The REAL reason Slack became a billion dollar company

The author might be onto something here. There's definitely a lot to be said for the social pressures of feeling 'in' with company culture, I can see why a limited-history, always-scrolling, continuous stream of group chats would create that pressure.

I see an analogue to Snapchat, another wildly popular app (in entirely different settings), where this 'fear-of-missing-out' is also very real, with the equivalent of 'status updates' disappearing in 24 hours, and the default 'picture message' being self-destructive. It incentivizes you to pay attention, and to check up often on everyone you're actually interested in, driving more engagement with the service.

The company that created slack created games and failed at them and then stumbled upon slack. A large part of all this is just luck and it's easy to retrofit these argument.

I also don't think slack will be able to sustain it's 1B evaluation.