Philosopher Businessman: Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield - Business Person

The “Business Person” heading tells “Megamind” readers about what stories and facts surround the most prominent IT entrepreneurs from all over the world, the value of companies running which exceeds any reasonable limits. We will not be limited only to the “new wave” of businessmen and we will also tell about those who are called the “old school”.

Today, close-up is Stuart Butterfield, the 42-year-old founder and CEO of Slack. Its share in the company is estimated at $ 300 million.
')
Slack Corporate Messenger is still popular. And its popularity continues to grow. At the moment, the application has 675 thousand premium users. The total number of users has reached 2.3 million. Annual revenue exceeded $ 64 million. The company is valued at $ 2.8 billion and recently received another $ 160 million investment.

The success of the project is due to the unusual approach of Butterfield. However, he himself believes that luck was the deciding factor.

Childhood, education, hobbies

Butterfield was born in Lund (Canada, British Columbia) in 1973. His parents were hippies - and until his son was four years old, there was no running water in their house.

When the family moved to the city of Victoria in British Columbia, Stuart Butterfield "founded" his first business - he bought hot dogs in a cafe and sold them on the beach with a surcharge. Then the future entrepreneur was 12 years old.

Butterfield graduated from the universities of Victoria (in 1996) and Cambridge (in 1998), where he studied philosophy.

Flickr

In the summer of 2002, Stuart Butterfield founded Ludicorp along with Catherine Fake and Jason Klasson. Initially, the Flickr service emerged as a tool created for Game Neverending, a massively multiplayer online game, during which players could save images, post them on personal pages on the Internet, and show them to each other. But Flickr turned out to be extremely promising, and the development of Game Neverending was frozen.



The authors of the project Stuart Butterfield and Katerina Fake saw the potential in the social aspect of photography.

In 2005, Flickr was bought by Yahoo! The service improved the design and structure of the site, and the version of site readiness changed from beta to gamma.

As it turned out later, the term “gamma”, which is extremely rarely used in the sphere of developers, means that visitors are actively using the site and according to their wishes it is constantly being improved.

In December 2006, data storage limits were increased and restrictions in the contact list were eliminated. In 2007, the service Yahoo! Photos was eliminated with all the photos, except for those photos that were transferred to Flickr using a special promotion arranged by Yahoo! until liquidation.

Photo service exists to this day. Now the service offers a voucher with a 30% discount on a $ 50 annual subscription, but many will certainly prefer Google Photos, where a similar tool for downloading photos is available for free, writes The Verge.

Tiny speck

In 2009, Butterfield founded the game studio Tiny Speck . The company developed the multiplayer game Glitch . The game did not gain a critical mass of users and was closed. But for team communication inside the studio, a service was used (later called Slack) developed by the company. Its launch was announced in August 2013.

A computer game, meanwhile, is not completely sunk into oblivion. The site of the game is still working. In January 2013, a group of sympathetic enthusiasts decided to restart the Glitch under a different name - Eleven. In December 2014, they started testing the alpha version of the game.

Slack

In 2012, Butterfield found that 70-80% do not use anything for internal communication at work. “But it is obvious that something is definitely used. They just don’t think of it as software, ”the businessman argued.

Often this is email, mailing lists. Some use Hangouts, some use SMS. We saw teams that used Skype, closed Facebook groups or Google+ pages.

“We talked a lot about the three functions in which we will be really good. As a result, Slack was developed around just three such functions (search, synchronization and simple file sharing). This may seem simple, but narrowing the field of view will help manage big problems and incomes in the company, ”he notes.



Despite the company's success, he does not share the general enthusiasm about the project.

In an interview with MIT Technology Review in 2014, Butterfield was honest, perhaps even too much. On the question of whether he wants to change something in Slack, he replied:

"Oh yeah. What is now is a huge piece of shit. I try to impress on the rest of the team. Slack is just awful and we should be ashamed that we show it to our users. Unfortunately, not everyone finds motivation in this. ”

One would have thought that this was said “on emotions”, if not for this post on Twitter dated February 26, 2016 (16 months after the interview).

In a startup area where every entrepreneur calls his product unique, innovative or gorgeous, Butterfield recall sounds unexpected.

Slack was launched in February 2014 and by the time of this interview had 300 thousand users, 73 thousand of whom paid for a premium subscription. The service has already been used by large companies and startups, by 2016 their number has only increased. In two years, Slack has changed significantly for the better - even Butterfield admits. The service is used by such successful companies as Vox Media, Buzzfeed, Airbnb, Adobe, Behance.

Butterfield has extensive entrepreneurial experience. He was “lucky enough” more than once to make a decision on closing a failed project. But on his account there are projects that have soared high. So, his words are hardly dictated by the subconscious fear of failure.

Humanities in IT

One of the key features of Slack is Slackbot, an avatar-assistant, able to give original advice to users and prompt them. One of the 180 Slack employees, 38-year-old Anna Picard, the company's editorial director, is responsible for the creative approach of the bot.

She managed to graduate from the University of Manchester in the direction of "theatrical art", but then became disillusioned with the profession because of the constant humiliation at auditions and castings. Having lived for some time underworking - blogging, scripts for video games and even playing the role of a cat in one of the performances, Picard suddenly found her calling in technology.

She writes funny and original answers to user requests, which often write something like: “I love you, Slackbot”. Her task, explains Anna, is to "surprise and delight."



Who came up with the idea of ​​inviting the failed actress to work in a B2B startup involved in software? Stuart Butterfield, of course. He himself is also a humanist (he holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy at the Canadian University of Victoria and a master's degree in philosophy and the history of science at Cambridge).

“Philosophy taught me two things. First, I learned how important it is to articulate my thoughts clearly. Secondly - how important it is to defend your arguments to the end, it helps a lot in negotiations. And the history of science is also a history of delusions and debunking myths that people can believe in for centuries. ”

"Philosophically" Butterfield approached the development of the company Slack. What came out of it, everyone knows. According to Butterfield, Slack managed to build a bridge between technology and man.

Who else Butterfield takes to work

Previously, the Slack CEO asked the interviewers three questions at the interview:

1. How much is 3 x 17?
2. Name the three countries located in Africa.
3. In what century did the Great French Revolution take place?

For those who have received a humanitarian education, Butterfield notes, these are rather simple questions - however, for some reason, many applicants are not able to correctly answer the second question.
The point of these questions was to see if the candidate is interested in the world around him: “I don’t expect everyone to answer correctly - this is not necessary. The main thing is that I understand that you are inquisitive. "
Now, according to Butterfield, he no longer uses such a system in an interview. Over time, questions have been reduced to the following:

“What would you like to achieve and what to become?”

“The bad answer to this question is the short answer,” said Stuart Butterfield. The founder of Slack would like to hear from a potential employee a detailed story - in which areas he would like to develop, what to do, and so on.
But more and more often, on an interview with candidates for work, Butterfield utters the phrase - "Tell me your story." He wants to know what part of his success the applicant owes to good luck. And, most importantly, how much he appreciates it. Butterfield himself believes that 98% owes its success to luck.

“I knew a lot of people who were not successful, despite their talent, character and other qualities. It's hard for me to think that something is wrong with them, ”says the entrepreneur.

Values ​​and corporate culture

According to Butterfield, the most important thing in the company's corporate culture is empathy. Everyone in the organization should strive to understand his colleague and somehow facilitate his work. If someone from the staff is going to meet with his colleague, he should try to clearly formulate his goal and not waste time on others.

Speaking to college graduates, the founder of Slack gave them the following advice: at a young age (20-25 years old) it is worth experimenting more and not taking things too seriously.

“Everyone wants to think that he has already achieved a lot. In my opinion, you just need to try to understand yourself and feel the world around us. At 25, I did not know anything about life - and even now I don’t know much. ”