Communication platform Slack keeps growing, with few signs of slowing. The company announced recently a $160 million round of funding, bringing Slack’s total valuation to a staggering $2.8 billion.
Slack has only been around for roughly a year and is becoming the communication mode of choice for many companies, including BuzzFeed, The New York Times, Adobe and Walmart Labs. Slack has more than 750,000 daily active users — 200,000 of whom are paying customers.
As recently as October, Slack raised a $120 million round of funding, getting them into the $1 billion valuation club.
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield talked with The New York Times about the funding and the future of the company. He answered the question on everyone’s mind: is Slack truly worth nearly $3 billion?
It is, because people say it is.
I’m not trying to be trite, and I know why you’re asking, but if you go down to the fundamental level, we all have an agreement about what things are worth — until we don’t.
Maybe the better question is, how great is the risk that the consensus about what Slack is worth will change dramatically?
There is a risk that investors will say, maybe this company, at this time, is only worth half what we thought. But since we came back from the holidays, everything doubled. That’s a crazy rate of growth, but it has remained constant since we launched. We can’t keep that forever — the law of large numbers, we’ll start to saturate markets. But obviously we’re not there yet. I don’t feel like there are any serious vulnerabilities in the business. So I think even if our valuation were to go down, it would go down until we catch up to it.
Read the full interview here.
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