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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. "

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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

Hate

Going

Get

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It's easy to hire too fast and have chaos and disorganization and insufficient management. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Feel

Money

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Job

Better

" The element of teamwork is perhaps underappreciated. "

" We sent our user research team out to sit with customers for periods of time and get some insight into how Slack is working. We also get tens of thousands of points of contact via Twitter and our customer support ticketing system every month and can synthesize those results. "