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

Stewart Butterfield

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" 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

" I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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

" 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

" We'd never make Slack an email client, but it's good to support sending emails into it. There's quite a bit of formatting you can do. When I get an email from the outside world that I want to share with team, I cut and paste it into Slack. But really, I should be able to import that email as an object. "

Stewart Butterfield

" Slack is gratifying to work on in the same way that Flickr was. The mission is to make people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive. "

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

" People tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change. In the short-term, it's not going to make that much of a difference. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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

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

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

" The social use of Slack does drive awareness - it's a good thing for us. "

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

" 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

" The element of teamwork is perhaps underappreciated. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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

" There's a lot of automation that can happen that isn't a replacement of humans but of mind-numbing behavior. "

Stewart Butterfield

" I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them. "

Stewart Butterfield

" You can take a team of absolute all-stars in terms of their native abilities, but if they are not working together, they are much less effective than a team where there is less native ability but a higher degree of teamwork and cohesion. "

Stewart Butterfield

Working Together

" 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. "

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 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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. "

Stewart Butterfield

" There are a lot of things that Slack gives you that email doesn't when you think about internal use. Switching to Slack from email for internal communication gives you a lot more transparency. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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