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FORTUNE.COM // SEPTEMBER 2019
Aspen. “She got to ring the bell
to open our shares for trading.”
The ceremonious milestone
inside the New York Stock
Exchange was more than a fi-
nancial event for Slack. It was a
bar mitzvah of sorts: a step from
adolescence to adulthood for
the buzzy tool that lets workers
message one another, share and
collaborate on documents, and
manage projects, among other
tasks that are key to getting
work done.
Slack had ample reason to
grow up. Initially popular with
Silicon Valley startups, the
company has more recently
attracted larger corporate
customers, many of which are
accustomed to working with
vendors that are equally big—
and public. “It gives us some
credibility,” Butterfield said
about Slack becoming a pub-
licly traded company, during his
onstage interview.
According to the CEO, some
of Slack’s bigger customers had
been asking for the company’s
financial records. Now they’ll
have access to details like reve-
nue and profit—and risks to the
business—on a quarterly basis.
SL ACK SPREADS
ITS WINGS
The popular workplace chat app recently made a successful
public market debut. Now what? By Michal Lev-Ram
TECH
WHEN STEWART BUTTERFIELD, chief executive of workplace
messaging service Slack, flew to New York City for his
company’s public stock market debut in June, he didn’t just bring
his leadership team and some key customers to help celebrate. He
also brought his mother, Norma Butterfield.
“The big thing for me is, I got my mom to come,” the CEO told
the audience at FortuneÕs recent Brainstorm Tech conference in
To be sure, customers weren’t the only ones
clamoring for Slack to go public. So were its
early private investors, who have so far made
a killing on the company. On June 20, Slack’s
impressive first day as a publicly listed com-
pany, shares opened at $38.50, 48% above the
reference price of $26 that had been set by the
NYSE the day before. That gave Slack a valu-
ation of about $20 billion, nearly tripling its
value as a private company. The stock has since
fluctuated, with Slack’s market cap dipping to
around $15 billion in early August.
Despite the success of its “direct listing”—
an unconventional method of going public
without issuing new shares or working with
an underwriter—Slack now faces even higher
expectations of growth and the same power-
ful nemesis: Microsoft. The tech giant, based
in Redmond, Wash., recently bragged that
ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS GASH
