Stewart Butterfield Quotes

Powerful Stewart Butterfield for Daily Growth

About Stewart Butterfield

Stewart Butterfield, born on May 6, 1971, in Saskatchewan, Canada, is a renowned entrepreneur and inventor best known for co-founding Flickr and Slack, two revolutionary platforms that have shaped the digital landscape significantly. Butterfield's early life was marked by a strong interest in computing and technology. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Victoria in British Columbia before moving to Cambridge, England, to study Computer Science at Clare College, University of Cambridge. His academic journey culminated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. In 2004, Butterfield co-founded Flickr, an online image and video hosting platform, later acquired by Yahoo! It became one of the first successful social networking sites, offering users a platform to share and manage photos. In 2013, he co-founded Slack, a cloud-based set of collaboration tools and services for teams, which has since become a staple in modern work environments. Butterfield's influence extends beyond his entrepreneurial ventures. He is known for his humble leadership style, emphasizing learning, innovation, and adaptability. His journey serves as an inspiration to many aspiring entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts. Today, Butterfield continues to shape the digital world with Slack, driving collaboration and communication in the modern workplace. His life story is a testament to the power of innovation, resilience, and the pursuit of solving real-world problems through technology.

Interpretations of Popular Quotes

"A big part of success is just showing up."

The quote emphasizes that a significant factor in achieving success is consistency and persistence, as demonstrated by simply "showing up" - consistently putting in effort, being present, and giving one's best even when not everything seems to be going according to plan. This mindset encourages people to remain dedicated, even during challenging times, ultimately increasing the chances of finding opportunities that can lead to success.

"If you want to create something, it's really important to not know too much about the domain in which you're operating."

Stewart Butterfield's quote emphasizes that ignorance, or limited knowledge, can sometimes be beneficial when creating something new. By not knowing too much about a specific domain, one avoids being confined by existing conventions, assumptions, and limitations. Instead, they approach the problem from a fresh perspective, which can foster innovation and originality in their work. This quote suggests that ignorance or limited knowledge can sometimes be a powerful catalyst for creativity and progress.

"The most significant challenges often come from within an organization, not from the outside."

This quote emphasizes that some of the most formidable obstacles a company or organization may face can originate internally rather than externally. It suggests that internal conflicts, misunderstandings, or inefficiencies can pose significant challenges to an organization's success, often requiring more attention and resolution than external threats.

"We have three options: make the best of a bad situation, make that bad situation better, or change it."

The quote highlights the personal agency we possess in dealing with challenging circumstances. It suggests that we can either choose to adapt ourselves to a less-than-ideal situation (make the best of it), strive to improve the current state (make it better), or instigate change if needed. In essence, it emphasizes the importance of proactivity and resilience in overcoming obstacles and moving forward in life.

"Everyone has ideas; the key is to find out which ones matter and remember that most things can be made simpler."

This quote by Stewart Butterfield emphasizes the importance of discerning valuable ideas from less significant ones, while also highlighting the power of simplicity in execution. It suggests that everyone has a multitude of thoughts and concepts, but it is essential to identify the ideas that truly matter. Furthermore, he implies that often, things can be made more effective by stripping them down to their essence, making them simpler. This mindset can lead to efficiency, clarity, and impact in one's work or projects.

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, Numbers, Tell, Data

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

Love, New, Cities, London

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

My Life, Small, Very, Log

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, Year, Next, Log

I was pretty entrepreneurial as a kid. I had a lemonade stand. When I was 12, I arbitraged the price of 7-Eleven hot dogs; I'd buy the ones that are pre-wrapped with the bun and then sell them on the beach.

- Stewart Butterfield

Kid, Buy, 7-Eleven, Hot Dogs

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

Sometimes, Another, Turned, Messenger

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

Team, Degree, Less, Native

I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them.

- Stewart Butterfield

How, Found, Figure, Hippie

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

Data, Idea, Confluence, Hippie

I see all kinds of people work hard all over the world, and some of them are barely making it. I don't just mean subsistence farmers. I mean people in the developed world who work multiple jobs, and because the cost of health care and child care eats up almost all of the living they make.

- Stewart Butterfield

Some, I See, Almost, Subsistence

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

Through, Francisco, Almost, Vancouver

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Work, More, Lives, Simpler

Silicon Valley is the engine for wealth creation. They've displaced energy, they've displaced financial services, and if we don't start including a broader array of people in that, the same group of people is going to rise to the top.

- Stewart Butterfield

Wealth, Going, Including, Displaced

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

Cut, Paste, Import, Object

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

Inside, Turf, Presidents, Yahoo

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Perception, College, Other, Signal

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

Access, Use, Couple, Primary

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Deep, Some, I Think, Impulse

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

Bad, Some, Platform, Protocol

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Which, Means, Mandate, Common Denominator

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

Perfect, Organizational, Common Denominator

In Slack, you create channels to discuss different topics. For a small group of people, those channels are relatively easy to manage and navigate.

- Stewart Butterfield

Small, Navigate, Topics, Manage

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Strong, Icon, Boundary, Manage

I remember working with a guy named Andrew Braccia at Yahoo, and Yahoo was the company that bought Flickr. Everyone on his team was hard working and reliable, did what they said they were going to do, on top of everything, and seemed to be operating at this level of productivity and effectiveness that I found difficult to manage to.

- Stewart Butterfield

I Remember, Guy, Named, Manage

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

1920s, Tens, Almost, Railway

A lot of companies lock up for a few weeks once a year for performance reviews. But there's a way to collect feedback in real time from Slack so that by the end of the year, you've already stored up all of this information.

- Stewart Butterfield

Year, Weeks, Real Time, Stored

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Going, Use, Tries, Startup

Email will probably be around for many decades to come. It's hard to say what will happen 20 years from now, but email has been around for decades, and it will likely be around for decades more.

- Stewart Butterfield

Happen, Been, Likely, Decades

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Boss, Think, I Think, Entrepreneur

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

Next, Became, Almost, Entrepreneur

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Habits, Own, Bad, Hoarding

I think email's going to be around for, like, another 10,000 years. It's a great way to cross organizational boundaries.

- Stewart Butterfield

Think, Organizational, Email

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Think, Internal, Switching, Email

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Internal, Use, Mandate, Email

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Had, Early Days, Our, Extra

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Product, Shared, Almost, Designed

Flickr was designed partly to market itself. There are a lot features, in place early on, that let people take their photo, upload it to Flickr and post them elsewhere, on their own Web site or their blog, which meant a lot of incoming links.

- Stewart Butterfield

Own, Blog, Elsewhere, Designed

For most companies, the hard thing is making the product work well enough to convince a single person at a time to switch to it.

- Stewart Butterfield

Work, Product, Making, Well Enough

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

Doing, Reason, Very, Lessons

I almost never go to news sites - it's overwhelming how much content is out there. But I will pay attention to what my friends are picking up and sharing.

- Stewart Butterfield

News, Pay Attention, Almost, Overwhelming

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Year, Deal, Year Later, Yahoo

People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.

- Stewart Butterfield

Year, Add, Till, Yahoo

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Impact, Going, Tend, Technological

The element of teamwork is perhaps underappreciated.

- Stewart Butterfield

Teamwork, Perhaps, Element

We sent our user research team out to sit with customers for periods of time and get some insight into how Slack is working. We also get tens of thousands of points of contact via Twitter and our customer support ticketing system every month and can synthesize those results.

- Stewart Butterfield

Some, Tens, Our, Customers

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Maybe, I Think, Systemic, Exacerbated

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

Die, Other, Couple, Breathe

I can tell people a story that they believe in and get behind. So I'm good at the leadership part. But I've always said that I'm a terrible manager. I'm not good at giving feedback.

- Stewart Butterfield

Manager, Behind, Always, Terrible

If you're not hiring from some groups of the population, then you're obviously missing out.

- Stewart Butterfield

Some, Hiring, Groups, Missing

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

Developers, Virtual, Reports, What If

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Love, Tell, Terrifying, Employees

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Experience, Only, Eight, Employees

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, Product, Means, Absorb

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

- Stewart Butterfield

Behavior, Happen, Lot, Automation

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Advice, Feel, Leading, Organizations

The useful part of Microsoft was that everything worked together.

- Stewart Butterfield

Microsoft, Part, Worked, Useful

The experience of being able to search back over all your team's communications for, in our case, millions of messages, is super-valuable. But you don't know what that's like until you actually have it.

- Stewart Butterfield

Back, Over, Like, Communications

There are two big benefits from moving conversations from a mode where you're addressing individuals, or groups of individuals, to addressing a channel which is a topic, a project, a functional discipline, or whatever.

- Stewart Butterfield

Big, Benefits, Which, Topic

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

- Stewart Butterfield

System, Like, Internal, Tissue

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

Strong, New People, Very, Users

I rarely in a working day go more than 10 minutes without looking at Slack.

- Stewart Butterfield

Go, More, Minutes, Rarely

Sometimes you will get feedback that is contrary to your vision. You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first.

- Stewart Butterfield

Sometimes, Will, May, Particular

It's easy to hire too fast and have chaos and disorganization and insufficient management.

- Stewart Butterfield

Chaos, Fast, Hire, Insufficient

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Play, Alive, Some, Parts

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

Give, Explain, Ammunition, Materials

I think we are reluctant to move people out of an organization when there is not a good fit. It is typically not because someone is stupid or lazy or incompetent; it is a lot more subtle than that.

- Stewart Butterfield

Stupid, Think, Move, Incompetent

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

Good, Something, Really, Musician

One advantage that I think Slack has for most people who use it is, you pull out your phone, you look at the home screen, there's the Slack icon. You know when you tap this one, it's all the people you work with, and it's only the people you work with. And that's a big advantage.

- Stewart Butterfield

Big, I Think, Use, Phone

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

- Stewart Butterfield

Teams, Dozens, Using, Independently

The social use of Slack does drive awareness - it's a good thing for us.

- Stewart Butterfield

Awareness, Use, A Good Thing, Good Thing

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

- Stewart Butterfield

Think, Lucky, Maybe, Smart

Anything we can do that lets people find information more quickly is something we're interested in.

- Stewart Butterfield

More, Find, Quickly, Lets

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

Percent, Show, About, Photos

In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience.

- Stewart Butterfield

Software, Trying, Making, Guess

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.

- Stewart Butterfield

Decision, Amount, Large, Corporation

It's very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy.

- Stewart Butterfield

Design, Someone, Very, Empathy

I'm going to end up with a lot more money than I feel like I'm entitled to, given how hard I work.

- Stewart Butterfield

Like, Going, Given, Entitled

All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world.

- Stewart Butterfield

World, Doing, Which, Committed

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