Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Thursday, June 20th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, Slack debuts as a publicly traded company.

There will be congressional hearings about Libra.

A Florida city pays ransom money to hackers.

Getting your internet from your light bulbs,

and are we on the cusp of a fast charging battery revolution?

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

So Slack has had a really successful IPO, except it wasn't really an IPO, it was a direct

listing, but never mind because the headline is Slack's so-called reference price for its direct listing was $26 a share this morning,

which would have valued the company at $15.7 billion.

But when Slack opened for trading late this morning under the ticker symbol work, it surged 60% to actually

open at $38.50 to actually value the company at about $20 billion.

As of April, Slack had been valued at around $17 billion on the secondary markets and at its most

recent financing round in 2018.

Slack had a valuation of 7.1 billion dollars.

Again this was a direct listing like Spotify recently had quoting

NBC in a direct listing, unlike an IPO, banks do not

underwrite the offering and no new shares are sold so the company does not receive any additional

money for operations.

It's simply a way for existing shareholders to get liquidity by registering their shares

for sale on the public market.

Plus, Slack doesn't need to raise more money

...