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" 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

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" 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

" The scale of revenue growth is unprecedented. If you look back over history, whether you're looking at the railway robber baron era or the 1920s or the '50s or the '70s, it used to take a long time for a company to get to the point where they had tens of millions of dollars of revenue. It was almost never an overnight phenomenon. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Stewart Butterfield

" If you're not hiring from some groups of the population, then you're obviously missing out. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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

" 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

" Anything we can do that lets people find information more quickly is something we're interested in. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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

" 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. "

Stewart Butterfield

" The useful part of Microsoft was that everything worked together. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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

" 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

" 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

" One advantage that I think Slack has for most people who use it is, you pull out your phone, you look at the home screen, there's the Slack icon. You know when you tap this one, it's all the people you work with, and it's only the people you work with. And that's a big advantage. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Stewart Butterfield

" I'm going to end up with a lot more money than I feel like I'm entitled to, given how hard I work. "

Stewart Butterfield

" I rarely in a working day go more than 10 minutes without looking at Slack. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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

" Silicon Valley is the engine for wealth creation. They've displaced energy, they've displaced financial services, and if we don't start including a broader array of people in that, the same group of people is going to rise to the top. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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