Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…This is not in my DNA. This is pretty bad. I'm going to go with a C minus tenure as a public company. Maybe it deserves to be worse, but the outcome here is above the DPO, the first day of trading on the direct public listing. It's not like they destroyed value in the public markets. On the other hand, didn't come close in trading to 15–16 months as a public company to meeting that day one price or little on eclipsing it. Maybe it would've been impossible to fight this Microsoft Teams’ bullying narrative, so maybe this was an unwinnable battle, but they lost it. Packy, you have a great point. Teams is not the competitor here. This is a great company with great metrics. And yet, they let this become the narrative that Teams is just going to destroy these guys. I think that's why we ended up here. It's interesting because if we're grading the performance as a public company, the stock price movement is a failure of the CEO's ability to give the market confidence in the future of this company. I think Hamilton points this out in 7 Powers. Packy, I know you're an avid reader of Hamilton's work with 7 Powers, too, and I think it's worth bringing up. Public market investors are not short-sighted, they over-index on recent signals, but the reason is because the stock's price and the enterprise value of the company is primarily formed by an investor's view of what the next 30 years of cash flows are going to be. They, of course, over-index on recent signals if it paints a picture of how those 30 years are going to go. What we're seeing here is despite relatively strong performance as a business, the market doubted the business's long-term prospects even though the business did even better quarter over quarter over quarter as a public company. It's interesting, depending on what we're grading here, you'd grade different things. I'm in camp B-ish, B+ as actual execution on their goals but F on the ability to generate value for shareholders. Well, not F (I guess) because it didn't go down but C-. It's interesting that this communications company's biggest problem was communications and telling its own story, but I think my answer actually changes. I've suffered through this bouncing in the 25-30, on the 16 range as a public company below the DPO price and I'm fine with it because I thought that they shared the long-term vision that I had for the company. If you just asked me to grade it on the spot, it's totally fine. Everybody's misjudging it. They also see that this thing just compounds over time and compounds over time and compounds over time. Obviously, this still changes my perception of how they view themselves. In that case, I have to give it somewhere in the C range as a public company just because it stayed pretty flat, which is average. It's a C. It's underperforming in the market pretty significantly and particularly the time where you're just counting future cash flows to those three years which should be Slack's. To Slack's great benefit, you're just counting this tiny, tiny, tiny discount rate and yet it's not being reflected in the stock price if they're not taking that long-term view that I think you can't be any better than a C for me, unfortunately.…

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