A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently. – Stewart Butterfield
I have a couple of things I do to clear my head when I need it. The first is exercise, the kind of exercise that makes me lie on the floor afterward gasping for breath and wonder if I’m actually going to be able to breathe enough to not die. The other one is playing music. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn’t add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo. – Stewart Butterfield
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that there has got to be a reason for what you’re doing. You actually have to care about what you’re doing. The business has to be about something. Whatever the point of it is does not have to be inconsistent with making money, but usually if that’s the sole reason, it is not very successful. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
I love cities. New York, Montreal, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, L.A… but, I do choose to live in Vancouver. It’s home. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
I think there’s a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that’s music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative – they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
I related to the whole hippie, acid-test confluence of the early Internet. The idea that we should be open and interoperate with our data resonated with me. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
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. There are a lot of things that Slack gives you that email doesn’t when you think about internal use. – Stewart Butterfield
All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we’re doing, which is to be the eyes of the world. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
In Slack, you create channels to discuss different topics. For a small group of people, those channels are relatively easy to manage and navigate. – Stewart Butterfield
What motivates me is just to do a really, really good job at something. If I were a better musician, I probably would’ve ended up as one. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
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. – Stewart Butterfield
