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
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.
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.
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.
common facebook human lowest message messenger people sending time turned using
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.
bad common cross email lowest owns particular sounds
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.
worked
The useful part of Microsoft was that everything worked together.
maybe people
People think I'm smart because Flickr was successful. I'm lucky. Maybe I'm smart, too. But, I'm lucky.
acquired add early facebook people photo till
People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.
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.
rarely
I rarely in a working day go more than 10 minutes without looking at Slack.
against figure found hippie
I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them.
people
All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world.