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Businesses Communications The Almighty Buck United States Technology

Slack Is Going Public At $16 Billion Value (npr.org) 123

Posted by BeauHD from the putting-a-price-on-chat dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: In just five years, Slack has grown to have more than 10 million users and has become a verb in the process. "I'll Slack you" is shorthand for sending a message via the workplace chat platform. On Thursday, the company will take that popularity to the New York Stock Exchange, where its shares will be publicly listed for the first time. At a starting price of $26 per share set Wednesday, Slack Technologies would be worth about $16 billion. Instead of having a conventional initial public offering, Slack will enter into the market as a direct listing, which means the shares will simply be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Most firms that pass on an IPO are widely known companies that are in good financial shape. Fortune explains what it means to enter into the market as a direct listing: "Unlike an ordinary IPO, a direct listing means the company doesn't issue any new shares and doesn't raise additional capital. It's primarily a way for company insiders to sell some of their holdings to investors, while bypassing the formidable fees and requirements of using an underwriter."
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Slack Is Going Public At $16 Billion Value More

Slack Is Going Public At $16 Billion Value

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  • How do they come up with this shit? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Thursday June 20, 2019 @09:01AM (#58793020)
    They're just fucking making it up at this point!

    • Re: How do they come up with this shit? (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I know. My bank account is worth...... one quadrillion dollars. Yeah, that sounds about right. Who will buy shares from me at this valuation? Anyone? Hello?

    • Because nobody learned lessons of the dot-com era.

      The investors all point at Google or Facebook that all went up even after a crazy IPO. They, however, don't point at the mass of others that tanked almost immediately.

      • The problem with shares is that a company will normally sell a fixed quantity of them. After the sell them the company has the money in its pocket. So after they sold all their stock, if the price dropped to near zero, they will still have the profit for all the sales of the stock. It would be the person who is trying to sell the stock would suffer the consequences.
        Now stock normally gives the owner voting rights so if the stock price drops too much, the investors may have some control over the company to f

        • Sorry - but I have to chime in on this issue . . .

          IPO or LISTING and subsequent stock sales ==> $_MONEY_$ for printer-paper (STOCK)

          Stock drops, and _SOME_ of the $_MONEY_$ is spent re-acquiring MOST of the devalued stock

          BOTTOM LINE - company has repurchased a lot of the stock, and has $hitload$ of money from the high IPO / SALE vs the devalued repurchase of most of the 'floated' stocks.

          Sorta' sounds like Business As Usual to me . . . .
          and - even if the IPO - whatever - valuation DOESN'T dr

    • They're just fucking making it up at this point!

      Oh, it's going to get a lot better . . .

      . . . wait for it . . .

      . . . soon to be announced . . .

      . . . SlackCoin!

      That should give Facebook's Libra a run for the money.

      Literally.

    • This is what happens when an important industry is 95% owned by a small handful of inbred upper class twits. Surveillance Valley oligarchy FTW!

  • Slack Is Going Public At $0 Value (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Slack Is Going Public At $0 Value

    That's the correct headline, at least if you go by my valuation and not their made-up BS.

    • I'd pay at least $100 for Slack, knowing that some sucker would easily pay me $200. repeat ad infinitum.

  • What's wrong with XMPP, again? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20, 2019 @09:06AM (#58793038)

    Can someone remind me why we're trying to centralize all the old things the internet used to do in a de-centralized way? Only now with extra middlemen surveillance and monetization?

    • Re:What's wrong with XMPP, again? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Thursday June 20, 2019 @09:12AM (#58793050)

      "Can someone remind me why we're trying to centralize all the old things the internet used to do in a de-centralized way?"

      To better facilitate middlemen surveillance and monetization.

      In a world where we are concerned about cyber infiltration and corporate espionage the last thing anyone should go near is slack.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bluelip ( 123578 )

      Mattermost and Zulip are wonderful alternatives.

      XMPP still is the best if you're not worried about 'push' messages to mobile devices. The OS leaders in that area are actively trying to strangle communications apps in the name of extended battery life.

      • I believe SIMPLE [ietf.org] can do push, on the assumption that since SIP can do it and SIMPLE is built on top of it. Sadly IETF is willing to standardize multiple protocols (XMPP, MSRP+SIMPLE, IMPP) that basically solve the same problem, even if few are willing to implement them.

    • The problem with XMPP is there are too many choices of providers and integrators and software. Companies really don't like that. They just prefer to have a single choice and license scheme. It is stupid though, because the cost of a XMPP deployment is $0 and requires very little resources and maintenance, and you have full control over your internal communications. I used to work in the XMPP space and realized that companies really don't care about open standards or choice.

      • The difference is the stage the company is in.

        Early stage, everything gets done, there is an attempt to do it well, and budgets arent barriers to doing things right.
        Late stage, procedure gets done, there is no attempt to avoid procedure hurting the business, and budgets are the only thing that matters.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dnaumov ( 453672 )

      It turned out big business generally doesn't like de-centralization and big business has the big money that makes things happen.

    • Actually, there's a very easy explanation.

      XMPP is significantly more difficult to set up. XMPP also requires maintenance, and coordination between multiple parties if you want to do federation.

      With XMPP, you need to know the server, the port, set up an account, etc. And lets not get into the various feature capabilities that one node may have that another does not.

      The problem with XMPP is that it is made by geeks that assume everyone else who would use it is also a geek. Guess what? Geeks make up a very

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Trogre ( 513942 )

      One word: Control.

      Three more words: Take it back.

  • Where did that number come from? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by idontusenumbers ( 1367883 ) on Thursday June 20, 2019 @09:12AM (#58793052)

    Slack offers a bloated, unstable client that connects users to a network where there is no 'user base'. There's nothing of value here except the established customer base. Have these investors even used the slack product before?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • A billion ain't what it used to be, central banks are oiling up the printing presses to print some extra trillions, more stuff will have billion dollar price tags

    • Counterpoint (Score:5, Informative)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday June 20, 2019 @09:52AM (#58793268)

      Slack offers a bloated, unstable client that connects users to a network where there is no 'user base'.

      That is.... so wrong.

      Well not the bloated part. But everything else, shows you don't seem to use Slack much.

      I've tried a LOT of collaboration/chat tools. I generally work remote and have for a decade or so, I rely on tools like this to communicate with teams and clients and other technical people.

      Simply put, there is nothing as good as Slack. There's nothing nearly as good as Slack, at connecting the very real other people you work with without having to talk to them some other way. How can you say it connects a user to a network with "no users" when inherently for any Slack instance you are always connecting a group (however small) of people with a desperate need to talk to each other more easily and continuously?

      Does it go down sometimes? Yes, but it's pretty infrequent there are outages where you cannot communicate.

      There's nothing of value here except the established customer base.

      Curious, do you think more or fewer people will be working remotely over time? Do you think that every single company where people need to communicate with each other uses Slack already?

      How can you say there is no growth potential here?

      The initial valuation may be exaggerated but there is a very real value to Slack and very real room for growth going forward, so then the question is just - how much?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That seems horribly close to IRC channels.

        By the way, any half decent IM tool has channel or groups support. So nothing new here.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I use Slack every day and have done across multiple jobs (sw dev).

        It is utterly utterly average.
        + You can chat (every IM I have used does that)
        + It keeps group chat history (ok, so do a lot of others)
        + It has lots of apps (ok, so this is not new)
        - It is slow, clunky, boated and arrrrg (like everything in the world)
        - It's not really that integrated for your average user. Yes, you can plug stuff into it, but Mary from accounts just doesn't care

        16 Billion for average seems an overspend.

        But that said, if peopl

      • genuine question here. My company just uses Lync and it's been enough for my team. What features does Slack have that make it worth using? I'm guessing Group chat with the click of a button is one, but is there more to it then that?

        • Hard to say as I've not used Lync, but basically I just find much less friction in using Slack to communicate with others compared to other clients I have used.

          Some of it may be the instant video/audio calls built into the client as well.

          Yes lots of other things will work OK, I've been able to use other chat clients to work. But it seems like scores of little things make other chat clients less easy to use, or more frustrating, where Slack mostly feels like it's out of the way and more like I'm really talk

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I use slack every day.

        There is nothing that it does that IRC cant do better, cheaper, more reliably, and with better security.

        Sure, its slightly better than its commercial competition, but thats not saying much.

    • In the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, Slack nearly doubled its revenues, to about $400 million. But it had a net loss of nearly $139 million.

      Great. Another Uber.

      As it continues to grow, Slack's biggest hurdle will be proving to its users that it's more than just a chat application.

      Good luck with that. Slack is to (or wants to be) chat as Gmail is to email.

  • Are you kidding me? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Is April fools now on the summer solstice? "I'll Slack you" is shorthand for sending a message via the workplace chat platform. == $16,000,000,000

    • Not when you realize the phrase "I'll Slack you" only comes up so frequently because you need to clarify whether you sent it via email, text, Slack, or whatever. If you don't, then the recipient will never see it, because Slack has fundamentally destroyed your company's ability to communicate electronically without in person voice prompts.

  • Good thing IRC will be still around by the time Slack goes bust^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H is acquired by Yahoo.

  • Who knew IRC was worth $16 billion? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Somebody should tell the investors that IRC has been around since the early '90s. Slack is just IRC with a clown suit on.

  • Counting the days until I can bet against this one.

  • No lock in, free competition. Short it. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    We used to use Slack where I work (free version only). It was great and a lot better than the XMPP OpenFire server we used to use. (No screenshots, uploads never worked right, no markdown, etc). Slack worked pretty good, but there was an outage every 3-5 months for a few minutes, but nothing catastrophic.

    Then someone installed Rocket Chat, which is pretty much equivalent to Slack, but Open Source, and you can just host it yourself. So who cares about Slack? What's the big feature of Slack that makes it

    • What's the big feature of Slack that makes it work 16 billion dollars?

      Hype and eyeballs. Just like during the dot com bubble.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dnaumov ( 453672 )

      RocketChat limiting you to 1000 notifications/month (deployment-wide) in the free version is kind of a killer though.

  • Personally I like Teams but we also have Slack and it has a strong backing so there might be something to it.

  • Everyone who is concerned about the Venture Capital investors foolishly making a big mistake, don't you worry. They just got all their money back and a lot more, they are out of Slack now forever. They couldn't care less if Slack tanks tomorrow. The suckers are people like you and I who at some point might decide to try in get in on an IPO to make a few bucks, or trade Slack ponzi scheme style not worrying about the underlying product or company, but hoping to make a a few bucks on an uptick of the stock

  • Slack is great, but I don't understand how a fancy IRC client that somehow managed to take over a gig of memory is worth $16 billion.

  • Look at their SEC filing:
    approximately doubling revenue each year, but costs increasing inline with that (so also approximate doubling).

    then take a look at the section around Emerging Growth Company (JOBS): "take advantage of certain exemptions from various public reporting requirements, including the requirement that our internal control over financial reporting be audited by our independent registered public accounting firm pursuant to Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the Sarbanes-Ox

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