Stewart Butterfield

“The useful part of Microsoft was that everything worked together.”

“Inside all the computers of any large corporation is every decision that gets made. But people spend a huge amount of time trying to find the correct piece of information.”

“People tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change. In the short-term, it's not going to make that much of a difference.”

“There's a lot of automation that can happen that isn't a replacement of humans but of mind-numbing behavior.”

“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. There are a lot of things that Slack gives you that email doesn't when you think about internal use.”

“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.”

“I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.”

“I feel like the business side came more naturally to me along with the product design side, but managing and effectively leading large organizations of people is something that is perpetually challenging and the topic on which I am constantly looking for good advice.”

“Those moments of play that we do get in meta-life, like playing music, or golf, or word-play, or flirting - those are some of the best parts about being alive.”

“A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently.”

“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.”

“I think tech lives inside of a society that still has a lot of systemic racism and doesn't stop at the boundaries of the tech industry. But neither is it especially exacerbated by being around technology. But it is maybe exacerbated by the irrational decision making of people who are trying to make money.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If one engineer at a startup tries Slack and says, 'I hate it. I am not going to use this,' that's it for us. We won't get evaluated.”

“People think I'm smart because Flickr was successful. I'm lucky. Maybe I'm smart, too. But, I'm lucky.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Internally, we sometimes say Slack is like a nervous system, connective tissue, or the internal network.”

“The most productive employees, from my experience, are those who go home at 5:30 P.M. but are hyperfocused at work. People can only think really hard for six to eight hours a day.”