Equity Shot: Uber’s IPO terms and Slack’s S-1

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Kate and Alex are back (again), bringing you the latest on the IPO front. As Friday is coming to a close, we’ll keep this post short to leave plenty of room for you to dig into the audio. Welcome to the weekend.

Up first we dug into Uber’s latest S-1 filing. This time, the company set a price range for itself (TechCrunch’s coverage here), valuing itself at $84 billion and also detailing estimates of its first-quarter results (Crunchbase News’s notes here).

We suspect Uber will ultimately price a top that range. Time will tell.

And then we turned to Slack, who’s direct listing will help set the historical tone for the unicorn era; screw your money, Slack says, we have our own. Well maybe not, but the company has impressive growth, killer margins, and, to our surprise, larger GAAP deficits than we expected. The company’s filing was fascinating.

But worry not, we can figure out how to value Slack. It’s Uber that left us scratching our heads. Expect next week to be another blizzard of news and numbers.

Thanks as always for listening to the show. We’ve never had more downloads than these last few weeks. It means a lot that you want to hang out with us. Don’t forget that we have an email address ([email protected]), and a hashtag that Alex needs to learn to use: #equitypod.