We didn't need an all-in-one hub for realtime chat. Hipchat worked great for us, we had a separate WhatsApp group (with the founders and everyone else in there)

We didn't need an all-in-one hub for realtime chat. Hipchat worked great for us, we had a separate WhatsApp group (with the founders and everyone else in there) for the social stuff. We all mingled but if you didn't want to, they'd find the preferred way to talk to you. I don't want to name the exact place this happened but it was certainly a unique culture that I now miss. It was neither British or American. It was the only place I've worked where I had easy and direct access to the founders, the C level, and the VPs, as a lowly senior engineer. And not because I brown-nosed my way up; we'd connect outside of work because we liked the same things. A total tangent, but it's just to say that we never needed Slack in the first place. I doubt many places do.