Slack is a popular enterprise communication and collaboration tool, currently used by 630,000 businesses. In early 2014, it received more than $40 million in financing and then completed $120 million in financing, bringing its valuation to $1.12 billion. In February 2015, slack reached 500,000 active users on its first anniversary. On June 20, 2019, the startup Slack officially landed on the New York Stock Exchange.
It wasn’t easy to grow an app that started as a nearly failed gaming project into the $27 billion company it is today. Today, let’s hear an anecdote from Flicr and Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield.
Stewart Butterfield was born in Lund, British Columbia, Canada in 1973. In Stewart’s view, the development of his character and behavior is not unrelated to the family.
Stewart’s mother is extremely empathetic. At the age of 16, Stewart was involved in a major accident with his father’s car. Stewart’s mother unexpectedly did not blame the young Stewart, but warned him that the accident is not terrible, as long as he can learn from it.
Stewart’s father was a real estate developer. The real estate industry has a peculiarity: Practitioners build corresponding management entities in each project, like building new businesses over and over. Real estate companies face a fundraising cycle every two to three years, requiring practitioners to combine development vision with specific plans. In the next ten years or so, vision and plans will jointly promote the entire process of projects from bidding to landing.
His father’s profession had an incredible impact on Stewart. The succession and transformation of five or six projects accompanied him through his ignorant teenage years, and he also learned to look at the world with business thinking, and no longer understand people and things with pure instinctive and simple logic.
Computer Enlightenment, but majoring in Philosophy
From Stewart’s point of view, computers are really cool things.
What is displayed on the computer screen is not a one-way transmission like a TV, and the user can control the objects in it. It is amazing! So in 1979 or 1980, the Stewart family bought the first Apple II. In addition, a computer is also installed in the classroom of the school.
Stewart once bought a magazine called Byte, which always had some written programs on the back cover. Stewart’s initial programming inspiration was trying to run these programs on Apple. In the process, he always likes to change some program content to see what happens. Before he knew it, Stewart had learned about programming at the age of seven.
“But by the time I got to high school, computers weren’t that interesting for me anymore. Luckily, after I got into college, I got an account on a Unix machine at school and got my first exposure to the Internet. It was 1992, and the web thing It was really eye-opening…I could hardly believe what I was seeing.”
Stewart’s subsequent career has always adhered to the basic concept of exploring computer technology as a means and serving human interaction as the purpose. At the time, two things attracted Stewart the most:
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Try to translate human imagination into reality by executing code.
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Integrate these results to serve human interaction.
He explained: “It’s an experience that’s really worth digging into, like breaking down important things into successive layers. First try to translate human imagination into reality by executing code … and then The results are integrated to serve human interaction.”
In fact, Stewart wanted to study cognitive science, but their school did not have a cognitive science course. The essence of cognitive science is the synthesis of computer science, psychology, linguistics and philosophy. Since there is no special cognitive course, it is not enough to study these four courses separately. But he didn’t choose psychology, because in order to pursue this major, he had to be exposed to a lot of coursework that he was not interested in.
But the philosophy is different, there are not many requirements, and the coursework requirements are relatively easy. So he decided to pursue a degree in philosophy. Stewart soon discovered that the fundamentals of philosophy are a fascinating spiritual adventure, given that there are so many important unanswered questions in the world.
No need for a science and engineering background, but still devote yourself to web development
In 1992, Stewart’s college life began. Stewart, a rookie college student, realized that the Web was emerging and growing rapidly. More and more people have started their own “Internet surfing” journey.
At that time, Mosaic had already been born, but it had not yet been widely adopted. The Internet is made up of email, Internet chat (IRC), and a Unix program called Talk. After a semester or two of his time in college, the Internet really took the leap and became one of the most popular mediums in the world.
“…Since this time, the Internet has become a very popular medium, and has given birth to subversive results such as Gopher and Wais. And I have been fortunate enough to witness it all.”
Back in those years, HTML was pretty simple. Anyone who is interested can teach themselves HTML. The curious Stewart was not far behind, so in 1993, he became one of the five earliest masters of HTML in his hometown.
For the next ’94, ’95, and ’96, his vacations and part-time jobs at school consisted of making websites for non-technical clients.
By 1998, he had decided to apply for a Doctor of Philosophy. A friend of his had just finished his Ph.D. and got a job at a university in Kentucky. But his friends weren’t satisfied, and didn’t even want to stay in Kentucky at all. Because the salary level there is too low, and the position itself has no sense of existence, basically people leave in less than a year, and the unit needs to recruit again.
After learning the harsh reality, Stewart began to think hard about his life decisions.
At this point he has two options. Either follow the path of a friend, study for a Ph.D., go to college, and mess around; or keep up with the technological wave set off by the Web and grasp this wave of changes that are growing at an exponential rate. In addition, he also knew that his friends who were first exposed to the Web had all moved to San Francisco, and were paid two or three times as much as in Kentucky.
He felt that the Web role was the most exciting, dynamic, and transformative direction of its era. He also received the support of many professors. These old academics also complained and felt that it was really difficult to work in academia.
“I talked to a few professors about how to plan a career, and they basically came to similar conclusions… Doing academia is a pretty bad life experience. If you can’t choose, don’t choose. If you still have illusions, Might as well subscribe to a few journals and attend a few academic conferences to see if there is a “curative effect”. “
Stewart took the professors’ advice to heart.
As a web designer, he’s still not “safe”
After a few years of web design, Stewart built his first gaming company.
His first game work, called “Neverending”. It was 2002, and his team had finished prototyping and started testing the game.
But 2002 was really not a good year: at the beginning of the new century, the Internet bubble began to burst, industry giants also exposed financial scandals, and the darkest moment for the financial market came, and the Nasdaq also fell nearly 80% from its highest point.
At that time, no one wanted to invest in the Internet, and no one was willing to invest in any Internet multiplayer game. Since then, “Neverending” has also become the object of disgust. In the end, the game was not completed successfully because of unsustainable funds.
But in the unfinished game, there is still a lot of residual value. The development team decided to use the technology developed while making the game to build other products, which would later become Flickr.
As the saying goes, the east is not bright and the west is bright, and the game died unexpectedly, but the legacy it left has allowed Flickr to develop into a very commercially viable surprise product.
For a few months, the development team had to work on Flickr while making games. So when it finally decided to give up game development, Stewart was frustrated, as were the people who participated in the playtesting.
“We let everyone down. Many of the friends who participated in the test liked the game and thought it was cool. But fortunately, Flickr is also good and promising, so everyone is not really hit hard.”
Flickr is indeed favored by everyone, and the user base has gradually accumulated. Through Flickr, users can upload and store photos for free. As for how to make money, users can choose to purchase a professional account, increase the number of photo uploads to more than 200, and enjoy analysis services.
In 2005, Yahoo decided to buy Flickr for $20 million.
The road to the game, no matter how bad Waterloo
The most successful decision of Stewart’s life was to launch a game that didn’t make it.
In 2012, the head iron Stewart did not believe in evil, and established a game company called Tiny Speck. The company produced another game called Glitch.
One failure is not enough, where did Stewart get his confidence? Because between 2002 and 2009, the Internet experienced an incredible period of explosive growth. Suddenly, everyone seemed to have access to the Internet. As a result, the total number of Internet users began to grow exponentially. Thousands of companies have logged on to the Internet platform, and people have been exposed to different services provided by different companies.
Soon, the era of mobile Internet access is coming, and people can finally enjoy high-speed Internet connection anytime, anywhere. At the same time, the world of open source software that supports Internet development has also ushered in a wave of explosive development.
“…In 2002, open source resources were still very limited. But by 2009, Apache’s foundation was strong and mature, and various great network technologies were supplemented by more powerful computer equipment, and more people began to enjoy ” The thrill of surfing the Internet. “
Compared with the team that developed “Neverending”, the development lineup of “Glitch” is much more luxurious. “If the full score is 10, then our development camp has increased from the previous two points to the later eight, nine or even close to full points.”
The game itself has also gained the attention of the capital market. They thought that with such influence, they would be able to get sufficient funds, improve team treatment, and finally come up with a masterpiece of fame and fortune. Sadly, they only got $17.5 million from VCs.
“Venture capital is very difficult to deal with, we became a “contractor” to a certain extent and had to do projects according to their will, so things were deviated from the expected track again. “
At this point, Stewart decided to stop the loss in time. The tragedy of “Neverending” happened again, and Stewart’s game development dream had to come to an abrupt end.
This time the team is bigger, and Stewart is facing new challenges like never before.
There were 45 employees in the company at the time, involving professionals such as animators, musicians, writers, illustrators, and focus designers who couldn’t transfer their skills to other projects, so the halt in development would have resulted in them being out of a job. Thirty-five of the 45-person team faced a layoff crisis. The game they updated and released also failed to build the strong community they expected. So, the conflict becomes more intense.
As a team leader, Stewart is naturally distressed by the predicament. Stewart tells a story. Two months ago, he just persuaded an employee to move out of his hometown with his wife and two-year-old daughter and start a business with him. When I bought a new house in a new town, I stayed away from familiar friends and relatives. But now Stewart suddenly has to tell the other person again that you were fired.
Stewart knew the decision was hard to make and hard to articulate. As soon as the words are spoken, the lives of teammates will be completely destroyed.
“Before the day the news was officially announced internally, there was already an atmosphere of concern in the company. Some people felt that the project had reached the point of life and death, and if there was no progress, there would definitely be problems.”
In a flash, Slack was born
Fortunately, Stewart decided to stop the loss in time and shut down the development work in advance. So there is some money left in the company account. The money is not small, a full $ 5.5 million. With the help of this money, the Stewart team was able to complete the outage in a more respectable manner. They also have a website dedicated to helping each employee compile a detailed resume.
The company also wrote many letters of recommendation, did some career counseling, and helped each member successfully find a new job. Most professionals get better jobs than they did at Tiny Speck.
“We paid back the money we owed to our customers…and did some charitable stuff. A year later, Tim Leffler finally joined Slack, which meant the end of the whole derailment process. But, at that moment, I had absolutely no Ease of feeling.”
Stewart shut down Glitch with a heavy heart. The co-founder began to look back on his own experiences, sorting out important lessons learned in the game’s operations.
During the development and operation of Glitch, a number of different teams have been continuously involved in the project. Among them, one team is responsible for music creation, one team leads animation production, one team provides art design, and another team is responsible for programming development. To improve collaboration, the programming team also wrote an internal chat system to help people communicate online. Compared with email, this chat system is much more efficient. Compared with the game itself, many players seem to prefer this built-in chat method.
One of the co-founders analyzed that such instant messaging tools have not appeared at all even in the business field. The opportunity is here!
Originally, the Glitch game was intended to use Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networking tools to enable online communication. Like most messaging systems we’re familiar with today, there’s a concept called “store-and-forward” involved.
For example, when Bob sends a message to Angela, but Angela is not online at the time, it may not be received temporarily, and the message content needs to be temporarily stored. The next time Angela goes online, the reserved messages will be forwarded to her in time. However, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) does not have store-and-forward functionality. That is, as long as IRC is used, as long as Angela is not online when Bob sends a message, she will never receive the message.
To this end, the entire team of 8 decided to develop a system for message logging. The database will receive messages, and team members want to be able to search for these messages, so a search function is built accordingly.
“We kept adding new features to it over time. Eventually, they created something that could be integrated with the file server. So as long as a user uploads a file, the IRC side will also reflect,” Stewart said. “Slow Slowly, we developed the system and it became the preferred method of communication within the company. The great experience made us realize that we don’t seem to know how to work without this system.”
With more and more functions and higher stability, they finally came up with a result that can achieve full communication content and full knowledge item search – Slack.
In 2021, Salesforce bought Slack for $27.7 billion. A failed game project was exchanged for a communication platform that affected the world, and Stewart and his partners made a lot of money.
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