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All Quotes by author - 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. "
Baby
World
Wedding
" A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently. "
Slack
Different
Use
" All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world. "
Which
Team
Doing
" A lot of companies lock up for a few weeks once a year for performance reviews. But there's a way to collect feedback in real time from Slack so that by the end of the year, you've already stored up all of this information. "
Information
Performance
Time
" Anything we can do that lets people find information more quickly is something we're interested in. "
Lets
Information
More
" 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. "
Windows
Work
Job
" 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. "
Virtue
Like
Everyone
" 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. "
Know
You
Way
" Email will probably be around for many decades to come. It's hard to say what will happen 20 years from now, but email has been around for decades, and it will likely be around for decades more. "
Hard
Will
Say
" 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. "
Place
People
Own
" For most companies, the hard thing is making the product work well enough to convince a single person at a time to switch to it. "
Time
Product
Person
" 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. "
Water
My Life
Life
" 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. "
Making Money
Money
Battle
" Hard numbers tell an important story; user stats and sales numbers will always be key metrics. But every day, your users are sharing a huge amount of qualitative data, too - and a lot of companies either don't know how or forget to act on it. "
Important
Key
Data
" I almost never go to news sites - it's overwhelming how much content is out there. But I will pay attention to what my friends are picking up and sharing. "
News
Never
Sharing
" I can tell people a story that they believe in and get behind. So I'm good at the leadership part. But I've always said that I'm a terrible manager. I'm not good at giving feedback. "
People
Believe
Good
" I don't think it ever occurred to me that I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. My dad became a real estate developer, and that work is usually project-based. You attract investors for a project with a certain life cycle, and then you move on to the next thing. It's almost like being a serial entrepreneur, so I had that as an example. "
Real Estate
Think
Work
" I feel like the business side came more naturally to me along with the product design side, but managing and effectively leading large organizations of people is something that is perpetually challenging and the topic on which I am constantly looking for good advice. "
I Am
People
Looking
" If one engineer at a startup tries Slack and says, 'I hate it. I am not going to use this,' that's it for us. We won't get evaluated. "
Hate
Going
Get
" If you're not hiring from some groups of the population, then you're obviously missing out. "
You
Hiring
Out
" If your job requires that you spend a lot of time communicating with people across organizational boundaries, email is perfect. Email is the lowest common denominator, and it's going to cross organizational boundaries really well. "
Job
You
Going
" If you work at a 10,000-person company, and you're using e-mail as the primary means of communication, then you probably have access to a couple hundredths of 1 percent of all the communications happening across the company. But if you use Slack, you might have access to 10 or 20 percent. "
Communication
Then
Work
" I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them. "
Difficult
Out
Parents
" 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. "
Die
Lie
Exercise
" 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. "
Forget
Year
People
" 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. "
Home
New York
New
" I'm going to end up with a lot more money than I feel like I'm entitled to, given how hard I work. "
Feel
Money
More
" I no longer file expense reports, so I no longer experience the pain of it. What if everyone had a virtual assistant to do that kind of effort... like approving time off or submitting time-off requests? We want to really encourage developers to create cool things for Slack. "
Effort
Time
Pain
" 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. "
Everyone
Technology
You
" Inside all the computers of any large corporation is every decision that gets made. But people spend a huge amount of time trying to find the correct piece of information. "
Decision
Find
People
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