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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.

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>that everybody uses

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.

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.

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.

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