Stewart Butterfield

Daniel Stewart Butterfield (born Dharma Jeremy Butterfield;[2] March 21, 1973[3]) is a Canadian billionaire businessman, best known for co-founding the photo-sharing website Flickr and the team-messaging application Slack.

Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield in 2017
Born
Dharma Jeremy Butterfield

(1973-03-21) March 21, 1973
Lund, British Columbia, Canada
Alma materUniversity of Victoria (1996)
Clare College, Cambridge (1998)
OccupationEntrepreneur and businessman
Known forCo-founder of Flickr
Founder and CEO of Slack
Net worthUS$1.3 billion (June 2019)[1]
TitleCEO of Slack Technologies, Inc.
Spouse(s)
​
​
(m. 2001; div. 2007)​
Children1 daughter

Early life and education

In 1973, Butterfield was born in Lund, British Columbia, to Norma and David Butterfield.[4] For the first five years of his life he grew up in a log cabin without running water or electricity. His family lived on a commune in remote Canada after his father fled the US to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War.[5][6] His family moved to Victoria when Butterfield was five years old.[6] As a child, Butterfield taught himself how to code, and changed his name to Stewart when he was 12.[7]

Butterfield was educated at St. Michaels University School in Victoria, British Columbia and made money in university designing websites.[6] He received a B.A. degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria in 1996 and went on to earn a Master of Philosophy from Clare College, Cambridge in 1998.[8]

Career

In 2000, Butterfield worked with Jason Classon to build a startup called Gradfinder.com.[6][9] Following Gradfinder.com's acquisition, he worked as a freelance web designer. Butterfield also created a contest called the 5K competition, centered around people with the ability to design websites under 5 kilobytes.[6]

Ludicorp and Flickr

In the summer of 2002, he co-founded Ludicorp with Caterina Fake and Jason Classon in Vancouver.[8] Ludicorp initially developed a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Game Neverending. After the game failed to launch, the company started a photo-sharing website called Flickr. In March 2005, Ludicorp was acquired by Yahoo!, where Butterfield continued as the General Manager of Flickr until he left Yahoo! on July 12, 2008.[10][2]

Tiny Speck

In 2009, Butterfield co-founded a new company called Tiny Speck.[11] Tiny Speck launched its first project, the massively multiplayer game Glitch, on September 27, 2011.[12] Glitch was later closed due to its failure to attract a sufficiently large audience. The game world closed down on December 9, 2012, but the website remained online.[13][14] In January 2013, the company announced that it would make the most of the game's art available under a Creative Commons license.[15] On December 9, 2014, a fan project to relaunch Glitch under the name Eleven began alpha testing.[16]

Slack
Main article: Slack (software)

In August 2013, Butterfield announced the release of Slack, an instant-message-based team communication tool, built by Tiny Speck while working on Glitch.[17][18] After its public release in February 2014, the tool grew at a weekly rate of 5 to 10 percent, with more than 120,000 daily users registered in the first week of August. In early 2014, the data for Slack's first six-month usage period showed that nearly 16,000 users were registered without any advertising.[19][20]

That same year, Butterfield secured an office for Slack employees in San Francisco, and was expected to commence recruitment during the second half of the year.[19]

As of December 2015, Slack had raised US$340 million in venture capital and had more than 2 million daily active users, of which 570,000 were paid customers.[21]

Slack was named Inc. Magazine’s 2015 company of the year.[22]

In June 2019, the company announced its initial public offering with an opening price of $38.50 and a market capitalization of US$21.4 billion.[23][24]

In December 2020, Salesforce confirmed plans to buy Slack for US$27.7 billion.[25]

Awards and honors

In 2005, Butterfield was named one of Businessweek's "Top 50" Leaders[26] in the entrepreneur category. In the same year, he was also named in the TR35, a list collated by MIT in its MIT Technology Review publication, as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35 years.[27][28] In 2006, he was named in the "Time 100", Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world,[29] and also appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine.[30][31]

In November 2008, Butterfield received the "Legacy Distinguished Alumni Award" from the University of Victoria.[32]

In 2015, Stewart was named the Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovator for 2015,[33] awarded TechCrunch’s Founder of the Year Crunchie,[34] and included in Vanity Fair’s New Establishment,[35] Advertising Age’s Creative 50,[36] and Details’ Digital Mavericks lists.[37]

In May 2017, he featured in Masters of Scale, a podcast series by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin, along with other successful businesspeople such as Mark Zuckerberg, John Elkann, and Brian Chesky. In it, he discussed the scaling strategy adopted by Slack.[38]

Personal life

Butterfield was married to Caterina Fake, his Flickr co-founder, from 2001[39] to 2007.[40] They have one daughter together, who was born in 2007.[41] In May 2019 he became engaged to Jennifer Rubio, co-founder of Away Luggage.[42]

References
  1. Metcalf, Tom (June 19, 2019). "Slack's Chairman Was Raised in a Log Cabin. Now He's Worth $1.3 Billion". Fortune. Retrieved 19 May 2020.
  2. Honan, Mat (August 7, 2014). "The Most Fascinating Profile You'll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup". Wired. Retrieved September 3, 2016.
  3. Neil Kandalgaonkar [@NeilKNet] (2016-03-21). "@stewart Happy birthday. Please keep being yourself as long as you like!" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  4. Kosoff, Maya (2 September 2015). "14 Surprising Facts About Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield". inc.com. Retrieved 19 February 2016.
  5. "The $5bn tech boss who grew up without electricity". Daniel Thomas. BBC News. 25 June 2018. Retrieved 27 June 2018.
  6. Kosoff, Maya (September 1, 2015). "The amazing life of Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of one of the fastest-growing business apps ever". Business Insider. Retrieved April 18, 2017.
  7. Schrodt, Paul (February 7, 2019). "The Man Behind Silicon Valley's Next Big IPO Grew Up on a Commune Without Running Water or Electricity". Money.com. Retrieved April 3, 2019.
  8. Kosoff, Maya (2015-09-02). "14 Surprising Facts About Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield". Inc.com. Retrieved 2020-01-23.
  9. Livingston, Jessica (2009). Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. Apress. p. 257. ISBN 1430210788.
  10. Arrington, Michael (June 17, 2008). "Flickr Co-founders Join Mass Exodus From Yahoo". TechCrunch.
  11. Swisher, Kara (August 23, 2010). "Flickr Co-Founder Butterfield Talks About His New Game Start-Up, Glitch". AllThingsD. Retrieved September 17, 2010.
  12. "Stewart Butterfield: The big pivot". WaitWhat. Retrieved 2018-03-20.
  13. Boyd, E.B. (September 27, 2011). "A Flickr Founder's Glitch: Can A Game That Wants You To Play Nice Be A Blockbuster?". Fast Company. Retrieved September 30, 2011.
  14. "Vancouver's Tiny Speck puts massively multiplayer game Glitch online". Vancouver Sun. September 27, 2011. Retrieved September 30, 2011.
  15. Gera, Emily (January 24, 2013). "Glitch developer shares assets under Creative Commons license following closure of game". Polygon. Retrieved March 4, 2013.
  16. "'Two Years Past' or 'Welcome Home'". The Eleven Project. Retrieved 11 January 2015.
  17. Tam, Donna (August 14, 2013). "Flickr founder plans to kill company e-mails with Slack". CNET. Retrieved November 26, 2013.
  18. Thomas, Owen (August 14, 2013). "Die, Email, Die! A Flickr Cofounder Aims To Cut Us All Some Slack". ReadWrite. Retrieved November 26, 2013.
  19. Mat Honan (7 July 2014). "The Most Fascinating Profile You'll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup". Wired. Condé Nast. Retrieved August 10, 2014.
  20. "Slack vs. Email: The Case for RTC for Enterprise IT". IT Pro. 2019-03-31. Retrieved 2020-01-30.
  21. Gage, Deborah (December 15, 2015). "Slack Raises $80 Million Fund to Support Platform Strategy". Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  22. Bercovici, Jeff (November 23, 2015). "Slack Is Our Company of the Year. Here's Why Everybody's Talking About It". Inc. Magazine. Inc.com. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  23. "What's Next for Slack Now That It's Public". Fortune. Retrieved 2019-08-29.
  24. Griffith, Erin (2019-06-20). "Slack Stock Soars, Putting Company's Public Value at $19.5 Billion". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-01-30.
  25. Tilley, Aaron (2020-12-02). "Salesforce Confirms Deal to Buy Slack for $27.7 Billion". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2020-12-02.
  26. "2005 Top Leaders: Entrepreneurs". Businessweek. 2005.
  27. "2005 Young Innovators Under 35". Technology Review. 2005. Retrieved August 15, 2011.
  28. "TR35 2005". Technology Review. 2005.
  29. "2006 Time 100". Time. 2006. Archived from the original on May 2, 2006.
  30. "Flickr on the cover of Newsweek". Niall Kennedy. March 27, 2006.
  31. Levy, Steven (April 2, 2006). "The New Wisdom of the Web". Newsweek.
  32. "Flickr co-founder makes it big with an arts degree". Times Colonist. November 26, 2008. Alt URL
  33. Stevenson, Seth (November 5, 2015). "Stewart Butterfield, Email Killer". Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  34. Kumparak, Greg (February 5, 2015). "Slack's Co-Founders Take Home The Crunchie For Founder Of The Year". TechCrunch. TechCrunch. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  35. Bilton, Nick (September 30, 2015). "New Establishment List 2015". Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  36. Peterson, Tim (December 21, 2015). "Creativity 50 2015: Stewart Butterfield". Advertising Age. Advertising Age. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  37. Angio, Joe (April 7, 2015). "Digital Mavericks 2015". Details Magazine. Details Magazine. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  38. "Master of Scale - Stewart Butterfield".
  39. Chatterjee, Pia (September 12, 2007). "Love, e-company style". Business 2.0 Magazine. CNN Money.
  40. Leonard, Devin (July 28, 2010). "What You Want: Flickr Creator Spins Addictive New Web Service". Wired. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
  41. Thomas, Owen (July 12, 2007). "Silicon Valley's baby boom". Gawker.
  42. Perino, Marissa. "Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield is newly engaged to a woman who runs a $1.4 billion startup. Inside the relationship of Silicon Valley's newest 'it' power couple". Business Insider.

Further reading
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