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Slack Says It's Filed To Go Public
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.
what a fucked up world we live in
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!
...they have no way of making money.
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
The eth bubble is dead.
Yes....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
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.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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?
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Get ready for more ads and microtransactions than you can handle. Gotta show those investors some returns somehow..
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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!"
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
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. This means early investors get to cash out and move on to the next thing. Of course, it also means they have greater transparency requirements and increased reporting requirements to the SEC. This makes for larger auditing obligations. All of this increases the cost of doing business somewhat, but it seems like they are dong fine and can easily afford it.
See above.
A few years too late. IMO Slack is losing substantial ground to MS Teams and from my understanding, their failure to entire the enterprise market by integrating with MS products cost them. Not an MS fan boy by any stretch but i was happy to see MS not drop the 8 bln on a glorified irc web app.
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.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is coincidentally the optimum amount of memory (in bytes) required for the application!
No competitive advantage.
Competitor can build a JavaScript, electron, wrapped in a win32 exe app to compete with Slack, undercut slack's pricing and have it in the marker in less than 6 months. Electron == yuck and is DLL hell for the dozens of javascript packages brought into the project.
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 the company I work at now, so we have to use Teams. *disgusted emoji*
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You are missing an apostrophe and a comma, you dumb bastard. Learn to not be a hypocrite.