Love Slack's leaders

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cynical.ly

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cynical.ly
Jun 21, 2019 10 Comments

This is not a comment Slack's product or even valuation. I don't use Slack, so I'm not qualified to comment on the product. And I think the company is overvalued, at least a little bit.

But I want to express my respect for the founder. For all his quirkiness, Stewart Butterfield has done right by the employees. By options for direct listing instead of IPO, the employees do not have a lock out period and can sell their shares on day 1. The rank and file employees get to benefit from the valuation and not just founders and investors, unlike most of the hyped IPOs.

Thank you,, Sir! I wish more companies, at least the ones that claim to be profitable, follow this path.

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TOP 10 Comments
  • Oracle / Product
    dbiA46

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    PRE
    F5 Networks
    dbiA46
    Slack’s overvalued by a lot. They won’t continue to build out their Dev ecosystem (aka their only moat) and will continue down the enterprise path just to get owned by Microsoft in the long run. 500M revenue on a current 18B with substantial losses. Hell they even stated in their S-1 that they may never be profitable.
    Jun 22, 2019 5
    • Google
      3lineguy

      Go to company page Google

      3lineguy
      Also, G&F were both profitable at IPO
      Jun 22, 2019
    • If you are not too young, you would remember how many people joked about how Google can’t make money by selling ads. Its revenue was far from 1B. Facebook was a single SNS that can crush anytime soon like MySpace.

      Start ups having business as customers do quite well. It may have huge upside like consumer companies but it is more stable. Okta, Box, MongoDB did pretty well after IPO. Whereas, GoPro, Zynga, Groupon, Dropbox, BlueApron not much.
      Jun 23, 2019
  • Facebook
    cynical.ly

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    cynical.ly
    OP
    Oracle, you missed the point of the post. This isn't about valuation, but about how employees are not screwed over like in Snap and a bunch of other IPOs where the investors and founders make money but the stock crashes by the time employees are able to sell theirs.
    Jun 22, 2019 1
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