(“Platform,” in the business sense, meaning a marketplace that connects parties for transactions.) Investors would rather businesses be “platforms” than vendors or manufacturers because platforms are potentially much more lucrative - owning the whole strip mall is better than just being one of the strip mall tenants, especially if you get a cut of all the transactions in the mall. But among the last generation or two of tech unicorns (start-ups valued at more than $1 billion), there’s been an implicit expectation that simply selling a product in such a way that you make money isn’t quite enough: You need to be a world-shaping platform behemoth. It’s not that such a business model is rare in Silicon Valley, exactly. By “boring” I don’t mean that the Slack app itself is boring (nothing that contains as much gossip, shit talk, and potential for embarrassment as the Slack app does could be boring), but that the way Slack works as a company is a boring: It sells a valuable service directly to other companies, for money.
This would give the company a valuation in the $21 billion range - higher than that of Lyft (to name another 2019 tech-industry public offering), and triple what investors valued Slack at as recently as last August.Īll in all, a very exciting day for a very boring company. The stock - given the ticker symbol WORK, har har - opened trading at $38.50 a share before climbing as high as $42. Slack, the workplace-chat app that haunts your life if you work in certain deskbound industries and is likely unknown to you if you don’t, went public on the New York Stock Exchange early Thursday afternoon.
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