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Slack Says It's Filed To Go Public 52

Posted by BeauHD from the first-major-Silicon-Valley-IPOs-of-the-year dept.
Slack, the cloud-based messaging platform, has confidentially filed with regulators to go public in the U.S. "[Slack], previously reported to be pursuing a direct listing of its stock, said in a statement Monday that it had submitted a confidential filing with the [SEC]," reports Bloomberg. "Slack is working with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Allen & Co. on the share sale." From the report: Slack plans to forgo a traditional initial public offering and instead intends to sell its shares to bidders in a direct listing, a person familiar with the matter said last month. While that would preclude the company from raising money by issuing new shares for sale, it would avoid some typical underwriting fees and allow current investors to sell shares without a lock-up period. 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. The share sale, which might take place toward mid-year, could value Slack at more than $7 billion, according to the person, who added that the San Francisco-based company's plans could still change.
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Slack Says It's Filed To Go Public More

Slack Says It's Filed To Go Public

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  • $7 billion dollars for a chat app? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 04, 2019 @05:38PM (#58070532)

    what a fucked up world we live in

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      But it's "cloud-based" so it's worth more.

  • Who The Fuck Could Have Guessed? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Who the fuck could have guessed that you could turn a webified version of IRC or XMPP into a public company that will likely draw billions of dollars in investment?

    IT'S A FUCKING CHAT WEB APP!

  • And IPO means only one thing these days... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bohnanza ( 523456 ) on Monday February 04, 2019 @05:48PM (#58070578)
    ...they have no way of making money.
    • They were making $500 million a year fairly recently [forbes.com].

      The only reason to do it, of course, is investors want to cash out.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by davecb ( 6526 )
        They've maximized their native capacity to earn, time to sell it for a godzillabuck or two and watch the purchaser go tist-up (;-))
      • Interestingly, on the page you link, the word profit does not appear anywhere. Yes, they have revenue - but no profit. It's easy to get $10 billion in revenue - sell $11 billion dollars for $10 billion. They have lots of revenue - but no profit.
        • Given their products, if they have more than $100million in annual expenses, they are doing something wrong. Now, they could be doing something wrong, but that's a different story.
          • You would think so, but given the fact they're still losing money - they ARE doing something wrong. It's always shocking to me that these "new" companies need staffs of hundreds, and budgets of hundreds of millions, to blow it all and lose money. And a site like Craigslist with a few dozen employees turns a profit, reaching more people...

            • You would think so, but given the fact they're still losing money

              Are they losing money? Is that mentioned somewhere?

              • Last year they were projecting no profits for 2018 [recode.net], and purchase offers were in the realm of valuation of this IPO - so I'd conclude their profitability status has not changed - stagnant valuation.
                • I wonder what they're doing with all their money. What could they possibly be spending it on?
                  • Well, you need a program AND product manager to "own" each and every small feature, like does the caret flash or not, is it grey or black, etc. And then you need program managers to manage the horde of lower program managers. And of course your $5/sq. ft. monthly rent in downtown SF because you HAVE to be there because it's trendy and all...
    • Cue Microsoft buyout in 3... 2... 1...

  • Slackware is going public! (Score:3)

    by future assassin ( 639396 ) on Monday February 04, 2019 @05:57PM (#58070616)

    Yes....

  • Trading Has Slowed... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Monday February 04, 2019 @05:58PM (#58070626) Journal
    due to all of the extra cruft and overhead involved with the Slack IPO. Most people say they are satisfied with traditional IPOs, but Slack says their IPO has new features that everyone will like.
  • Slack has attracted myriad corporations and other entities with their claim that they only make money on subscriptions; which for now is true, but will be untrue once Slack IPO is completed, and the problem of ever increasing profits begins.

    The real reason Slack was created was for data mining, I guarantee it.

    Google began life before IPO with the moniker Do No Evil - that disappeared didn't it?

    • An IPO is the sale of newly created shares to the public. That's why the company makes money around an IPO: They are selling brand-new, freshly-created shares. Getting a bank to run the IPO, and crossing all of the i's and dotting all of the t's costs money and is apparently kind of a PITA.

      This is conversion from closely-held to public. It changes the rules regarding sales of existing stock to outsiders. The current stock owners will now be able to sell their existing shares to anyone on an exchange.

  • Slack still the best of bad options (Score:3)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday February 04, 2019 @06:02PM (#58070642)

    Having tried a number of different team chat platforms, I have to say Slack still has a kind of commanding lead, even in just the basics of chat. I prefer it to anything else.

    However it still is not the most pleasant or well organized thing at times, so I personally would be a bit reluctant to invest in Slack just because I feel like it's still possible some other company could figure out a better approach and overtake Slack someday.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by t0qer ( 230538 )

      > Having tried a number of different team chat platforms, I have to say Slack still has a kind of commanding lead, even in just the basics of chat. I prefer it to anything else.

      Funny bit the other day.

      I'm in the discord server for 2b2t, a minecraft server that's chock full of shitposts. I post a few things in chat, goatse, GNAA, all the classic trolls from here. Guy that runs the discord, points me at the discord TOS that says these things are not allowed.

      I promptly ran back to the wilds of Efnet.

    • For chat, I always found MindAlign to be my favorite. (10 years or so ago) It was essentially a beefed up version of IRC with a few additional nice features. We used it for a dispersed team around the world working on the same development project. Microsoft used the code in Group Chat, then sold off the company. Group Chat was still useful until they decided to make it more Microsoft and summarily killed the usefulness of it.

      2nd favorite to MindAlign was good ol' IRC. Slack isn't approved software at

  • LOL Slack is Dying Already (Score:3)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Monday February 04, 2019 @06:04PM (#58070656)

    it doesn't need the cash or publicity of an IPO

    Yet here they are, going public, courting big players, floating a $7 billion estimation, and feeding these reports to the shill media.

    Seems to me the current investors want OUT.

  • It's like being in an entire office of salescritters, all constantly exclaiming "OOH! SHINEY!"
  • We use slack at work...cuts down on the 3,401 stupid phone calls I would get during the day asking me the same d*mn questions over and over. It will go public, the lDIOTS on Wall street will buy buy buy, driving the price up and some outfit like google, microsoft, apple etc...will buy it and gut it. And or the stockholders will jack up the price, sell, cause the price to tank and screw it up.
    • The thing is, Slack is easily reproducible by any other company or open source software. Its just a fancy IRC after all, there are hundreds of similar tools you can install yourself, right now. They just made it easy and cheap, and made a sales pitch to business clients which made it reasonable to use.

      Luckily, whenever wall street screws it up and/or hikes the prices, it will take about one week to build/install an adequate replacement and migrate your team to that. Since it is primarily used by small

  • Not impressed (Score:3)

    by o_ferguson ( 836655 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @03:17AM (#58072192)
    I've had exactly one client who used Slack and insisted that I (a freelancer/telecommute) use it too. It was crap. A place for people to do everything that they should be doing with proper email chains, but in "chat" instead. So fucking stupid. I routinely refuse to use Slack or work for people who are bad at business enough to use Slack.

  • I see so many ways in which slack could get worse and only a few in which it maintains it's quality.

    Let's see how well this goes.

  • Is coincidentally the optimum amount of memory (in bytes) required for the application!

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