Stewart Butterfield

Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield (April 2006)
Born	Daniel Stewart Butterfield 1973 (age 42–43) Canada
Alma mater	University of Victoria ('96) University of Cambridge ('98)
Occupation	Entrepreneur and businessman
Known for	Co-founder of Flickr Founder of Slack (software)
Spouse(s)	Caterina Fake (2001–2007)

Stewart Butterfield (born Daniel Stewart Butterfield in 1973) is a Canadian-born entrepreneur and businessman, best known for being a co-founder of the photo sharing website Flickr and team messaging application Slack.

Early life and education

Butterfield was educated at St. Michaels University School in Victoria, British Columbia. He received a B.A. degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria in 1996.^[1] Butterfield went on to earn a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge in 1998, where he specialized in the philosophy of biology, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind.

Career

Ludicorp and Flickr

In the summer of 2002, he co-founded Ludicorp in Vancouver with Caterina Fake and Jason Classon.^[2][3] Ludicorp initially developed a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Game Neverending. The game did not launch, but the company then 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.^[4][5]

Tiny Speck

In 2009 Butterfield cofounded a new company called Tiny Speck.^[6] Tiny Speck launched its first project, the massively multiplayer game Glitch, on September 27, 2011. 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 web site, with most of the content, is still available.^[7][8] In January 2013, it was announced that the company would make most of the game's art available under a Creative Commons license.^[9][10] On December 9, 2014, a fan project to relaunch Glitch under the name Eleven began alpha testing.^[11]

Slack

In August 2013, Butterfield announced the release of Slack, an instant-message-based team communication tool built by Tiny Speck while working on Glitch.^[12][13] Since its public release in February 2014, the tool has grown at a weekly rate of 5 to 10 percent, with more than 120,000 daily users registered in the first week of August 2014. As of August 2014, Slack has garnered US$1.5 million in revenue and raised US$60 million in venture capital. In early 2014, the data for Slack's first six-month usage period since the preview release was published, showing that nearly 16,000 users were registered without the use of any form of advertising—growth was based solely upon word-of-mouth.^[14][15]

Butterfield secured an office for Slack employees in San Francisco in 2014 and was expected to commence recruitment during the second half of the year.^[14]

As of December 2015, Slack has raised US$340 million in venture capital and has more than 2 million daily active users, of which 570,000 are paid customers.^[16]

Slack was named Inc. Magazine’s 2015 company of the year.^[17]

Awards and honors

In 2005, Butterfield was named one of Businessweek's "Top 50" Leaders ^[18] 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.^[19][20] In 2006, he was named in the "Time 100", Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world,^[21] and also appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine.^[22][23]

In November 2008, Butterfield received the "Legacy Distinguished Alumni Award" from the University of Victoria.^[24]

In 2015, Stewart was named the Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovator for 2015,^[25] awarded TechCrunch’s Founder of the Year Crunchie,^[26] and included in Vanity Fair’s New Establishment,^[27] Advertising Age’s Creative 50,^[28] and Details’ Digital Mavericks lists.^[29]

Personal life

Butterfield was married to Caterina Fake, his Flickr co-founder, from 2001^[30] to 2007.^[31] They have one daughter together, who was born in 2007.^[32]

Butterfield maintained a personal website and blog at sylloge.com starting in 1998; the most recent entry is from 2007.^[33]

References

Further reading

• Slack's Stewart Butterfield, in His Own Words (April 2015), Inc magazine