Nothing Slack About Stewart Butterfield
Canadian entrepreneur, Stewart Butterfield, is no stranger to dot-com enterprises. In 2000, he successfully built a startup with a uni friend called Gradfinder.com. He definitely didn’t stop there.
He moved on to co-found Ludicorp in 2002 with fellow business-brain Caterina Fake, after initially designing a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game, Game Neverending. In the wake of the game not launching, the versentity created photo-sharing site, Fickr in 2004.
Through the years, Butterfield’s meticulously worked harder and harder in the industry and founded Slack, the cloud-based set of online tools and services, to which he’s now CEO. Slack is an interactive channel for businesses to collaborate with their work. Millions of people use the creative hub to bring together their teams and systems. Slack gets up to 10 million users per day that branch out to 150 countries around the globe. It has a market cap of USD$7.1 billion and Butterfield has an estimated networth of $1.69 billion and counting. There’s certainly nothing slack about that.
Stewart Butterfield Timeline:
1973 Born in Lund, BC, Canada
1996 Finished a B.A. in philosophy from University of Victoria, Canada
1998 Completed a Master of Philosophy from University of Cambridge, UK
2000 Helped to build online community, Gradfinder.com
2002 Co-founded Ludicorp, which went on to start photo-sharing website, Flickr
2005 Ludicorp sold to Yahoo!
2009 Left his role as General Manager of Flickr
2013 Launched instant-messaging tool, Slack
2014 Slack raises $60 million of venture capital and brought in $1.5 million of revenue
2018 Slack valued at $7.1 billion and Butterfield’s networth is estimated to be $1.69 billion
M2 BEST THINGS EVER SAID:
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
Warren Buffett, Entrepreneur
“Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft
“Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they’ll turn out to be right.”
Reed Hastings, Netflix
“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion”
Jack Welch, General Electric
“Anything that is measured and watched, improves.”
Bob Parsons, GoDaddy
“Business leaders cannot be bystanders”
Howard Schultz, Starbucks
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Bill Gates, Microsoft
“Chase the vision, not the money, the money will end up following you.”
Tony Hsieh, Zappos
“The most dangerous poison is the feeling of achievement. The antidote is to every evening think what can be done better tomorrow.”
Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA
“Life is too short to do mediocre work and it is definitely too short to build shitty things.”
Stewart Butterfield, Flickr and Slack
