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, better known as WeWork, made two intelligent decisions this week:

1. It announced in a filing that it is “unwinding” a deal that awarded its CEO $5.9 million for use of “‘we'” trademarks
2. It intends to appoint Harvard Business School professor and WeWork consultant to its board after its IPO.

Two actions, one purpose. WeWork has come under withering fire in media, startup, and financial circles for paying its CEO for use of a trademark; the deal looked like self-dealing from a CEO with voting control of his company. And the company has endured general censure for filing to go public with an all-male board. ( , alerting Crunchbase News to the filing.)

That the company agreed to pay Neumann $5.9 million in “consideration” for assigning “rights” to the “we” trademarks that he controlled through his own side-corporation was a massive optical error. That it had the poor judgment to get all the way to an IPO without any women on its board was inexcusable.

Fixing both is good, even if the money (“the issuance […] of the partnership interests was unwound and the partnership interests were returned to the We Company Partnership”) should never have been paid, and appointing a woman to the board after the IPO smacks of window-dressing and general ignorance.

If the markets will decide that the company’s sense of judgement is improving isn’t yet clear, even if the moves are steps in the right direction.

Looming Obfuscation

It’s old-hat now to point out that WeWork’s business model is hard to parse from its S-1 filing. That its real cost of revenue is hard to nail down, that its adjusted profit metrics are confusing, and that it is hard to tease out growth costs from operating costs.

This makes the potential profit of its long-term model hard to grok. And if you can’t estimate a firm’s future profits, how can you value it?

WeWork’s financials will be the deciding factors regarding the firm’s IPO potential success or failure. But you can’t help but wonder if the company would be able to extract more goodwill—faith, even—from investors if it hadn’t committed its unforced errors.

Recall that Neumann also sold . This allowed him to buy real estate that he later leased to the company, leading to some cries of double-dipping. (See also: The trademark issue.)

WeWork could be spending its time arguing about the long-term value it can extract from its mature buildings. Instead, it’s promising to appoint a woman to its board at a later date and retracting a $5.9 million payment to its CEO who, through a separate company, charged his own company for use of a trademark that he owned. This is not where you want to be if you are working to go public whilst defending a high valuation.

There are more important things going on today (Hong Kong’s leader the extradition bill, Boris Johnson is after losing his majority, and Hurricane Dorian is as we type), but in our little pond of private companies and private capital, this is the feature event.

More when WeWork sets a price range.

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The company is in the process of working towards an exotic direct listing on June 20th, eschewing the traditional IPO process. Instead, Slack will begin trading on the 20th of June without selling a bloc of new equity and setting a normal IPO share price.

How it performs when it does begin to trade will hinge on its financial performance, so let’s sink our teeth into what is new from the company and its accountants.

Q1, Finalized

In a preceding S-1/A filing, Slack detailed an expected range for its first quarter. Just for fun, here’s that particular bit of data (you can hunt it up in-context ):

Those ranges are incredibly tight, you’ll notice. Slack had revenue pegged within a million dollars and calculated billings to a mere $2 million range off a higher base.

How did Slack bear out? Here are the comparable results to the above-expected metrics:

• Slack Q1 Revenue: $134.8 million
• Slack Q1 Calculated Billings: $149.6 million

Slack, therefore, landed at the top of its Q1 revenue estimate, and just $100,000 under its upper-end calculated billings result. Someone buy its accounting team a raft of cupcakes, this was a clean brace of projections and results.

But all of that doesn’t tell us what we really need to know, which is how fast Slack is growing, and how much money it currently costs the firm to do so. So let’s check in on precisely that. From today’s filing, a few metrics and their pertinent deltas:

• Slack Q1 year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth: 66.6 percent
• Slack sequential-quarterly revenue growth: 10.7 percent
• Slack Q1 net loss: $31.9 million
• Slack year-ago net loss: $24.9 million
• Slack Q1 net margin: -25 percent
• Slack Q1 free cash flow (FCF): -$34.2 million
• Slack year-ago FCF: -$15.0 million

Alrighty, so what? The short answer to what all that means is that Slack is allowing its net deficits and cash burn to rise as it scales revenue.

Normally during an IPO run-up, I note that rising losses as the cost of growth makes for a harder-to-find path to profitability and that that could ding the firm’s final pricing and so forth. Here’s the thing, though: Slack doesn’t really care what you or I think.

The firm isn’t pricing; it’s direct listing. And it closed out its most recent quarter with more than $792 million in cash. If you look up the definition of “Fuck You Money,” most dictionaries now return a copy of Slack’s IPO filings. At a burn rate of $34.2 million a quarter, Slack has just under six years of cash available. It will not never, ever run out of money unless it loses focus and crashes itself into the side of a mountain.

Slack is probably pretty content with its new-normal quarterly Sales and Marketing spend of $66 million to $68 million. Why not? Putting up double-digit percentage sequential-quarterly growth is bonkers for a company doing north of $100 million in quarterly revenue.

It’s not like Slack’s margins are in trouble either. In its most recent quarter, Slack had gross margins of a little more than 86 percent. Find a problem with that; I dare you.

Slack is spending plenty to pick up more than $10 million in high-margin ARR every quarter it can expect to grow by 38 percent each year (the firm’s “net dollar retention” in its most recent quarter was 138 percent). Oh no, the horror.

I’m excited about this one.

Illustration: .