Friday News Roundup: Slack, Uber, And Stripe

Morning Markets: We made it to Friday! Here’s all the stuff we missed.

Welcome to the end of the week. You are probably pretty excited to go home and go straight to bed; the news cycle has been exhausting now for months. But it’s still morning out here in San Francisco, so let’s get caught up heading into the soporific weekend.

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Slack’s Impending Investor Day

What do you call a roadshow that isn’t? An “online presentation to prospective shareholders,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s Kate Roof.

Yes, since Slack is not going public in the traditional manner, the office messaging unicorn instead intends to host a webinar of sorts on May 13th, detailing its business and performance thereof. We’ll tune in. Recall that Slack is pursuing a direct listing, akin to what Spotify pulled off recently.

Uber’s IPO Date: A Reminder

We haven’t forgotten about the Uber IPO, never you worry. Indeed, the company’s IPO is still in the offing and we’re currently expecting it to price on May 9th, and begin trading on May 10.

News out indicates that Uber has managed to fill its book, albeit at the lower-end of its valuation. Given that, the company’s anticipated hope of raising its range may prove difficult. Expect more news to leak out early next week ahead of pricing.

And then prepare yourself for the anti-climactic existence of Uber as a public company, working to beat quarterly figures and keep growing while reducing deficits. Just like most recently-public tech shops.

Stripe Embraces Remote Work

The Crunchbase News team has been hard at work in recent months covering all sorts of places. Here’s some recent work on Austin, New Jersey, and Latin America, for example.

But we’re not the only band of nerds with eyes on the horizon. Stripe, the wealthy online payments company, has decided to set up its next development hub, well, nowhere. Here’s the firm:

Stripe has engineering hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We are establishing a fifth hub that is less traditional but no less important: Remote…. Stripe will hire over a hundred remote engineers this year. They will be deployed across every major engineering workstream at Stripe.

Hiring engineering staff in the bay area is gladiatorial work, and those folks aren’t merely concentrated in four other cities. So, Stripe is making a big stab towards hiring people where they already are. Expect more of this in 2019.

Listen To Equity

If you want even more News Recap, we have it for you right here. You’re welcome.

And that’s that, folks. Have a good weekend, get a nap, and I’ll see you bright and early Monday morning. (Oh, and if you want to sound smarter at dinner parties, follow these folks.)

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.