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 I no longer file expense reports, so I no longer experience the pain of it. What if everyone had a virtual assistant to do that kind of effort... like approving time off or submitting time-off requests? We want to really encourage developers to create cool things for Slack. Stewart Butterfield cool experience pain time I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them. Stewart Butterfield parents how rebel difficult 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. Stewart Butterfield nothing new technology together 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. Stewart Butterfield you age water life Email is the lowest common denominator. It's the way you get communications from one person to another. There isn't really an alternative. Sometimes people will have Facebook messenger turned on, but 99 percent of the time, if you're sending a message to a human you don't know well, you're using email. Stewart Butterfield you time sometimes people About 80 percent of the photos on Flickr are public and searchable by everyone. In one sense, it's a place where people upload snapshots from the family reunion, wedding or the birth of a baby or something like that, but it's also a place where people go to show what the world looks like to them. Stewart Butterfield wedding family people world There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong, and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them, too. Stewart Butterfield experience community strong people The scale of revenue growth is unprecedented. If you look back over history, whether you're looking at the railway robber baron era or the 1920s or the '50s or the '70s, it used to take a long time for a company to get to the point where they had tens of millions of dollars of revenue. It was almost never an overnight phenomenon. Stewart Butterfield you growth time history It's very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy. Stewart Butterfield someone you empathy design We created materials to explain Slack to individuals - what it was for, how it worked, what you're supposed to do - but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team. Stewart Butterfield explain help you team If you work at a 10,000-person company, and you're using e-mail as the primary means of communication, then you probably have access to a couple hundredths of 1 percent of all the communications happening across the company. But if you use Slack, you might have access to 10 or 20 percent. Stewart Butterfield you company communication work 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. Stewart Butterfield open me internet data 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. Stewart Butterfield better job good me 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. Stewart Butterfield lie die me music If email becomes less important, then that whole $ 35, $ 40 billion-a-year collaboration productivity business unit is threatened. Stewart Butterfield
