The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that money-losing companies are getting acquired for astronomical sums. The Globe's Tim Kiladze writes that last December, Salesforce acquired Slack Technologies for $28-billion (U.S.), even though Slack, developer of the workplace messaging application, lost $1-billion (U.S.) over three years. In Canada, save for a few homegrown funds, tech was largely a backwater in a country dominated by natural resources and financial services. Aside from Shopify's initial public offering in 2015, there was not much progress until early 2019. That is when the tech sector finally seemed to gain some momentum, fuelled in part by the expectation that more U.S. start-ups, such as Airbnb and Uber, would finally go public. That March, Lightspeed Commerce pulled off a $240-million IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange. At first it seemed the party would not last long. By September, WeWork's plans to go public blew up. Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly digital businesses were all the rage. In July, 2020, Dye & Durham finally went public (its first attempt, in 2018, had failed), and the deal was a smash. The company's share price quickly tripled, opening the floodgates for more deals.