Slack Is a Boring Company. That’s Why Its Stock Was Exciting.

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Slack went public in a characteristically boring, but smart, manner, and the result was a very exciting day for a very boring company

Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg Slack, the workplace-chat app that haunts your life if you work in certain deskbound industries and is likely unknown to you if you don’t, went public on the New York Stock Exchange early Thursday afternoon. The stock — given the ticker symbol WORK, har har — opened trading at $38.50 a share before climbing as high as $42.

It’s not that such a business model is rare in Silicon Valley, exactly. But among the last generation or two of tech unicorns , there’s been an implicit expectation that simply selling a product in such a way that you make money isn’t quite enough: You need to be a world-shaping platform behemoth.

Slack, by contrast, does not talk much about itself as a platform. It’s not that it’s definitively not a platform — it has an app “store,” though most of the apps are free, and Slack doesn’t appear to take a cut from those that charge money — it’s just that it makes its money as a vendor, and seems satisfied with the boring business model of “charging money for a product.” That Slack has an easily understandable business model doesn’t, to be clear, make it a profitable company.

 

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