Slack Taps Goldman Sachs to Lead IPO

Fun fact, Goldman built a Slack-like chat service in house that they've spun off into a company called Symphony. It's pitch is that it's more compliance-friendly for heavily regulated orgs like banks. Also, it sucks.

What does Slack need to raise capital for? They have their niche and are doing great in it, I don't get why they'd want to be publicly owned with all the headaches that brings. I don't get why a lot of companies do it when they could just as well bootstrap and stay private.

&gt;Slack is competing against the likes of Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O) Teams, Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google Hangouts Chat and Cisco Systems Inc’s (CSCO.O) Webex Teams in the so-called workplace collaboration market<p>How is Webex competing with Slack? Slack is for chat-based collaboration with people in your workplace. Webex is for scheduling video calls.<p>Is there some overlapping use-case of either one that I&#x27;m missing?

I worry this will lead to a further reduction in privacy for average users, as Slack is pushed toward &quot;enterprise&quot; features which are basically just giving your boss the ability to read all your private messages.<p>That said, I think it&#x27;s naive and foolish to have an expectation of privacy on your work slack. Should you have privacy? Yes, absolutely. Do I expect it? No, not at all.

Maybe after he becomes a billionaire, Stewart can finally retire and actually release a game.

Feels like this might be one of those IPOs that end up being fishing expeditions for a higher acquisition price, like happened with Qualtrics last month (bought out by SAP week before the IPO).

Slack feels so lacking compared to Facebook&#x27;s Workplace.

I’ve heard a lot of people talking about MS Teams. Is it as easy to use as Slack?

Google should buy them.