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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
data early open related
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.
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.
breath breathe clear couple floor head music playing wonder
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.
basically battle bigger company disaster extremely learned looks money vice yahoo
From the outside, Yahoo was extremely successful. It was making money; it was still bigger than Google. But when I got there, I learned what a disaster of a company looks like from the inside. There were a lot of vice presidents, and it was basically a turf battle between them.
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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.
designed meant partly people post site
Flickr was designed partly to market itself. There are a lot features, in place early on, that let people take their photo, upload it to Flickr and post them elsewhere, on their own Web site or their blog, which meant a lot of incoming links.
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Email is the lowest common denominator. It's the way you get communications from one person to another. There isn't really an alternative. Sometimes people will have Facebook messenger turned on, but 99 percent of the time, if you're sending a message to a human you don't know well, you're using email.
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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.
almost designed job shared windows work
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.
ended good job
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.