Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield
Daniel Stewart Butterfieldis a Canadian entrepreneur and businessman, best known for being a co-founder of the photo sharing website Flickr and team messaging application Slack...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionBusinessman
CountryCanada
birth family looks people percent photos public wedding
About 80 percent of the photos on Flickr are public and searchable by everyone. In one sense, it's a place where people upload snapshots from the family reunion, wedding or the birth of a baby or something like that, but it's also a place where people go to show what the world looks like to them.
bad default develop habits hoarding information means mode people power preserving using work wrong
There's a lot that's wrong with the way we work - bad habits that develop around control of information, people hoarding information as a means of preserving their own power. When you're using Slack, everyone can see what's going on because the default mode is public.
best flirting moments music parts playing
Those moments of play that we do get in meta-life, like playing music, or golf, or word-play, or flirting - those are some of the best parts about being alive.
bosses hard love people tend
I tend to be a lot more honest and transparent with employees than most bosses are. But I've had people tell me - even those who love working with me - that I'm terrifying, which is hard for me to imagine.
dozens teams using
A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently.
channels create discuss manage relatively
In Slack, you create channels to discuss different topics. For a small group of people, those channels are relatively easy to manage and navigate.
maybe people
People think I'm smart because Flickr was successful. I'm lucky. Maybe I'm smart, too. But, I'm lucky.
worked
The useful part of Microsoft was that everything worked together.
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At my first job in the mid-to-late '90s, almost every product was from Microsoft. Everything was designed to work together - Windows for workgroups, shared M drives, etc., etc.
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Email has the virtue - sounds like a bad thing, but it's the virtue of being the lowest common denominator messaging protocol. Everyone can have it. It can cross organizational boundaries. No one owns it. It's not some particular company's platform.
age british cabin changed columbia dharma five grew life log mostly name running small
For the first five years of my life, I grew up in a log cabin in coastal British Columbia in a very small town, like 300 people, mostly hippies. No running water, no electricity. When I was 12, I changed my name from Dharma to Stewart. At that age, you just want to be normal.
closed deal february learned people period relatively time year
I learned so much in the year after Flickr was acquired. People forget, but Flickr launched in February 2004. And a year later, the deal was done with Yahoo, and we closed it in March of 2005. It was really independent for a relatively short period of time.
designer easiest happens people serial
I think of myself more as a designer than a serial entrepreneur. As a designer, the easiest way to see that something happens is to start a company and then be the boss, and then people have to do what you say.
common fidelity higher lowest mandate means technology
Inside a company, you can mandate that everyone use the same technology, which means you can go a little bit, I don't know, higher fidelity than the lowest common denominator technology.