Slackers
By: John Bonini
Tags: The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin, Yuval Noah Harari, Slack, Direct Listing

Image Credit: HBO Entertainment

“I’m going to take you into the 21st century — right after I drag you through the 19th and 20th.”

I hate-watched the series The Newsroom, even though Aaron Sorkin made it.

But I did like a few of the secondary (corporate) characters, such as B.J. Novak’s tech billionaire role of Lucas Pruitt.

Charlie: I was very proud of our Boston (bombing) coverage.

Lucas: ‘Proud’ is generally what people pretend they are when they’ve lost.

Charlie: Cryptic is what people generally are when they pretend they have supernatural powers.

Lucas: What if I told you: you could be the number one news network and change the world at the same time?

Charlie: Change it into what?

Lucas: A place where people say snappy, sardonic things like that.

There exist two camps in corporate America:

One uses Slack.

And the other does not belong in the 21st century.

Sure, Slack is just an app — a tool through which a workplace chats.

And there has existed and continue to be other players in the same market… but Slack is the best.

At a private valuation of $7.1 billion, you could say that employees at Slack are happy with (and proud of) what they’ve built as the company knocks on the door of the public markets:

“After nearly a decade of economic expansion, tech investors are getting less interested in finding early-stage investments and more interested in using public markets to exit their positions.

Slack Technologies, for example, is one of several Silicon Valley ‘unicorns’ expected to IPO this year. The office messaging app is planning a public debut as soon as the second quarter.

But there’s a catch. Slack doesn’t plan to use Wall Street underwriters, who build lists of institutional buyers for IPOs while backstopping the share price. Instead, The Wall Street Journal reported today that Slack plans to use a market maker to sell shares directly to the public. That means the company is skipping the chance to raise new funds, the traditional purpose of an IPO. Technically, a direct listing isn’t an IPO at all, since there’s no offering of new shares — the core component of an ‘initial public offering.’”

Ben Carlson simplified what investing is (or, at least, what it should be):

“Sometimes people forget that putting money into the stock market gives you an ownership stake in actual businesses that produce regular cash flow which they pay out to their investors.”

Meanwhile, Ben’s co-worker (boss), Josh Brown, adds a little more perspective when it comes to interpreting the value of companies:

“I think we take a lot for granted in America. The story that we’ve all bought into, that ‘legal fictions’ like Apple and Google and Wells Fargo and Berkshire Hathaway ought to be worth twelve to fifteen times their annual earnings while Russia’s largest companies should only sell for five or six times is one of those things. As Yuval Noah Harari explains in his book Sapiens, corporations are not naturally occurring phenomena. They’re not written into the laws of the universe. Rather, they are just stories that we all agree upon.”

I have no private stake in Slack, but I do know a good product when I see it.

Would I want to own shares at a $7.1 billion valuation or higher?

I’m not sure. But I might arrive at an answer by the end of 2019.