

The delightful Stewart Butterfield: "Q So do you think Slack is worth $3 billion? A It is, because people say it is."

Stewart co-founded Flickr, created the wonderful (and failed) game Glitch (which he released to the public domain upon its demise). Now he runs Slack, which is much beloved by Boing Boing's team — and is essential to my wife's company, too.

In a NYT interview, Stewart explains why he said yes to another $160M in capital and why his company is now valued at $2.8B. It's one of the least CEO-ish, most frank and bullshit-free interviews you're likely to read in the financial press. Go Stewart!

Public investors often have some underlying rationale for getting to a decent price. In this market, there are bets about how big the company's market can be, how good the team is — but there is also just a whole lot of supply and demand. And there are a lot of investors who have a lot of money. So when I say arbitrary, I mean that it's not coming from some airtight, textbook formula for how to value these types of companies. It's based on how many there are — and there's only one Slack — and if you would like to invest in this Slack, this is the price that it costs. It's very highly influenced by other factors: Interest rates being low, there's a lot of money in V.C., funds get larger as a result, but the number of deals that they do remains about the same. So therefore the amount that they invest per deal goes up, which means the valuation goes up.

Is Slack Really Worth $2.8 Billion? A Conversation With Stewart Butterfield [Farhad Manjoo/NYT]