And by their mentorship, they give these companies a leg up. “You have people who are winners from the previous generation picking winners from the next. “It’s Silicon Valley’s greatest strength and Achilles heel,” says Margaret O’Mara, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied the modern history of Silicon Valley. The beauty of the direct listing is there’s no “lockup” period like in a traditional IPO, so its shareholders can immediately sell their shares.

Each $25,000 they invested would now be worth more than $40 million. According to Forbes, they all took stakes in the early rounds of the company.Īnd now, their bet on Butterfield & his fledgling Tiny Speck has paid off handsomely. Those friends were influential tech founders: LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner Stripe’s Patrick and John Collison Squarespace’s Anthony Casalena Twitter’s Biz Stone Yammer’s David Sacks and Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp. Before the company pivoted into the Slack we know today, it was called Tiny Speck (which made video games that ultimately failed to catch on.)īefore co-founders Stewart Butterfield, Cal Henderson and two former Flickr colleagues went to raise money from VCs, they first gave a call to their friends. But I read an interesting story in Forbes that talks about how Slack’s surprise winners are other startup CEOs. Yesterday, I noted that Accel had a big windfall thanks to Slack’s public market debut. That’s nearly triple its last private market valuation of $7.1 billion. On its first day of trading, the company’s shares opened at $38.50, 48% higher than its expected price, giving it a market cap of $19.5 billion.

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