How some services, like Donut and Hallway, are attempting to revive serendipitous encounters between employees during remote work, many built atop Slack
Katherine Bindley / Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @amishjani Tweets: Amish Jani / @amishjani : Fun piece on building digital connections featuring @donut and @danmanian! “The watercooler as a place to build relationships just evaporated.” With so many people working from home, innovators are trying to re-create office collegiality. https://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2020, Slack had become the de facto surface where distributed teams lived — coverage through the year traced its expansion from a workflow tool that merely filled cracks between apps into something reshaping how organizations talk, including a Trojan-horse effect that flattened communication hierarchies. Donut and Hallway are the next layer on that same substrate: instead of replacing Slack, they treat it as the platform on which to rebuild the informal encounters the office used to provide.
The timing matters because the problem they attack — 'the watercooler evaporated' — was fresh in September 2020, and the market responded quickly: within two months, a parallel wave of virtual HQs like Branch, Gather, and Huddle was building spatial, metaverse-style workplaces rather than bolting serendipity onto chat.
First-order effects
- Teams already standardized on Slack can add Donut- or Hallway-style pairing and encounter tools without adopting new infrastructure, making Slack's installed base the distribution channel for workplace-culture software.
- Donut and Hallway validate a product category — engineered serendipity — that didn't need to exist when offices did, giving HR and people-ops buyers a concrete tool for remote cohesion.
Second-order effects
- Virtual-HQ startups like Branch, Gather, and Huddle are forced to differentiate on spatial presence and ambient awareness rather than simple matchmaking, splitting the 'recreate the office' market into chat-native and world-native camps.
- The informality these tools deliberately encourage cuts both ways: related reporting showed soaring Slack and Teams usage already driving an uptick in harassment claims from misinterpreted casual messaging, so employers adopting serendipity tooling inherit a compliance surface along with the culture benefits.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, workplace-culture software consolidates around whichever platform hosts the conversation — Slack first among them — turning the chat layer into the operating system for everything from task management to social bonding, not just messaging.
- The longer arc points toward companies assembling a composite digital headquarters from third-party layers (pairing bots, spatial rooms, agents) atop one communication backbone, with the backbone owner gaining leverage over an entire ecosystem of culture vendors.
The trend: Remote-work tooling is evolving from replacing office productivity to reconstructing office sociology, first as add-ons atop Slack and then as dedicated spatial workplaces.