Former Birmingham student set to make millions from company’s NYSE debut
Entrepreneur and Birmingham City University graduate Cal Henderson is set to float the messaging company he helped develop, Slack, on the New York Stock Exchange.
San Francisco-based software engineer Mr Henderson owns 3.4% of the company, which he helped to found. Slack is a business communications service, allowing inter-company teams to talk instantly. It was intended as a replacement for email conversations amongst employees. Its “freemium” model means that smaller companies can use the platform for free, whilst bigger companies pay to use the service.
The news has been long-awaited, and was confirmed following a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week.
According to the filing, more than 600,000 organisations across 150 countries use the service. It also said that private share sales from March 2019 value Slack at $13bn.
Following the listing, Mr Henderson could see returns of $442m from the listing, although according to the Financial Times, it is unclear how many shares Slack’s owners will register to sell at the start of trading.
Slack is the latest in a line of San Francisco-based technology companies, which include Twitter and Spotify, to list on the NYSE. It will launch through a direct listing, meaning that it will not undertake an initial share sale through an IPO.
Mr Henderson has had a history of developing the technology of major companies, having been involved in image sharing platform Flickr. At age 24, Henderson and long-term associate Stewart Butterfield sold Flickr for £19m to Yahoo. They then founded Slack, which reported revenues of $401m in 2018, a jump of 82% on the year before.
He won BCU’s Alumni of the Year in 2015, and has has been based in San Francisco since 2003.
