I don't know, to me $9B seems like a lot of money for a glorified IRC client built on web tech. Sure, you don't pay for the tech, but in the end you can do a lot with that kind of money. Elon Musk sold his first two businesses to get the funds to start what he really wanted to do.
We don't know where Oculus would be without FB, i would argue they are better off because they are creating a new market and are in a capital intensive business. The VR market is still slow overall. Without FB, they could have already run out of breath or cut corners on the product.
A glorified IRC client built on web tech... that everybody uses. Tech is only one small part of a business. Slack provides real value to millions of people, $9B certainly doesn't seem an unreasonable valuation to me.
You're spending too much time in the tech industry. Even if you double the daily active users from a year ago, that doesn't even reach 5% of the US population.
That's still a lot of users. By that logic most B2C companies (e.g.: Atlassian) shouldn't have a big valuation either. My point is that Slack has taken technology which has been around a long time, made it fun and usable so people use it, and most importantly they've got people to pay for it. GP's comment was dismissing Slack purely because of the tech.
5% of the US population seems very large to me if that's right... They make a lot more money than something like facebook per user - even though we don't know how many organizations are paid vs free.
We don't know where Oculus would be without FB, i would argue they are better off because they are creating a new market and are in a capital intensive business. The VR market is still slow overall. Without FB, they could have already run out of breath or cut corners on the product.