We'd never make Slack an email client, but it's good to support sending emails into it. There's quite a bit of formatting you can do. When I get an email from the outside world that I want to share with team, I cut and paste it into Slack. But really, I should be able to import that email as an object.
— Stewart Butterfield
People think I'm smart because Flickr was successful. I'm lucky. Maybe I'm smart, too. But, I'm lucky.
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.
People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.
A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently.
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.
I learned so much in the year after Flickr was acquired. People forget, but Flickr launched in February 2004. And a year later, the deal was done with Yahoo, and we closed it in March of 2005. It was really independent for a relatively short period of time.
Email has the virtue - sounds like a bad thing, but it's the virtue of being the lowest common denominator messaging protocol. Everyone can have it. It can cross organizational boundaries. No one owns it. It's not some particular company's platform.
I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them.
One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that there has got to be a reason for what you're doing. You actually have to care about what you're doing. The business has to be about something. Whatever the point of it is does not have to be inconsistent with making money, but usually if that's the sole reason, it is not very successful.
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 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.
There's a lot that's wrong with the way we work - bad habits that develop around control of information, people hoarding information as a means of preserving their own power. When you're using Slack, everyone can see what's going on because the default mode is public.
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.
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.
In Slack, you create channels to discuss different topics. For a small group of people, those channels are relatively easy to manage and navigate.
There are a lot of things that Slack gives you that email doesn't when you think about internal use. Switching to Slack from email for internal communication gives you a lot more transparency.
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.
I related to the whole hippie, acid-test confluence of the early Internet. The idea that we should be open and interoperate with our data resonated with me.
One of the advantages of something like Slack is that I tap on the app icon, and it's just the people at my company and just the people I work with. There's a strong boundary there which aids in comprehension. It's one less molecule of glucose in my brain to manage it all.
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.
For the first five years of my life, I grew up in a log cabin in coastal British Columbia in a very small town, like 300 people, mostly hippies. No running water, no electricity. When I was 12, I changed my name from Dharma to Stewart. At that age, you just want to be normal.
All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world.
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.
You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first. In our case, we knew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we looked at our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.
Inside a company, you can mandate that everyone use the same technology, which means you can go a little bit, I don't know, higher fidelity than the lowest common denominator technology.
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.
It's easy to hire too fast and have chaos and disorganization and insufficient management.
