The Art of Leadership

Act III. Slack: Executive

THE STORY AS I HEARD IT WAS Stewart Butterfield likes games and has twice attempted to build a commercially viable online game. The first one was called Game Neverending. Built during the first generation of the internet, it was not a success. But one aspect of the game appeared valuable: sharing photos.

The company that built Game Neverending, Ludicorp, pivoted and built Flickr for the world. Butterfield sold Flickr (at 40 people) to Yahoo! and remained there as the GM for four years. Upon leaving Yahoo! he made his second game attempt with Glitch, with his company Tiny Speck. Web-based, artistically delicious, and weirdly clever, Glitch didn’t find a viable market. As Butterfield attempted to return investors’ money, they asked, “Do you have any other ideas?”

He did.

In building Glitch, the team had hacked on a version of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to make it more useful for team collaboration. They could not imagine building anything else without this janky communication tool, so they chose to build the janky communication tool from the ground up—and that changed everything.

Pivoting and rebranding the company, they built a beta in six months. They signed up 8,000 companies in 24 hours and quickly discovered they’d built the fastest-growing piece of enterprise software in the history of the galaxy. They called it Slack.

I was in love with Slack long before Stewart mailed me. It was not that I was a longtime IRC user—it was just obvious to me that communication ...