So last Thursday Slack finally showed up on the New York Stock Exchange, and it did it in this weird sideways way that I keep thinking about four days later. No roadshow theater, no bank setting a price the night before and then everyone pretending to be surprised when it "pops" 40%. They just let the market open the thing cold. Reference price was $26 a share, first trade printed somewhere up around $38, and it closed the day not far off that. Ticker is WORK, which, sure, fine, I guess DEND was taken.
This is called a direct listing, and Slack is only the second big name to try it after Spotify did it back in April 2018. No new shares get created, nobody's buying freshly printed stock from the company, existing shareholders (employees, early investors, whoever got in during the private rounds) just start selling what they already have straight to the public. No underwriters setting an artificial price low enough that their favorite clients get a guaranteed pop on day one at the expense of the company leaving money on the table. I've never worked at a company that IPO'd so I don't have a dog in this fight exactly, but every time I read about a "hot IPO" popping 60% I think about how that pop is just value the company handed to insiders instead of keeping for itself. If your stock opens at $38 and everyone involved priced it at $26 the night before, the company sold shares for $12 less than they were worth. That's not success, that's a pricing miss dressed up as a party.
Anyway I don't really care about the finance mechanics for their own sake, I care because I use this thing every day. I run a Slack workspace for a two-person freelance thing I do on the side, and I'm in three other workspaces for various communities and one very dead one from a hackathon team that hasn't posted since March. Its become the default the way IRC used to be the default, and that bugs me a little if I'm honest. Back in 2012 or so, when this blog was maybe six months old, I ran a self-hosted IRC bouncer on a cheap VPS so a project group I was in could stay logged into a channel 24/7 without anyone's laptop needing to stay open. Took maybe twenty minutes to set up, cost nothing but the box itself, and it just sat there quietly doing its job for two years. Now the equivalent thing is "go make a free Slack workspace," which is easier for sure, but it also means your team chat history lives on someone else's servers with a free-tier message limit that eventually starts hiding your own old conversations from you unless you pay up. I get why it won, it's genuinely nicer to use day to day, but I do miss owning the thing outright.
The other story eating all the tech press oxygen this week is obviously Facebook's cryptocurrency project, which I am deliberately not writing about today because I guarantee every tech blog on earth is doing that post right now and I don't have anything to add that a hundred other people haven't already said better. Slack going public quietly on the same news cycle feels like the more interesting small story anyway, the one that'll actually matter to how software companies think about going public going forward, even if it got buried under bigger headlines.
If you're curious what a workspace actually costs at scale: free tier caps you at 10,000 searchable messages and 10 integrations, which sounds like a lot until your team crosses it in about six weeks. Paid plans start at $6.67 a person a month if you pay annually, which adds up fast once you're past a dozen people. For my little two-person setup it doesn't matter, we're nowhere near the message cap and probably never will be. For anyone running a bigger team, I'd bet that free tier ceiling is doing more to drive Slack's revenue than any amount of marketing.
Not sure I have a neat takeaway here other than: watching a company go public without the usual theater was more interesting than I expected, and it made me a little nostalgic for running my own dumb little chat server on a box I controlled. Might spin one back up just to have it.