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" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
Time
Product
Person
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" 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. "
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" If you're not hiring from some groups of the population, then you're obviously missing out. "
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" There's a lot of automation that can happen that isn't a replacement of humans but of mind-numbing behavior. "
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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. "
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" 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. "
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" Anything we can do that lets people find information more quickly is something we're interested in. "
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" I see all kinds of people work hard all over the world, and some of them are barely making it. I don't just mean subsistence farmers. I mean people in the developed world who work multiple jobs, and because the cost of health care and child care eats up almost all of the living they make. "
Stewart Butterfield
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" The most productive employees, from my experience, are those who go home at 5:30 P.M. but are hyperfocused at work. People can only think really hard for six to eight hours a day. "
Stewart Butterfield
People
Work
Home
" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
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" 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. "
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Love
Employees
" A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently. "
Stewart Butterfield
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Different
Use
" I was born in a little town called Lund in British Columbia. It's like a fishing village. My parents were hippies. They tried to live off the land, so I grew up in a log cabin, and we didn't get running water until I was 4. The next year, we got electricity. Then we moved to the city, Victoria, British Columbia, so I could go to school. "
Stewart Butterfield
Parents
School
Live
" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
News
Never
Sharing
" I remember working with a guy named Andrew Braccia at Yahoo, and Yahoo was the company that bought Flickr. Everyone on his team was hard working and reliable, did what they said they were going to do, on top of everything, and seemed to be operating at this level of productivity and effectiveness that I found difficult to manage to. "
Stewart Butterfield
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" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
Information
Performance
Time
" 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
Forget
Year
People
" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
People
Believe
Good
" 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
College
Employees
Quality
" 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
You
Mind
Drive
" 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
Music
Play
Golf
" People think I'm smart because Flickr was successful. I'm lucky. Maybe I'm smart, too. But, I'm lucky. "
Stewart Butterfield
Smart
Think
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" 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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Control
Bad
Work
" 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
Money
You
Business
" People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo. "
Stewart Butterfield
People
Forget
Early
" 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
Early
Open
Me
" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
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" 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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Own
" It's very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy. "
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Empathy
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Design
" The experience of being able to search back over all your team's communications for, in our case, millions of messages, is super-valuable. But you don't know what that's like until you actually have it. "
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" 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
Die
Lie
Exercise