Led by British Columbia-born serial entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield, Slack will go public on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with a direct listing.The hottest Canadian-led tech company outside of Canada will list publicly this week without an initial public offering.
The service, based in San Francisco, with offices in Vancouver, Toronto and around the world, takes the spirit of the age-old chatroom and deploys it into the workplace. In its most simple use, it replaces haphazard e-mail trails with concise “channels,” for teams to communicate. But it also integrates a number of tools into the platform, such as letting employees clock in and out of workdays and projects, with simple language-based commands.
That forecast, however, implies a decelerating growth rate that might worry investors come Thursday. Revenue growth is down from 82 per cent between fiscal 2018 and 2019, and from 110 per cent between 2017 and 2018. That’s on top of continued projected losses for the company: after losing US$139-million last year, it’s forecasting a loss this fiscal year as wide as US$176-million .
Although Mr. Jaluria has a “neutral” rating on Slack right now, he says that was determined by what he sees as a “high” valuation based on the high end of shares’ private-market trading value in Slack’s most recent quarter of $31.50 a share.