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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.