7 Quotes & Sayings By Stewart Butterfield

Stewart Butterfield is the founder and CEO of Slack. He is also an investor, board member, advisor, and partner at Obvious Ventures, Y Combinator's most recent venture fund. Prior to launching Slack in 2013, he was the co-founder of Flickr, which sold to Yahoo in 2005 for $30 million. Prior to that, he was a researcher at Netscape.

1
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
2
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
3
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
4
It's very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy. Stewart Butterfield
5
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
6
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