Stewart Butterfield

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Stewart Butterfield.

Slack

Stewart Butterfieldis a Canadian entrepreneur who cofounded both Flickr (2004), a photo-sharing site, and Slack Technologies, Inc. (2009), a dot-com enterprise that provided organizations with Slack, an internal-messaging service that facilitated employee collaboration.

Butterfield’s parents, who lived in a commune in a small British Columbia fishing village, named their son Dharma Jeremy Butterfield; when he was 12 years old, he legally changed his name to Daniel Stewart Butterfield. In 1978 the family left communal living and moved to Victoria, the provincial capital. Within a few years they purchased a computer, and Butterfield became immersed in that technology. He earned a B.A. in philosophy (1996) from the University of Victoria and a master’s degree (1998) in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, with an emphasis on philosophy of biology, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind.

In 2000 Butterfield joined his friend Jason Classon’s start-up, Gradfinder.com, and although the dot-com bubble had just burst, the concern was sold for a substantial profit. Two years later Butterfield married blogger Caterina Fake, and together with Classon they founded Ludicorp, which developed a multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. The struggling enterprise was abandoned by Ludicorp in favour of an image-sharing service (developed by Cal Henderson and Eric Costello) that was christened Flickr. The trailblazing photo-sharing site debuted in 2004 and was innovative in helping to usher in the Web 2.0 era, in which interactive applications began to enhance static Web pages. In 2005 Yahoo! purchased Flickr, and Butterfield was hired at Yahoo! as general manager of Flickr and senior director of project management. He and Fake left Yahoo! in 2008, the same year that they dissolved their marriage. In 2009 Butterfield founded Tiny Speck with $1.5 million raised in seed money. The following year the company debuted its first product, Glitch, a quirky online game, but the expensive-to-run game failed to attract a large audience or a buyer and was scrapped in November 2012.

In 2009 Butterfield helped establish Slack Technologies and became its CEO. At the end of 2012, work began on the Slack app, which allowed users to create specific channels devoted to real-time communication. The preview release appeared in August 2013 and was an instant hit. The app remained live until the go-to-market release in February 2014. Businesses involved in the Internet, media, and advertising signed up for subscriptions, and Butterfield attributed the success of Slack to a strategy that made customer feedback the centrepiece of its focus. By 2015 Slack Technologies ranked among the so-called unicorns, privately held start-up companies with a valuation greater than $1 billion. Four years later Butterfield oversaw its becoming a public company. In an unusual move, however, no new stocks were offered, and only existing shares were made available. After the first day of trading, the market value of Slack Technologies was about $19.5 billion. In 2021 the software company Salesforce acquired Slack in a deal that was valued at about $28 billion. As per the terms, Slack continued to exist as an entity, and Butterfield remained its CEO.