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" I think email's going to be around for, like, another 10,000 years. It's a great way to cross organizational boundaries. "
Stewart Butterfield
Think
Great
Boundaries
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" I was pretty entrepreneurial as a kid. I had a lemonade stand. When I was 12, I arbitraged the price of 7-Eleven hot dogs; I'd buy the ones that are pre-wrapped with the bun and then sell them on the beach. "
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" We created materials to explain Slack to individuals - what it was for, how it worked, what you're supposed to do - but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team. "
Stewart Butterfield
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" Slack is actually a technical term in product management that means the excess capacity the system has to absorb any failures or to take on new work. That's something that was really on our minds when we came up with it. "
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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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" 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
Community
People
Strong
" 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
Everyone
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You
" 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 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
Real Estate
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Work
" 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. "
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Music
Play
Golf
" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
Hate
Going
Get
" There are two big benefits from moving conversations from a mode where you're addressing individuals, or groups of individuals, to addressing a channel which is a topic, a project, a functional discipline, or whatever. "
Stewart Butterfield
Discipline
Moving
You
" 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
New York
Nothing
Technology
" I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them. "
Stewart Butterfield
Difficult
Out
Parents
" We sent our user research team out to sit with customers for periods of time and get some insight into how Slack is working. We also get tens of thousands of points of contact via Twitter and our customer support ticketing system every month and can synthesize those results. "
Stewart Butterfield
Time
Team
Support
" A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently. "
Stewart Butterfield
Slack
Different
Use
" It's very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy. "
Stewart Butterfield
Empathy
You
Design
" Sometimes you will get feedback that is contrary to your vision. You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first. "
Stewart Butterfield
Direction
Vision
Drive
" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
Search
Experience
Know
" 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
Successful
" Internally, we sometimes say Slack is like a nervous system, connective tissue, or the internal network. "
Stewart Butterfield
Sometimes
System
Say
" 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
Virtue
Like
Everyone
" The element of teamwork is perhaps underappreciated. "
Stewart Butterfield
Teamwork
Element
Perhaps
" 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
" 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
" Anything we can do that lets people find information more quickly is something we're interested in. "
Stewart Butterfield
Lets
Information
More
" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
Hard
Will
Say
" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
Effort
Time
Pain
" One of the advantages of something like Slack is that I tap on the app icon, and it's just the people at my company and just the people I work with. There's a strong boundary there which aids in comprehension. It's one less molecule of glucose in my brain to manage it all. "
Stewart Butterfield
Company
Work
Strong
" 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. "
Stewart Butterfield
Know
You
Way
" The social use of Slack does drive awareness - it's a good thing for us. "
Stewart Butterfield
Use
Us
Social