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" People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo. "

Stewart Butterfield

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world. "

Stewart Butterfield

" 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

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

Stewart Butterfield

" In Slack, you create channels to discuss different topics. For a small group of people, those channels are relatively easy to manage and navigate. "

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 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

" It's very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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 think tech lives inside of a society that still has a lot of systemic racism and doesn't stop at the boundaries of the tech industry. But neither is it especially exacerbated by being around technology. But it is maybe exacerbated by the irrational decision making of people who are trying to make money. "

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

" 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. "

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 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

" 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

" 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

" I think of myself more as a designer than a serial entrepreneur. As a designer, the easiest way to see that something happens is to start a company and then be the boss, and then people have to do what you say. "

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

" People think I'm smart because Flickr was successful. I'm lucky. Maybe I'm smart, too. But, I'm lucky. "

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 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

" 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

" 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. "

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