Slack is one of the most impressive successes in SaaS over the last five years. Its growth is awe-inspiring, and the passion of its users is infectious, but both can be hard to internalize because the product seems like such an incremental improvement over ICQ. When we look back five years, a well-crafted business chat app feels like it was a clear opportunity that one startup turned into a $4B concern. What seems obvious in retrospect, is often difficult to see clearly in the present.

Consumerization, a focus on design, and the importance of easily deployable GIFs all played a role in Slack's rise. What are the similarly self-evident solutions to age-old problems that we should be running towards today to prepare us for the next five years of B2B software?

Is a new technology like VR a productivity booster that can help us understand each other better? Are we ignoring conspicuous opportunities in crypto? Can AI live up to its promise? What improvements can we envision in how business software is marketed and sold in the coming years? What innovation will seem indisputable five years hence? And how can we benefit from being ahead of that curve today?