC. Much shinier than the old IRC.
  - Groxx 8y ago
    It handles images now!
    - IshKebab 8y ago
      You joke but it really is an indictment against decentralised protocols that IRC is still so primitive that it can't even handle images. No doubt someone will reply "that's not what it's for!"
      - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        That's an indictment against IRC. Anyone could have come up with an open protocol, IRC-killer but XML happened and we ended up with a morass of garbage.
        kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
        That's an indictment against IRC, but I guess GP's point is that when it's everyone's business it often ends up being no-one's business
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Managed and modern. Seriously show me an IRC client that supports images, threads, emoji reactions (yes they really are useful), painless file transfers, etc. Hell IRC doesn't even let you browse history. How can you people not see that Slack is vastly superior to IRC (apart from the openness of course).
x1lo321 8y ago
The privacy statement of Slack is horrible. I also wonder why so many companies trust often highly sensitive conversations to what is essentially an IRC forum that could be taken over by an evil company any minute.
- iwakura 8y ago
  Convenience unfortunately seems to be higher valued than privacy by many. This held true for a web agency I worked for. Getting things done, even with proprietary tools, stood above all. The privacy policy was read later, or not at all.
- judge2020 8y ago
  [Many|most] companies big enough to worry about company secrets and PII being logged will get a contract with Slack set up before putting anything on there.
andrewmcwatters 8y ago
"From 1980 through 2001, if you had bought the average IPO at its first public closing price and held on for three years, you would have underperformed the market by more than 23 percentage points annually."
- mhuffman 8y ago
  I wonder what that number looks like from 2001-2016?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- jalgos_eminator 8y ago
  > From 1980 through 2001 How about through 1999? It seems dubiously arbitrary to use 21 years, the end of which just happens to be when the dot-com bubble burst...
- mruts 8y ago
  Ignoring the huge black swan event in your data (the tech crash), the point of getting in on an IPO isn't for you to hold it 3 years. You get allocated shares that you then sell before the lockup period for everyone else expires. It's just risk-free money for the people that are friends with the underwriters. I don't have the data on me, but I bet if you got into every IPO from 1980 through 2001 and then sold after one month, your returns would be pretty damn good.
  - andrewmcwatters 8y ago
    "And finance professors Jay Ritter and William Schwert have shown that if you had spread a total of only $1,000 across every IPO in January 1960, at its offering price, sold out at the end of that month, then invested anew in each successive month’s crop of IPOs, your portfolio would have been worth more than $533 decillion ($533,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) by year-end 2001." "Unfortunately, for every IPO like Microsoft that turns out to be a big winner, there are thousands of losers." "You could have earned that $533 decillion gain only if you never missed a single one of the IPO market’s rare winners—a practical impossibility."
killyp 8y ago
Serious question... What are the benefits of using Slack over Discord? I know Slack has been around longer, looks more professional and has more tie-ins with work flow management tools but those seem like small advantages compared to how feature rich Discord is. Just genuinely curious as I prefer Discord for communicating with my coworkers about non-sensitive information but it doesn't seem to get any love outside of video game and internet communities.
- fargo 8y ago
  Slack offers Enterprise sales
  - 1290cc 8y ago
    Thats what so many miss in a tech company IPO. Slack has built a business model off commodity tech that was around for decades. It has happy customers who continue to spend money with them and a plan to continue growing their revenue with more happy customers. Personally I just see it as a refresh of yammer or a business focused discord but at the end of the day someone in procurement is signing checks for Slack.
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  Enterprise IRC that people actually want to use and will pay for. B2B is incredibly lucrative if you cater to large organizations' risk needs. That being said, I'm sure the valuation is overinflated. The ARR ranges I've read don't justify it. If you're feeling bold and want to speculate, I'd probably short it.
- crescentfresh 8y ago
  Is that what Discord is (a Slack competing product)?? I've never found the time to look up Discord but I hear it referenced a lot. On the other hand I use Slack daily.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
jerdoug 8y ago
Interesting story...going to go Slack it to my team
thewizardofaus 8y ago
Hate to say it but I believe this will be a easy short long term.
- raiyu 8y ago
  If you look at their revenue growth the past several years and projections I wouldn't assume immediately it's a short. Their revenue growth has been very solid, so while the valuation may seem a bit high, if they hit their numbers for this year and demonstrate good visibility in to 2020 based on hitting projections it's no where near a short based on the value of other cloud/SaaS companies currently. Now it would be great to look at the S1 to see the costs associated with the business but I don't expect it to be an upside down story as much as Box was at the time of their IPO. Additionally you still have companies like MongoDB growing slower, from a smaller revenue base, with some very large costs and no where near profitability and still trading at quite a high premium, so based on their revenue and growth and assuming their net loss is below or at 50% of their revenue base it will still trade well based on current comps in the market.
nofunsir 8y ago
Does anyone else here use Mattermost, an open source, self-hosted alternative to Slack? I like it. We're not allowed to store communication offsite. I have no experience with Slack, so I'm wondering how current offerings compare.
- bitexploder 8y ago
  We tried Mattermost a while back. Slack is just way more polished, especially the mobile apps. We use the API to interact with Slack a lot. Mattermost was fine, just not nearly as nice as Slack.
  - Avshalom 8y ago
    I've never used Slack in a business context which leads to: what polish is missing that actually affects your use case? You mentioned mobile for instance but how are people using the mobile app while also being in an actionable position?
    - ido 8y ago
      Not everyone is a programmer! I've had plenty of times when I was getting messages on my phone that mostly required informing/connecting the right people/departments. If I hadn't done it stuff would have eventually gotten done, but a lot later & with more misunderstandings and miscommunications.
- ThrowawayIP 8y ago
  You might also checkout zulipchat. I've been advocating for us to use it internally (over M$ Teams) for a while now.
- bduerst 8y ago
  You could probably roll your own with Riot & Matrix, but it's probably not as feature-rich as Slack or Mattermost. Past HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031306
- 8y ago
Jedd 8y ago
An application that lets you chat to other people from your computer is valued at a quarter of a company that puts stuff into space. (Yes, I appreciate it's not a unique observation, and that reality is slightly more nuanced than that, but nonetheless, prima facie crazy.)
- hippich 8y ago
  So the question is - is it slack overpriced, or company you mentioned is underpriced?
- duderific 8y ago
  I personally don't get a lot of productivity gain from putting stuff into space. I do, using Slack, and I suspect a lot of other people do as well.
  - dingaling 8y ago
    You get immense prodictivity benefits from putting stuff into space. You just don't personally notice unless it breaks. Did you check today's weather forecast specific to your location? Compared to what the 2,000 active satellites enable, Slack is just chatter.
    - bad_user 8y ago
      Also see this page on Wikipedia documenting some of NASA’s inventions that have benefited us: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
    - buboard 8y ago
      ULA does that, not spacex and spacex doesnt plan on going public and technically it's russian engines that launch them in any case company valuation is not based on aspirations
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
raiyu 8y ago
For those that are thinking of the product rather than the company Slack - theinformation ran a great piece on Slack's financials: "Slack had revenue of $221 million in the year ended January 2018, and was projected to grow by 76% to $389 million for the year ending January 2019, according to the early 2018 documents. Revenue was expected to grow by 64% to $640 million in the year ending January 2020. The financial details haven’t previously been reported." Link / Paywall: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/slacks-financials-ahead-of-listing-plans https://www.theinformation.com/articles/slacks-financials-ah...
tanilama 8y ago
Better late than never.
dawhizkid 8y ago
Anyone else thinking of jumping on buying a condo in SF bay area soon in anticipation of this wave of IPOs? I'm looking at a few properties with the rationale that prices will only, at least, stay constant if not increase with additional demand all this new liquidity might bring to the market.
- austenallred 8y ago
  I don't think they're particularly cheap right now if that's the question
  - dawhizkid 8y ago
    Agree definitely not cheap, but newfound liquidity for thousands of tech workers should, in theory, keep prices high or higher than they are today.
    - judge2020 8y ago
      If remote work continues to catch on (ironically almost always using Slack) then the rate of price increases will likely stagnate.
      - dawhizkid 8y ago
        SF is so screwed up though that even if that's true there will, for the foreseeable future, more people that want to live here than there is housing available...
herpderp3dtwerp 8y ago
You thought the real-estate was bad in SF now... we have AirBnB, Uber, Lyft and now Slack all going public in short order.
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  I wonder why they're all going public right around now.
  - paulmd 8y ago
    Trying to get it done before the economy tanks, I think. We're vastly overdue for a downturn, the economy was already over-juiced due to excessive tax cuts/etc, we just put five million households out of work for a month (most of which are contractors and will not even be getting back pay) and will be doing it again in less than two weeks (now that the Superbowl is over and we're not messing with FOOTBAWW we can get back to our regularly scheduled shutdown). The US economy is extremely likely to slide into recession in the next 2-6 months. And when they do, it'll be a lot harder to get $7 billion for a knockoff IRC client.
  - paxys 8y ago
    It has been a few very good years for raising cash from private investors, but that is now slowly reversing. Best to IPO now while the stock market is still mostly bullish.
  - mruts 8y ago
    You gotta rob the Street before the Street robs you! Get cash when the markets are frothy and the money is cheap, and then use it when they're not.
a-dub 8y ago
shit. startup idea: "encyclopedia dramatica for work"
edgarvaldes 8y ago
My use case for loving IRC is this: I like to chat with other people while learning a language/framework. What do you guys use these days to do the same? Are there public channels on discord or slack, so to speak?
- lmm 8y ago
  There's a bunch of programming Discord servers yeah. Also some Slack ones but those always seemed to involve some awkward hack where you put your email into github to get an invite or some such. Gitter is also pretty popular for that kind of thing.
- thestepafter 8y ago
  The short answer is yes and more and more are moving from Slack to Discord primarily for the unlimited history and also better access control.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
For my curiosity: Is there any mathematically optimal algorithm for doing an open initial offering? Some sort of auction I guess where at the end there’s just one price and 100% of shares are sold? I know Google did a Dutch auction... is that considered the state or the art? Are there variations that wouldn’t have the same problem? I suspect ICOs have done all manner of experimentation here.
sys_64738 8y ago
The world is mad. Launch an IRC server then make billions.
- mruts 8y ago
  There's a long history of taking things that are marginally hard to use (like FTP servers) and making them marginally easier (like Dropbox). I kind of understand why it works, but it's still seems a little disappointing that you can make billions off of a technology that was invented eons ago (for both FTP, and IRC).
1290cc 8y ago
When hacker news shits on a tech company IPO its definitely time to buy.
gavreh 8y ago
No mention here of MS Teams? I suspect many companies will be switching from Slack to MS Teams over the next 12-24 mos.
- dalyons 8y ago
  Why?
  - fencepost 8y ago
    Maybe because it's included with Office365 Business Premium (local Office + Exchange/Onedrive/Sharepoint/Teams, etc) or O365 Business Essentials (just the online services)? It's also included with E1/E3/E5 on the Enterprise side. So basically if you're using any of the MS products that include online services you get it free. If you're not, you can get Teams for $5/month/user and get Exchange and online storage thrown in free (vs $6.67-12.50/month/user for Slack depending on your compliance and reporting needs). If nothing else, there may be pressure to "try what we're already paying for anyway and see if it's good enough," and while there's at least one other comment about how bad it is, I'm pretty sure a lot of the Microsoft online services have been improving at a pretty decent clip.
- LandR 8y ago
  We use MS Teams. It's always having to reconnect, the history doesn't work well, notifications are unreliable. IT's just terrible IME
  - sngz 8y ago
    that's been the opposite of my experience. You described slack for me and MS Teams UI was much more friendly to use.
userbinator 8y ago
Two comments predicted this on the discussion about Slack's redesign a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18923809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18923809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18924347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18924347
sidcool 8y ago
Microsoft Teams does almost everything Slack does, and some things even better. What vision would Slack provide to the investors to convince them that they would not just be wiped out by Microsoft or Google? Personally I feel Slack was a huge missed opportunity by Google. Their enterprise woes would have reduced a bit
enriquto 8y ago
I can't help but interpret 'Slack' as an abbreviation of 'Slackware', always, in whatever context. This leads to some curious confusions.
lfaoro 8y ago
Why filing only now? Trying to get a piece of fools money while facing fierce competition?
dangero 8y ago
This is tangential, but a couple of years ago I market tested the idea of a slack competitor that limits interruptions. I could not find demand and ditched the project.
- MacroChip 8y ago
  Ever tried https://twist.com/tour https://twist.com/tour ? I've always thought it looked interesting, but my company uses Slack. The main difference seems to be that it's thread focused rather than channel focused. Which makes me wonder if it's basically just modern email (which is fine).
crispyambulance 8y ago
I don't get it. Why do they need or want to go public with revenue north of 1 Billion dollars and ~1000 employees? (according to a Recode story from last year: https://www.recode.net/2017/6/15/15810088/slack-deal-funding-amazon-microsoft-buyers-business-communication https://www.recode.net/2017/6/15/15810088/slack-deal-funding...). The got a good product, it makes money, lots of people use it. Aren't they afraid of "winning" the market so completely that they can only look forward only to a downhill ride? Is it simply because they took investor money and now need to grow like bejeezus to pay them back?
- rkangel 8y ago
  As I understand it, there are two reasons to go public: to raise money, and for investors to exit. From the way they are going public (direct listing), it doesn't appear that they are trying to raise money. For investors, some companies get large enough that there isn't anyone who can buy them in whatever sector they are in. Going public is a way of them exiting the business and getting cash out.
- ethagknight 8y ago
  Look at it a different way, why do they need to stay private? Do they have any strategic advantage to maintaining a tight market-counterintuitive initiative? What's the reason not to put a bow on it and push it out the door? Probably large part due to their early funding, but what's wrong with that?
  - Xelbair 8y ago
    Not having a bunch of shareholders, who are interested in their short-term profit, directing your business decisions is one thing.
- btown 8y ago
  Hot take: the board REALLY wants them to revert their icon redesign, but they don’t want to look like they’re the ones doing it, so they’re taking the company public so new shareholders will advocate in their stead. /s

500 points by chollida1 8y ago

> The company is choosing the unusual method for going public because it doesn’t need the cash or publicity of an IPO, the person said at the time. So why is it going public? Is there a benefit to a successful company?

nemothekid 8y ago
To provide liquidity to employees and investors.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  More than the cash it currently has? It's a grab for an even bigger pile of money? edit: Ah, missed the employees angle.
  - koolba 8y ago
    It would be cash for individuals who till now have illiquid options or private stock. Not just the company’s war chest.
  - 1123581321 8y ago
    The company could only use cash to do dividends or share buybacks, and the company is worth more than its cash on hand (maybe 10-20x as much more in Slack’s case.) A public offering makes it possible for effectively every shareholder to sell their shares for the full value without the company having to make a strategic financial decision to return cash to shareholders.
  - nemothekid 8y ago
    The "cash" who has? The employees don't have cash - they have stock. You can't pay rent with stock. This is a good move by Slack to provide a return to the employees who have stuck with them.
    - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      Ah, ok, so the employees will be getting money for their stock? That makes sense now.
      - shimms 8y ago
        If they choose to sell it. Whilst markets exist for selling shares in private companies, it’s harder and there is a smaller pool of people looking to buy. On the public market, any shareholder can sell their shares (relatively) easily, and since it’s a public market the pool of potential buyers is much bigger. Employees don’t automatically get money for their shares, being public just makes it easier for them to if they decide they want to.
      - icelancer 8y ago
        They'll own stock they can trade publicly. It's their call now, rather than holding on to a bunch of fictional dollars.
- msalomon 8y ago
  That seems like a dumb reason
  - Johnny555 8y ago
    Not if you're an employee or investor.
    - LeoNatan25 8y ago
      If only the current economic system would encourage dividends rather than stock.
      - icelancer 8y ago
        Dividends do not solve this problem.
      - pathseeker 8y ago
        What do you think dividends are paid on?
  - aetherson 8y ago
    They're the owners of the company. They get to (collectively) decide when they want to cash out.
- Tiktaalik 8y ago
  Good news for the Maserati dealerships in Vancouver which had been suffering recently from the Chinese government crackdown in moving money out of the country.
e9 8y ago
Just from top of my head: 1. Investors and employees cash out 2. You have huge leverage with stock compensation that now is real cash 3. You can buy other companies because you have access to funding(sell company shares instead of taking a loan, etc) I’m sure there are more benefits
- YetAnotherNick 8y ago
  Why can't liquidity of existing stocks be provided without becoming public? Seems like easier task than going public and coming under myriad of different rules.
  - lozenge 8y ago
    When you have over a certain number of shareholders you have to follow strict reporting rules, giving your company all of the costs of being public but none of the benefits.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ves 8y ago
    Providing enough liquidity at scale is hard without the public market.
  - sjjshzvuiajhz 8y ago
    A public market gives you access to millions of potential buyers, so you get the best price, with minimal fees. That’s liquidity. A private company could try to provide something like that without using the public market, but it won’t be nearly as good.
  - epa 8y ago
    They can, that is what's called "Private Equity". Private equity companies (similar to how Warren Buffet operates), usually want control, which changes a lot of how the Company may be run. Public companies are generally controlled by a group of investors, none of which has majority control.
jorde 8y ago
Spotify's CPO gave a good digest of the reasons recently: https://youtu.be/jTM7ZCKEUGM?t=2340 https://youtu.be/jTM7ZCKEUGM?t=2340 In short: * Need to go public if the company is too big * More fair for employees stock holders

ergothus 8y ago

...and my confidence that Slack will continue to be useful and a good experience for me just plummeted. Does this mean something is wrong with our market, or just my expectations?

duxup 8y ago
It says something about the system of rolling out companies with high valuations that don't seem sustainable outside of major changes that alter the product's desirability. But people will buy this and other stocks regardless so I'm not sure there's any incentive to change that.
shittyadmin 8y ago
It means somethings fucked with the VC system and they're finding companies that should be worthless.
- anongraddebt 8y ago
  I agree. I also think we're going through a bizarre period in tech. I know I know, that's historical bias and all, but it doesn't mean living through it feels any less bizarre. A trite example is my use of Slack. I don't use it for messaging, though I've had the opportunity both in professional and non-professional settings to do so. Rather, I use Slack as a kind of RSS feed because people and organizations whose content I value have given me that opportunity on Slack. It's my favorite content notification feature because it is all in Slack, rather than being assaulted with notifications from all angles. Another trite example is my use of text messaging over the past year or so. Messaging is largely my social media experience now. I have - largely through no fault of my own - many different distinct group text messaging threads that are basically permanent. In Jan. 2018 that was not the case. Now, I can't get rid of these people I care about in meat space, from my messaging inbox! These group threads last for months and when one goes dead or silent another replaces it the next day. Each participant is posting in them on a daily basis (often 5+ times a day), with pictures and videos as well, and often long paragraphs of text. I do think the VC industry is showing signs of being broken. However, I also think companies are shape-shifting faster and more frequently then before.

TheBill 8y ago

Nothing is wrong with the market: Slack may have decided that this is the best way for them to create liquidity. There is also a cap (2000) on the number of shareholders a company can have before they have to abide by what amounts to the same reporting requirements as a publicly traded company. Slack also get the advantage of the usual market pop of acquiring companies share prices that usually amounts to a significant % of the cash value of the transaction.

KZeillmann 8y ago
Yeah I don't get why so many other commenters seem to think a direct listing means the company's all of a sudden about to die or its product is all of a sudden going to turn to crap. If this is the best way to achieve liquidity, that sounds good for them.
- lugg 8y ago
  Their product kind of did turn to crap. 30% cpu at idle with 5 accounts. 50% if I enable emojis. Like I'm sorry but it's essentially IRC. There is zero excuse for being that much of a hog. You can blame it on electron if you like (I do) but it doesn't change anything for the end user.
  - adamnemecek 8y ago
    [deleted]
    - sbov 8y ago
      They weren't saying its just IRC so it isn't a viable business model. They're saying its just IRC so it shouldn't be a CPU hog. Your link is not really relevant here because it talks of business viability not program performance.
  - bduerst 8y ago
    Apparently they've fixed a lot of the CPU issues, it's just still in Beta: https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memory-gone-the-answer-slack-9e5c39207cab https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memor...

dawhizkid 8y ago

I find myself increasingly preferring email over chat

asien 8y ago

Fascinating how « Good » apps turn to utter shit when they are touch by VC money. Slack really follows the same pattern as everything that exist in the valley : - Create simple software that people love to use - Raise hundred of millions - Stop innovating / fixing bugs / adding new features and solely focus on customer acquisition - Go Public ans Cash Out - Leave the company and ignore millions of frustrated users - Repeat

s3r3nity 8y ago
Are the latter points true? I mean, I personally do not like using Slack at work, but I have to admit it has a lot of really smooth UI and Product features that seem polished. I don't think I encounter bugs on a frequent basis at all, and my coworkers don't seem frustrated by using it. But I guess I'm just one point of anecdotal data?
- itslennysfault 8y ago
  I can second this, and I have a bias against it. When it came out I couldn't wrap my head around why people were excited about it. I've used IRC for like 20+ years and I didn't see it as much of an improvement from IRC. However, I currently use it every day and honestly have no complaints. I still don't know why a chat app is worth so much, but it does what it's supposed to (lets me talk to others in my company in a single place), and basically everything you could think of has an integration for it. I haven't had an even remotely annoying user experience since the early days, and as a "slack hater" I've been actively looking for things to complain about.

certmd 8y ago

Matt Levine on Slack direct listing from a few weeks ago... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-11/direct-listings-are-a-thing-now https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-11/direct...

airstrike 8y ago
Thanks for sharing. I swear, if you want to understand Wall Street, all you really need is Matt Levine. It's more informative than seemingly anything else out there.
- davepeck 8y ago
  Agreed. Levine has a unique ability to peer deep inside the underlying mechanisms of modern finance and explain them clearly. Levine's writing reminds me somewhat of John Brooks, although Brooks was perhaps more interested in personas than mechanics. (If you've never read the Business Adventures collection, it's worth picking up!)
- mruts 8y ago
  I don't think I've ever come across any written material on the internet that's better than Money Stuff. Matt Levine is a hero (and clearly very smart and measured in his thinking).
mylons 8y ago
great read. levine points out that lockout periods are basically a condition for traditional IPOs by the lead investors, and isn't required in a direct listing. assuming direct listings become a thing, inevitably there will be a big firm that does it and doesn't require a lockout period. i cannot wait to see what happens in that case.
- aston 8y ago
  Spotify skipped their lockout period, with pretty boring results.

spacejesus 8y ago

Now we will watch big business and political agenda replace what we now know as "slack". It will be given a new name though once gone public... It will be called "slack-in"! Reminds me of snapchat.. lol

neom 8y ago

The interesting thing about these direct list IPOs is that if you have confidence your investors will hold, you don't need the bank for stability, you have stability as a result of such low volume. I'm no pro but I think the real risk is introduced when you don't know your investor base well, hence traditional underwritten IPOs have worked well. If the company doesn't need to raise money, seems like a fine way to let the little guys find liquidity. Will likely follow a similar chart as $ESTC.

drewr 8y ago
Not sure if the comments were supposed to be connected, but just to be clear, Elastic NV (ESTC) did a traditional IPO. Spotify was the first to do this direct IPO and Slack would be the second.
- neom 8y ago
  Yah sorry, I started my thought about small cap IPOs that I think have similar revenue and then made a disconnected point, thanks for clarifying.
lmm 8y ago
Most companies need to sell themselves to investors - that's part of what the "roadshow" is about. Slack is a lot more visible than most B2B companies - people will be lining up to buy their shares without needing a banker to sell them on the company, in a way that wouldn't be the case for many businesses.

cpursley 8y ago

Hopefully they raise enough money to build a native desktop app.

Waterluvian 8y ago
You mean three native desktop apps.
- snuxoll 8y ago
  Qt /thread
  - gfwhukku 8y ago
    Qt is not native. Native doesn't mean "it's not written in JS" or "it's fast". Native means "it uses the GUI toolkit of the target platform". And Qt doesn't do that, it merely mimics its appearance.
    - darkengine 8y ago
      GTK isn't any more "native" than Qt -- they're both abstractions atop X (or Wayland, or Broadway).
    - IshKebab 8y ago
      You are incorrect. Toolkits like Qt are exactly what people are talking about when they say "native". How many apps do you think still use X11 graphic primitives? Did you even know they exist? How many programs use native Win32 controls? Not even Microsoft does that anymore.
      - gfwhukku 8y ago
        >How many programs use native Win32 controls? Not even Microsoft does that anymore. So because Microsoft has lowered the bar, now everything can be called "native"? There's a reason many people hate UWP.

edoo 8y ago

After 30 years the market is finally prime for a managed IRC service.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
$7B IRC. Much shinier than the old IRC.
- Groxx 8y ago
  It handles images now!
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    You joke but it really is an indictment against decentralised protocols that IRC is still so primitive that it can't even handle images. No doubt someone will reply "that's not what it's for!"
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      That's an indictment against IRC. Anyone could have come up with an open protocol, IRC-killer but XML happened and we ended up with a morass of garbage.
      - kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
        That's an indictment against IRC, but I guess GP's point is that when it's everyone's business it often ends up being no-one's business
IshKebab 8y ago
Managed and modern. Seriously show me an IRC client that supports images, threads, emoji reactions (yes they really are useful), painless file transfers, etc. Hell IRC doesn't even let you browse history. How can you people not see that Slack is vastly superior to IRC (apart from the openness of course).

x1lo321 8y ago

The privacy statement of Slack is horrible. I also wonder why so many companies trust often highly sensitive conversations to what is essentially an IRC forum that could be taken over by an evil company any minute.

iwakura 8y ago
Convenience unfortunately seems to be higher valued than privacy by many. This held true for a web agency I worked for. Getting things done, even with proprietary tools, stood above all. The privacy policy was read later, or not at all.
judge2020 8y ago
[Many|most] companies big enough to worry about company secrets and PII being logged will get a contract with Slack set up before putting anything on there.

andrewmcwatters 8y ago

"From 1980 through 2001, if you had bought the average IPO at its first public closing price and held on for three years, you would have underperformed the market by more than 23 percentage points annually."

mhuffman 8y ago
I wonder what that number looks like from 2001-2016?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jalgos_eminator 8y ago
> From 1980 through 2001 How about through 1999? It seems dubiously arbitrary to use 21 years, the end of which just happens to be when the dot-com bubble burst...
mruts 8y ago
Ignoring the huge black swan event in your data (the tech crash), the point of getting in on an IPO isn't for you to hold it 3 years. You get allocated shares that you then sell before the lockup period for everyone else expires. It's just risk-free money for the people that are friends with the underwriters. I don't have the data on me, but I bet if you got into every IPO from 1980 through 2001 and then sold after one month, your returns would be pretty damn good.
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  "And finance professors Jay Ritter and William Schwert have shown that if you had spread a total of only $1,000 across every IPO in January 1960, at its offering price, sold out at the end of that month, then invested anew in each successive month’s crop of IPOs, your portfolio would have been worth more than $533 decillion ($533,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) by year-end 2001." "Unfortunately, for every IPO like Microsoft that turns out to be a big winner, there are thousands of losers." "You could have earned that $533 decillion gain only if you never missed a single one of the IPO market’s rare winners—a practical impossibility."

killyp 8y ago

Serious question... What are the benefits of using Slack over Discord? I know Slack has been around longer, looks more professional and has more tie-ins with work flow management tools but those seem like small advantages compared to how feature rich Discord is. Just genuinely curious as I prefer Discord for communicating with my coworkers about non-sensitive information but it doesn't seem to get any love outside of video game and internet communities.

fargo 8y ago
Slack offers Enterprise sales
- 1290cc 8y ago
  Thats what so many miss in a tech company IPO. Slack has built a business model off commodity tech that was around for decades. It has happy customers who continue to spend money with them and a plan to continue growing their revenue with more happy customers. Personally I just see it as a refresh of yammer or a business focused discord but at the end of the day someone in procurement is signing checks for Slack.
andrewmcwatters 8y ago
Enterprise IRC that people actually want to use and will pay for. B2B is incredibly lucrative if you cater to large organizations' risk needs. That being said, I'm sure the valuation is overinflated. The ARR ranges I've read don't justify it. If you're feeling bold and want to speculate, I'd probably short it.
crescentfresh 8y ago
Is that what Discord is (a Slack competing product)?? I've never found the time to look up Discord but I hear it referenced a lot. On the other hand I use Slack daily.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

jerdoug 8y ago

Interesting story...going to go Slack it to my team

thewizardofaus 8y ago

Hate to say it but I believe this will be a easy short long term.

raiyu 8y ago
If you look at their revenue growth the past several years and projections I wouldn't assume immediately it's a short. Their revenue growth has been very solid, so while the valuation may seem a bit high, if they hit their numbers for this year and demonstrate good visibility in to 2020 based on hitting projections it's no where near a short based on the value of other cloud/SaaS companies currently. Now it would be great to look at the S1 to see the costs associated with the business but I don't expect it to be an upside down story as much as Box was at the time of their IPO. Additionally you still have companies like MongoDB growing slower, from a smaller revenue base, with some very large costs and no where near profitability and still trading at quite a high premium, so based on their revenue and growth and assuming their net loss is below or at 50% of their revenue base it will still trade well based on current comps in the market.

nofunsir 8y ago

Does anyone else here use Mattermost, an open source, self-hosted alternative to Slack? I like it. We're not allowed to store communication offsite. I have no experience with Slack, so I'm wondering how current offerings compare.

bitexploder 8y ago
We tried Mattermost a while back. Slack is just way more polished, especially the mobile apps. We use the API to interact with Slack a lot. Mattermost was fine, just not nearly as nice as Slack.
- Avshalom 8y ago
  I've never used Slack in a business context which leads to: what polish is missing that actually affects your use case? You mentioned mobile for instance but how are people using the mobile app while also being in an actionable position?
  - ido 8y ago
    Not everyone is a programmer! I've had plenty of times when I was getting messages on my phone that mostly required informing/connecting the right people/departments. If I hadn't done it stuff would have eventually gotten done, but a lot later & with more misunderstandings and miscommunications.
ThrowawayIP 8y ago
You might also checkout zulipchat. I've been advocating for us to use it internally (over M$ Teams) for a while now.
bduerst 8y ago
You could probably roll your own with Riot & Matrix, but it's probably not as feature-rich as Slack or Mattermost. Past HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031306
8y ago

Jedd 8y ago

An application that lets you chat to other people from your computer is valued at a quarter of a company that puts stuff into space. (Yes, I appreciate it's not a unique observation, and that reality is slightly more nuanced than that, but nonetheless, prima facie crazy.)

hippich 8y ago
So the question is - is it slack overpriced, or company you mentioned is underpriced?
duderific 8y ago
I personally don't get a lot of productivity gain from putting stuff into space. I do, using Slack, and I suspect a lot of other people do as well.
- dingaling 8y ago
  You get immense prodictivity benefits from putting stuff into space. You just don't personally notice unless it breaks. Did you check today's weather forecast specific to your location? Compared to what the 2,000 active satellites enable, Slack is just chatter.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    Also see this page on Wikipedia documenting some of NASA’s inventions that have benefited us: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
  - buboard 8y ago
    ULA does that, not spacex and spacex doesnt plan on going public and technically it's russian engines that launch them in any case company valuation is not based on aspirations
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

raiyu 8y ago

For those that are thinking of the product rather than the company Slack - theinformation ran a great piece on Slack's financials: "Slack had revenue of $221 million in the year ended January 2018, and was projected to grow by 76% to $389 million for the year ending January 2019, according to the early 2018 documents. Revenue was expected to grow by 64% to $640 million in the year ending January 2020. The financial details haven’t previously been reported." Link / Paywall: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/slacks-financials-ahead-of-listing-plans https://www.theinformation.com/articles/slacks-financials-ah...

tanilama 8y ago

Better late than never.

dawhizkid 8y ago

Anyone else thinking of jumping on buying a condo in SF bay area soon in anticipation of this wave of IPOs? I'm looking at a few properties with the rationale that prices will only, at least, stay constant if not increase with additional demand all this new liquidity might bring to the market.

austenallred 8y ago
I don't think they're particularly cheap right now if that's the question
- dawhizkid 8y ago
  Agree definitely not cheap, but newfound liquidity for thousands of tech workers should, in theory, keep prices high or higher than they are today.
  - judge2020 8y ago
    If remote work continues to catch on (ironically almost always using Slack) then the rate of price increases will likely stagnate.
    - dawhizkid 8y ago
      SF is so screwed up though that even if that's true there will, for the foreseeable future, more people that want to live here than there is housing available...

herpderp3dtwerp 8y ago

You thought the real-estate was bad in SF now... we have AirBnB, Uber, Lyft and now Slack all going public in short order.

andrewmcwatters 8y ago
I wonder why they're all going public right around now.
- paulmd 8y ago
  Trying to get it done before the economy tanks, I think. We're vastly overdue for a downturn, the economy was already over-juiced due to excessive tax cuts/etc, we just put five million households out of work for a month (most of which are contractors and will not even be getting back pay) and will be doing it again in less than two weeks (now that the Superbowl is over and we're not messing with FOOTBAWW we can get back to our regularly scheduled shutdown). The US economy is extremely likely to slide into recession in the next 2-6 months. And when they do, it'll be a lot harder to get $7 billion for a knockoff IRC client.
- paxys 8y ago
  It has been a few very good years for raising cash from private investors, but that is now slowly reversing. Best to IPO now while the stock market is still mostly bullish.
- mruts 8y ago
  You gotta rob the Street before the Street robs you! Get cash when the markets are frothy and the money is cheap, and then use it when they're not.

a-dub 8y ago

shit. startup idea: "encyclopedia dramatica for work"

edgarvaldes 8y ago

My use case for loving IRC is this: I like to chat with other people while learning a language/framework. What do you guys use these days to do the same? Are there public channels on discord or slack, so to speak?

lmm 8y ago
There's a bunch of programming Discord servers yeah. Also some Slack ones but those always seemed to involve some awkward hack where you put your email into github to get an invite or some such. Gitter is also pretty popular for that kind of thing.
thestepafter 8y ago
The short answer is yes and more and more are moving from Slack to Discord primarily for the unlimited history and also better access control.

erikpukinskis 8y ago

For my curiosity: Is there any mathematically optimal algorithm for doing an open initial offering? Some sort of auction I guess where at the end there’s just one price and 100% of shares are sold? I know Google did a Dutch auction... is that considered the state or the art? Are there variations that wouldn’t have the same problem? I suspect ICOs have done all manner of experimentation here.

sys_64738 8y ago

The world is mad. Launch an IRC server then make billions.

mruts 8y ago
There's a long history of taking things that are marginally hard to use (like FTP servers) and making them marginally easier (like Dropbox). I kind of understand why it works, but it's still seems a little disappointing that you can make billions off of a technology that was invented eons ago (for both FTP, and IRC).

1290cc 8y ago

When hacker news shits on a tech company IPO its definitely time to buy.

gavreh 8y ago

No mention here of MS Teams? I suspect many companies will be switching from Slack to MS Teams over the next 12-24 mos.

dalyons 8y ago
Why?
- fencepost 8y ago
  Maybe because it's included with Office365 Business Premium (local Office + Exchange/Onedrive/Sharepoint/Teams, etc) or O365 Business Essentials (just the online services)? It's also included with E1/E3/E5 on the Enterprise side. So basically if you're using any of the MS products that include online services you get it free. If you're not, you can get Teams for $5/month/user and get Exchange and online storage thrown in free (vs $6.67-12.50/month/user for Slack depending on your compliance and reporting needs). If nothing else, there may be pressure to "try what we're already paying for anyway and see if it's good enough," and while there's at least one other comment about how bad it is, I'm pretty sure a lot of the Microsoft online services have been improving at a pretty decent clip.
LandR 8y ago
We use MS Teams. It's always having to reconnect, the history doesn't work well, notifications are unreliable. IT's just terrible IME
- sngz 8y ago
  that's been the opposite of my experience. You described slack for me and MS Teams UI was much more friendly to use.

userbinator 8y ago

Two comments predicted this on the discussion about Slack's redesign a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18923809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18923809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18924347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18924347

sidcool 8y ago

Microsoft Teams does almost everything Slack does, and some things even better. What vision would Slack provide to the investors to convince them that they would not just be wiped out by Microsoft or Google? Personally I feel Slack was a huge missed opportunity by Google. Their enterprise woes would have reduced a bit

enriquto 8y ago

I can't help but interpret 'Slack' as an abbreviation of 'Slackware', always, in whatever context. This leads to some curious confusions.

lfaoro 8y ago

Why filing only now? Trying to get a piece of fools money while facing fierce competition?

dangero 8y ago

This is tangential, but a couple of years ago I market tested the idea of a slack competitor that limits interruptions. I could not find demand and ditched the project.

MacroChip 8y ago
Ever tried https://twist.com/tour https://twist.com/tour ? I've always thought it looked interesting, but my company uses Slack. The main difference seems to be that it's thread focused rather than channel focused. Which makes me wonder if it's basically just modern email (which is fine).

crispyambulance 8y ago

I don't get it. Why do they need or want to go public with revenue north of 1 Billion dollars and ~1000 employees? (according to a Recode story from last year: https://www.recode.net/2017/6/15/15810088/slack-deal-funding-amazon-microsoft-buyers-business-communication https://www.recode.net/2017/6/15/15810088/slack-deal-funding...). The got a good product, it makes money, lots of people use it. Aren't they afraid of "winning" the market so completely that they can only look forward only to a downhill ride? Is it simply because they took investor money and now need to grow like bejeezus to pay them back?

rkangel 8y ago
As I understand it, there are two reasons to go public: to raise money, and for investors to exit. From the way they are going public (direct listing), it doesn't appear that they are trying to raise money. For investors, some companies get large enough that there isn't anyone who can buy them in whatever sector they are in. Going public is a way of them exiting the business and getting cash out.
ethagknight 8y ago
Look at it a different way, why do they need to stay private? Do they have any strategic advantage to maintaining a tight market-counterintuitive initiative? What's the reason not to put a bow on it and push it out the door? Probably large part due to their early funding, but what's wrong with that?
- Xelbair 8y ago
  Not having a bunch of shareholders, who are interested in their short-term profit, directing your business decisions is one thing.
btown 8y ago
Hot take: the board REALLY wants them to revert their icon redesign, but they don’t want to look like they’re the ones doing it, so they’re taking the company public so new shareholders will advocate in their stead. /s