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.