Flickr and Slack founder Stewart Butterfield on starting one of the fastest growing startups ever
"I lived in Cambridge in the late 1990s, and even then they were working on Silicon Fen,â says Stewart Butterfield. Weâre talking about replicating Silicon Valley because, as the founder of Flickr and now team collaboration tool Slack, heâs well placed to comment. And itâs not that heâs picking on Cambridge; the point is that centrally planning a replica tech hub would be near-on impossible anywhere.
âThere are some things you can do, but it is a little bit hopeless. When Flickr was acquired by Yahoo, the people that were sitting adjacent to me were Jeff Weiner, now CEO of LinkedIn, and Bradley Horowitz, whoâs senior VP at Google. There was the CEO of Groupon, several big-name VCs... the point is that it wasnât like Yahoo at that time was anything special. Itâs just that, if you worked at Ebay, PayPal, Facebook, Apple, all your peers went on to work at or start other companies, and then other companies. The network is incredibly dense. If you want to do interbank finance, you come to London. Media company? New York. And Los Angeles if you want to make movies. Thatâs just how it works.â
Butterfield himself is a Canadian; his chief technology officer is a Brit. âThatâs the great thing about the Valley: anyone can go â but you do have to go there.â
And Butterfield probably understands how things can just spring up unplanned better than most too. Twice in his life, heâs accidentally built an enormously successful business. In 2004, Flickr was born. But Butterfield hadnât actually intended to create the photo-sharing platform; he and his co-founders had set out to make a game called Game Neverending â Flickr was just created using a few features from it. And then, the same thing happened again. Having sold Flickr, Butterfield secured investment â ÂŁ17.5m â to build a new game, Glitch. Years of trying ended in failure, and the team were left with ÂŁ5m. But along the way, theyâd managed to build something: a real-time messaging and searchable archiving system for workplaces.
Slack works across all devices, meaning that, at any given moment, an employee can access messages, shared documents, videos and historic material from their phone, tablet or desktop. It is compatible with numerous applications â from Dropbox to MailChimp. It doesnât work with email, but businesses using it report a 50 per cent reduction in email use among employees. In two years, Slackâs staff numbers have grown from eight to 300, and 2m people use it every day. The company now has a valuation of $2.8bn.
Its clients range from a dentist in South Shields to the Wall Street Journal, Paypal, Adobe, Salesforce, Ocado and Airbnb. Slack couldâve predicted that Republican Scott Walker was going to pull out of the presidential campaign because his team stopped using it the day before. âFor most of the time, weâve just been trying to keep up with the growth. For 17 weeks, we were growing at 5 per cent a week. Itâs actually really difficult to keep up with that. While trying to make sure our customers are okay, weâre hiring new people all the time. Every new person needs to be trained and that means someone elseâs time. Weâre having to keep pace while also being the cause of future growth.â
Vision present and future
But maintaining a vision is something Slack and Butterfield seem rather good at. âWhen we were just 50 employees, we tried to be deliberate about the kind of workplace we wanted. Our engineering chief of staff wrote a whole essay on what we look for, and we published it.â As staff numbers grew, âcore valuesâ became important. Slack now has six â empathy, courtesy, craftsmanship, playfulness, thriving and solidarity â but Butterfield is keen to not be too âCalifornian about itâ. âWhen new people come in, I do a CEO welcome. After going through security practices and so on, I joke, âweâve just had a management offsite meeting to talk about corporate valuesâ. That always gets a chuckle.â
But jesting aside, Butterfield is growing a tech firm at a time when tech âis becoming more and more fashionableâ. This isnât because of vast investment inflows or founder splashes across Vanity Fair, though â itâs because âpeople are appreciating how much of an impact tech has had on the regular personâs life.â Indeed, applications like Tinder and SnapChat act âas a proxyâ for this awareness. âFifteen years ago, if you used an online dating site, it was definitely perceived as an act of desperation â you know, no-one would admit to doing it. Whereas now, itâs perfectly socially acceptable â âwe met onlineâ. Pakistani Chat rooms were the same: seen as deviant. But messaging and photo messaging are mainstream applications. In fact, it now has an obvious and very powerful hold over people.â
Our addiction to technology is something Butterfield refers to as âalmost a reverse function of intimacyâ â the fact youâll sit at a meal with those you know best and be on your phone. Yet itâs easy to see how an application like Slack, despite seeming like âmore technologyâ, will make life an awful lot easier â and less technologically intensive â because you can see everything thatâs going on all in one place.
And this is important to Butterfield, who is naturally slightly reticent around our always-on world. âItâs like cheap, easy calories. We donât really know, as a species, how to deal with it, and itâll take a couple of generations to work it out. In the meantime, thereâll be a cognitive and emotional form of diabetes people go through.â But this isnât solely negative. Butterfield likens it to âgoing from a state of being where people frequently starve to death and worry about their children doing so, to being in a position where they donât have to worry. Itâs the tech equivalent of knowing we have to deal with Burger King and KFC, but no-one will ever die of hunger again.â
Slack, he says, is âan iteration. Thirty years ago, the first businesses started switching to electronic mail. This isnât going to terminate at Slack; itâs a multi-hundred-year arch. This is just the next step of us, as a species, figuring something out.â
via source:http://www.cityam.com/231455/flickr-and-slack-founder-stewart-butterfield-on-starting-one-of-the-fastest-growing-startups-ever