The opening price for Slack's Class A common stock was determined by the buy and sell orders collected by the NYSE from broker-dealers, according to Slack's prospectus. While banks typically help determine pricing in an IPO, the NYSE set the reference price for Slack of $26 Wednesday night. Slack said it engaged Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Allen & Company as financial advisors and several more firms as associate financial advisors to assist it in the process. Plus, Slack doesn't need to raise more money since it already has more than $800 million in cash on hand. It's simply a way for existing shareholders to get liquidity by registering their shares for sale on the public market. 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. Spotify surprised Wall Street with its decision to list directly onto the New York Stock Exchange last year. But it is just the second large tech firm to pursue the unusual direct listing route in the past year and a half. Slack is part of a slew of tech companies to go public this year including Uber, Lyft, Zoom, Pinterest, PagerDuty and CrowdStrike. In its last financing round in 2018, Slack said it raised $427 million, which brought its valuation to $7.1 billion. As of April, Slack was valued at nearly $17 billion on the secondary market, according to Forge Global, which matches private companies and their employees with investors. The pop puts Slack's market cap at $19.5 billion.
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