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
advantages aids boundary company less manage people slack tap work
One of the advantages of something like Slack is that I tap on the app icon, and it's just the people at my company and just the people I work with. There's a strong boundary there which aids in comprehension. It's one less molecule of glucose in my brain to manage it all.
gratifying lives slack work
Slack is gratifying to work on in the same way that Flickr was. The mission is to make people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive.
firm hard matters perception sends signal tech
It's hard to overestimate how much the perception of the quality of the V.C. firm you're with matters - the signal it sends to other V.C.s, to potential employees, to customers, to the tech press. It's like where you went to college.
developing dialogue experience feedback initial joined people strong users
There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong, and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them, too.
communication slack switching
There are a lot of things that Slack gives you that email doesn't when you think about internal use. Switching to Slack from email for internal communication gives you a lot more transparency.
drive early knew looked mind paid particular people slack teams trying understand users using
You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first. In our case, we knew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we looked at our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.
bit cut email emails good outside paste quite sending share slack
We'd never make Slack an email client, but it's good to support sending emails into it. There's quite a bit of formatting you can do. When I get an email from the outside world that I want to share with team, I cut and paste it into Slack. But really, I should be able to import that email as an object.
opportunity people marketing
Every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. If you go above and beyond on the customer service side, people are much more likely to recommend you.
needs outcomes more-money
I'm going to make more money than I need in any outcome.
attitude
Have an 'experimental attitude'
keys fixed users
When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it - immediately.
expression empathy courtesy
The outward expression of empathy is courtesy.
cost imagine selling
It’s hard to imagine the revenue from selling the prints will cover the cost of lost goodwill.
almost built chat four san split technology tiny worked yahoo
When we first started Glitch, there were four co-founders of the company. We built Flickr and worked together at Yahoo and then started Tiny Speck. We were split in Vancouver, New York, and San Francisco. So we used an old chat technology called IRC. Almost nothing went through email.