Interesting... I guess you could see a lot of SaaS companies as outsourced software development teams for the whales.

yep, if you owe someone a little money they have control. If you owe someone a lot of money, you have control. The whales use SaaS companies to develop things they dont want in house and demand features because they know they're one of the biggest customers.

That is exactly how my current employer feels half the time.

I've noticed this too. I worked for companies that had one big customer; possibly branching out with two or three others. But if that one big customer ever went away, the company would probably collapse. They really should have just been bought and made a subsidiarity:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/tech-culture-shock-from-ameri...

Sometimes that is the strategy: create something cool and hope to get purchased. Having worked at a company that was likely one of Slack’s “whales”, it is a bonus to have feature requests weighted more heavily, but if a tool doesn’t keep everyone else using it happy - you run the risk of some other tool becoming the shiny new thing.

I've worked for a company with a whale client like that (maybe not total shutdown bad but pretty close). The argument for why they never bothered to just acquire the startup was their fear of ruining the agility of the startup. That seemed like a reasonable concern as they were a massive, heavily regulated company.

Well, it might still be the case.