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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. "

Stewart Butterfield

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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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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