When you deal with a solution provided by a startup that is a one man army you can play with the product, but you don't trust it enough to buy it. The story tells exactly why you should never trust such a product. These are not socks, buy a pack of three and throw it away in 6 months, people expect to use the solution for 3-5 year and there is no guarantee there will be updates, upgrades and support even next month. Trust, risk management, rings a bell?

It also requires time travel to implement; the folding knowledge was not known at the time of decision.

You don't need a time travel device, just a bayesian prior on probability of folding. (which happens to be close to one.)

It's not time travel, it's risk management.

I don't think it does make sense. Funded businesses die all the time. Google cancels products all the time. companies are acquihired and products end of lifed.

Even within organizations there are critically important employees.

So, no, it doesn't make sense.

At this point in time, Slack is a billion dollar unicorn that can magic money out of wherever it needs to keep going as long as it wants. It's not going away any time soon. The worst case scenario for Slack is acquisition and long slow death over a decade.

All it takes is one information leakage scandal, and customers will abandon Slack at the drop of a hat. It's just a chat app, so it's very easy to replace.

I am willing to bet that 99% of users will not blink an eye if there was an information leak. See Equifax, Facebook..

Equifax is a consumer product with uninformed customers, wherein the 'blowback' can't really be had by individual customers, rather, it has to pick up as a media storm.

Slack contains a world of sensitive corporate information.

Oddly though I don't recall any major email company losing gazillions of emails to a hacker either, but I could be wrong.

It's an existential risk for Slack, but not unlike most other SaaS companies as well, so it's just part of the cost of doing business a per the industry.

It's important not to forget that this isn't about whether Slack is something a company should adopt. Any such risk you can attribute to using Slack will be multiplied a million-fold with a nascent service being developed by a single person or startup. All of these are reasons to continue using Slack instead of switching to Level.

Big difference with Corp data. Even FB never leaked that.

Actually it makes perfect sense for all the reasons you stated.

"Funded businesses die all the time. Google cancels products all the time. companies are acquihired and products end of lifed."

So it makes perfect sense to avoid Google offerings (especially consumer side ones, which Google kills whenever it wants) and avoid "funded businesses" and newcomers that in danger of being acquihired and EOLifed.

Letting the careless early adopt those kinds of services, and using only mature ones (that have proven their longevity and aren't going anywhere even if acquired) in your company, makes sense.

Month-to-month, a new project by a single developer has many times the probability of folding than a company like Slack does. Shack is a significantly lower risk.

Further, there is much higher trust that Slack would give a reasonable notification period of they decided to stop existing, compared with a single dev's project.