Slack’s CEO, a few months after receiving a $2.8 billion company valuation just 14 months following its launch, announced that he’d had eight to 10 acquisition offers, TechCrunch recently reported . The news broke at the recent Code conference, which is powered by the Re/code team who we reported on recently.
Discussing the possibility of acquisitions on stage, CEO Stewart Butterfield told listeners, “We’re doing well. We have $300 million in the bank and we’ve been growing 5 percent a week for 70 straight weeks. Ninety-eight percent of people who have ever paid for Slack are still paying for it. We’ll never have an opportunity like this again.”
While Butterfield did not disclose which companies had approached him, TechCrunch author Alexia Tsotsis speculated that major Silicon Valley players such as Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, Google, and Facebook might be counted amongst those vying for attention.
Business Insider reported that the tool has been drawing in tens of thousands of new users every week. Slack’s excellent user onboarding experience has been lauded by industry experts, such as myTips , and its feature set praised by top tech blogs such as Finer Things in Tech .
Speaking with Business Insider , Butterfield admitted that one of the reasons why Slack received such a large valuation is due to one of the best venture capital markets we’ve seen for some decades.
He told the publication, “I’ve been in this industry for 20 years and this is definitely the best time. It’s a wonderful, crazy environment for raising capital.”
But this raises problems for acquisitions, too. Speaking with CNBC a few days prior , Butterfield said that things might be a little too hot right now and that a “giant crash” could be a good thing.
“I wouldn’t wish this upon the world, but kind of the best thing that could happen from our perspective is a giant crash… Office space becomes cheaper, salaries become cheaper, buying advertising becomes cheaper, acquiring companies becomes more realistic.”
The Slack CEO added that he’d been looking for businesses to acquire recently, but the price tags are simply too high due to favorable market conditions.
Slack is a business communication tool designed to help distributed workforces or disparate teams from the same company work more coherently on projects.
Unlike Skype or other instant messaging apps, it saves all files in the cloud, offers a hashtag system and an @username system similar to that seen on Twitter. Along with market competitors such Asana, many speculate that such tools could someday replace email.
“Your email inbox is a to-do list written for you by other people” @TomChatfield I think this is why #slack is so popular #webwewantfest
— Nathalie Nahai (@NathalieNahai) May 30, 2015
Have you tried Slack? Think it’s worth the $2.8 billion valuation? Let us know in the comments.
