So Slack went public last week. June 20th, direct listing on the NYSE, ticker WORK. No traditional IPO roadshow, no underwriters setting a price the night before and popping champagne at 9:30. They did the same thing Spotify did back in 2018, just let the market decide. The reference price was $26 a share. It opened at $38.50. By the closing bell it was sitting somewhere around $38.62, which if my math is right (it might not be, I did not study finance) puts the company's paper value at something like twenty billion dollars.
Twenty billion dollars for a chat app.
I want to be clear that I don't say that with contempt exactly. I use Slack every single day. I run a little workspace for a side project with two other people and we live in it. But there is something genuinely funny to me about watching a tool I complain about constantly turn into one of the most talked-about listings of the year.
Here's my actual complaint, the specific one, not the vague "software bad" one. Threads. I do not understand how a company with this much money and this many extremely smart engineers has shipped a threading model that manages to be worse than email. Someone replies to a message from four days ago, buried in a channel I haven't opened since last week, and unless I happen to have "also send to channel" checked (which half the time I don't, because I turned it off after the fortieth notification), that reply just sits there. Dead. Nobody sees it. I found a genuinely important note about a deploy issue three days late last month because it was tucked into a thread reply with zero visual indication anything had happened in that channel at all.
And the @channel thing. I had a collaborator ping @channel at, I want to say, 11:40 on a Tuesday night, to tell the two of us that he'd pushed a typo fix to the README. That's it. That's the whole message. My phone buzzed like something was on fire.
None of this is meant to talk anyone out of using it, to be clear: we're not switching, there's nothing better for what we do, and I know that. It's more that I find the gap funny. The stock does something like a 48% pop on day one, business press writes about it like it's a referendum on the health of the whole tech IPO pipeline (there was a real conversation happening this spring about whether direct listings might become the new normal instead of the traditional Wall Street IPO dance, and Slack going this route was being read as a pretty big test case for that), and meanwhile I'm sitting here at my desk trying to figure out why a message from Thursday just now decided to notify me.
I think what gets me is that the stuff that actually annoys daily users rarely has anything to do with the stuff that makes a company valuable. Wall Street doesn't care that thread notifications are a mess. It cares about seat growth, net dollar retention, whether enterprises are locked in enough to keep paying per-seat pricing forever. Those are completely different questions from "does this app make my Tuesday night worse." Both things can be true at once. The company can be a genuinely good business and the product can still have a UX decision in it that makes me want to throw my laptop into a lake.
Anyway. If you're one of the three people who read this and also happen to run a Slack workspace for something small (a project, a group of friends, whatever), go check your notification preferences right now. Not "later." Right now. Turn off @channel for anyone who isn't an actual admin if you can, mute the channels you don't need live updates from, and for the love of god use threads properly if you're going to use them at all, because half of the mess is just people not knowing "reply in thread" is a button that exists. It took me embarrassingly long to notice it myself.
Twenty billion dollars and I still think the little green dot means someone died if it turns red.