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" 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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" 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

Think

Work

" 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

Early

Open

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Internally, we sometimes say Slack is like a nervous system, connective tissue, or the internal network. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think email's going to be around for, like, another 10,000 years. It's a great way to cross organizational boundaries. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Everyone

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Experience

Know

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently. "