Life is too short to do mediocre work and it is definitely too short to build shitty things. Stewart Butterfield More Quotes by Stewart Butterfield More Quotes From Stewart Butterfield Every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. If you go above and beyond on the customer service side, people are much more likely to recommend you. Stewart Butterfield marketing opportunity people When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it - immediately. Stewart Butterfield users fixed keys We're still at the beginning of a major transition in how people communicate and work together. Stewart Butterfield transition working-together people Some people will know exactly what they want to do at a very young age, but the odds are low. I feel like people in their early- to mid-20s are very earnest. They’re very serious, and they want to feel like they’ve accomplished a lot at a very young age rather than just trying to figure stuff out. So I try to push them toward a more experimental attitude. Stewart Butterfield attitude The outward expression of empathy is courtesy. Stewart Butterfield courtesy empathy expression You have to figure out what conversion means in your case. What does retention mean? What does activation mean? For every business, it's going to be slightly different because of the nature of the product and the kinds of people who use it. Stewart Butterfield doe mean people It’s hard to imagine the revenue from selling the prints will cover the cost of lost goodwill. Stewart Butterfield selling imagine cost I'm going to make more money than I need in any outcome. Stewart Butterfield more-money outcomes needs There's a lot of automation that can happen that isn't a replacement of humans but of mind-numbing behavior. Stewart Butterfield happen lot automation behavior I was born in a little town called Lund in British Columbia. It's like a fishing village. My parents were hippies. They tried to live off the land, so I grew up in a log cabin, and we didn't get running water until I was 4. The next year, we got electricity. Then we moved to the city, Victoria, British Columbia, so I could go to school. Stewart Butterfield city parents village water You can take a team of absolute all-stars in terms of their native abilities, but if they are not working together, they are much less effective than a team where there is less native ability but a higher degree of teamwork and cohesion. Stewart Butterfield you team working-together together I don't think it ever occurred to me that I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. My dad became a real estate developer, and that work is usually project-based. You attract investors for a project with a certain life cycle, and then you move on to the next thing. It's almost like being a serial entrepreneur, so I had that as an example. Stewart Butterfield me you work life 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. Stewart Butterfield you care money business If your job requires that you spend a lot of time communicating with people across organizational boundaries, email is perfect. Email is the lowest common denominator, and it's going to cross organizational boundaries really well. Stewart Butterfield job you time people 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. Stewart Butterfield everyone bad like company Hard numbers tell an important story; user stats and sales numbers will always be key metrics. But every day, your users are sharing a huge amount of qualitative data, too - and a lot of companies either don't know how or forget to act on it. Stewart Butterfield every-day day important forget 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. Stewart Butterfield live new home love Slack is actually a technical term in product management that means the excess capacity the system has to absorb any failures or to take on new work. That's something that was really on our minds when we came up with it. Stewart Butterfield new something management work The element of teamwork is perhaps underappreciated. Stewart Butterfield element perhaps teamwork 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. Stewart Butterfield disaster battle money looks
