Better, Simpler Strategy

17

Being Bad in the Service of Good

Few entrepreneurial careers illustrate the role of fortunate accidents (and accidental fortunes) as clearly as that of Stewart Butterfield, cofounder of Flickr and Slack. Butterfield’s first startup built a multiplayer online game whose main purpose was to “kick ass.” It largely failed to do so, but the tools created for developing the game provided the building blocks for Flickr, a photo-sharing site that Butterfield eventually sold to Yahoo! He later returned to gaming to produce Glitch, another failure—and another instance where software written for a project that failed proved generally useful: thus was born Slack. The workplace communication platform went public in 2019. A year later, it was valued at ...