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Stewart Butterfield is the CEO and founder of Slack. For over 20 years, he has been an entrepreneur, developer and technology leader all at the same time.

Stewart Butterfield

Daniel Stewart Butterfield (born Dharma Jeremy Butterfield; (1973) is a Canadian businessman and entrepreneur, known for being the founder of the photo sharing website Flickr and the group messaging application Slack.

Early life and education

Stewart Butterfield was born in Lund, British Columbia in 1973 to Norma and David Butterfield and grew up the first three years of his life in a log cabin without running water while living in rural Canada, his father fled the United States . to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War.

Butterfield’s grandfather came to Canada from Poland when he was 17 years old during the war. His family moved to Victoria when Butterfield was five. As a child, Butterfield taught himself to code; he changed his name to Stewart when he was twelve.
Butterfield was educated at St. Michaels University School in Victoria, BC, and funded the development of the college’s website. 

He obtained a BA in philosophy from the University of Victoria in 1996. Butterfield went on to obtain an MA in philosophy from Clare College, Cambridge in 1998, where he studied the philosophy of biology, science and art. knowledge of the mind. His time at university coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web; His online presence stemmed from his passion for jam bands, and more specifically, the Vermont band Phish to found Rec.music.phish,[1] one of the first Usenet newsgroups.

Carrer of Stewart Butterfield

In 2000 Butterfield joined his friend Jason Classon’s startup, Gradfinder.com, and even though the dotcom bubble had just burst, the company was sold at a huge profit. Two years later, Butterfield married blogger Caterina Fake, and with Classon they founded Ludicorp, which developed a multiplayer online game called The Neverending Game. Ludicorp spun off the struggling company for a video sharing service (created by Cal Henderson and Eric Costello) called Flickr. The photo-sharing site pioneered in 2004 became an innovation that helped usher in the Web 2.0 era, in which social applications began to supersede static web pages.

In 2005 Yahoo! bought Flickr and Butterfield hired Yahoo! as Flickr’s Managing Director and Senior Director of Project Management. He and Fake left Yahoo! in 2008, the same year they dissolved their marriage. In 2009, Butterfield founded Tiny Speck with $1.5 million in seed funding. The following year, the company introduced its first product, Glitch, the first online game, but the game was expensive to run and did not attract a large audience or buyer and was discontinued in November 2012. In 2009, Butterfield helped found Slack Technologies and became its CEO. At the end of 2012, work began on the Slack application, which allowed users to create specific channels for real-time communication.

The preview version came out in August 2013 and was an instant hit. The application is available online until the launch of the market in February 2014. Companies involved in the Internet, advertising and media have raised subscriptions, and Butterfield said that Slack’s success was a strategy that made customer feedback a key focus. In 2015, Slack Technologies ranked among the so-called unicorns, private startups with a value of more than $1 billion. Four years later, Butterfield oversaw its transformation into a public company.

In this unusual move, however, no new shares were issued and only existing shares were issued. After the first day of trading, the market value of Slack Technologies is around $19.5 billion. In 2021, software company Salesforce acquired Slack in a deal valued at $28 billion. Under these terms, Slack continued as an entity and Butterfield remained its CEO.

Ludicorp and Flickr

In the summer of 2002, he founded Ludicorp with Caterina Fake and Jason Classon in Vancouver. Ludicorp first developed an online multiplayer game called The Neverending Game. After the game ended, the company launched a photo-sharing website called Flickr. In March 2005, Yahoo acquired Ludicorp!, while Butterfield continued as CEO of Flickr until he left Yahoo! July 12, 2008. 

Tiny Speck

In 2009 Butterfield founded a new company called Tiny Speck. Tiny Speck launched its first project, the multiplayer game Glitch, on September 27, 2011. Glitch was eventually shut down due to its failure to attract a large audience. World Games closed on December 9, 2012, but the website is still online. In January 2013, the company announced that it would make most of the game’s art available under a Creative Commons license. On December 9, 2014, a support group to relaunch Glitch as Eleven began alpha testing. 

Slack (software)

In August 2013, Butterfield announced the release of Slack, a team communication tool based on instant messaging that Tiny Speck built while working at Glitch. After being released to the public in February 2014, the tool grew at a weekly rate of 5-10%, with more than 120,000 daily users registered in the first week of August. In early 2014, data from Slack’s first six months of use showed nearly 16,000 registered users without any ads.

Butter Field Facts

Butterfield was born in 1973 in a small fishing town called Lund, British Columbia. His parents didn’t have running water in their cabin until he was three years old. When Butterfield was 5 years old, his family moved to Victoria. A few years later, the Butterfields got a computer, which Stewart loved. At an early age, he taught himself to code. In college, he made money creating websites. “I was one of the first kids to grow up with computers,” he told Business Insider.

Butterfield received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria in 1996. In 1998 he obtained a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.

In 2000, he joined his friend Jason Classon in Classon’s startup, Gradfinder.com. The internet bubble has just burst.

Despite the post-bubble economy, Butterfield and Classon were able to sell Gradfinder.com for what Butterfield describes as “a good profit.” After graduation, Classon went to work for Highwired, which acquired Gradfinder.com. Meanwhile, Butterfield is back to work as a freelance web developer.

Butterfield created a contest called the “5K Contest”, which encouraged people to create websites under 5 kilobytes. He took off. Butterfield told Business Insider, “It’s gotten the biggest surprise in every country in the world. Classon, Butterfield, and his then-wife, Caterina Fake, all founded a company called Ludicorp, with the goal of creating multiplayer online games. But that was right after 9/11 and when the technology exploded, the company couldn’t raise any money. 

Butterfield got the idea for his next business, Flicker, when he was vomiting and sick with food poisoning in a New York restaurant. The Butterfield team has created this feature where you can share photos with people. 

Later, he realized that it doesn’t work well because you can only share photos when both of you are online. Flickr made some changes and sold it to Yahoo. Butterfield and Fake joined Yahoo as part of the acquisition. In 2008, however, the couple left Flickr and went their separate ways.

Stewart Butterfield net worth

Stewart Butterfield’s net worth is estimated at $1.8 billion. The main source of income comes from his business activities. He lives a comfortable life because of the income from his business. In 2021, Stewart Butterfield apologized for an undocumented error in his messaging app Slack. However, he is one of the richest and most influential people in Canada.

Accomplishment

In 2005, Butterfield was named one of Businessweek’s “Top 50” leaders in the Entrepreneurship category. In the same year, he was also named in the TR35, a list compiled by MIT in its publication MIT Technology Review, as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under 35. In 2006, he was named in “Time 100”, Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, and appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine.

Stewart Butterfield was listed as an outstanding information technology director by Marquis Who’s Who.