Partying with Slack as Silicon Valley’s latest darling celebrated a hard-to-believe year.
"It tastes like a unicorn!" An enthusiastic, red-faced Slack employee is peeling tufts of house-cured foie gras cotton candy off a stick. It's his company's first anniversary party, and he's enjoying himself too much to realize that he's not just describing, in ridiculous terms, the already-ridiculous combination of foie gras and cotton candy, but doing so with the very buzzword used to describe startups like his—startups that have experienced the kind of near-mythical ascent that makes normal corporate growth look sluggish and the money that's out there feel fake. Around him, red carpets lead to a fountain topped by a statue of a naked woman riding a fish, and bowtie-clad servers offer "absinthe and whiskey cocktails with an oaky finish." A jazz quartet plays in the ballroom, the Slack logo projected behind them; later, a massive marching band will play. With just a little flooding this party could be a level from Bioshock. Welcome to San Francisco in 2015.
The night represents both a birthday and a coronation for Slack, the all-in-one business communication tool that's both hard to explain and exceedingly of-the-moment. The company's first anniversary comes on the heels of a valuation more than $1 billion—the specific valuation, in fact, at which a company becomes a so-called "unicorn," a milestone Slack reached after an almost-unheard-of-eight months. It has raised $162 million in venture capital, picked up half a million users, and has become a nearly perfect example new-tech success: fast revenues, faster funding, orgasmic valuations, surging user rates and green lights and "up" arrows flashing at every turn. Slack also has something that some might say makes it a true unicorn: its product actually fucking works, and people will even pay to use it. If those metrics correspond to a license to party, ballsier Slack brass could have been eating fistfulls of caviar from one of the tubas.
