Stewart Butterfield

Daniel Stewart Butterfield (born Dharma Jeremy Butterfield;^[1] March 21, 1973^[2]) is a Canadian billionaire businessman, best known for co-founding the photo-sharing website Flickr and the team-messaging application Slack.

Early life and education

In 1973, Butterfield was born in Lund, British Columbia, to Norma and David Butterfield.^[3] For the first five years of his life he grew up in a log cabin without running water or electricity. His family lived on a commune in remote Canada after his father fled the US to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War.^[4][5] His family moved to Victoria when Butterfield was five years old.^[5] As a child, Butterfield taught himself how to code, and changed his name to Stewart when he was 12.^[6]

Butterfield was educated at St. Michaels University School in Victoria, British Columbia and made money in university designing websites.^[5] He received a B.A. degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria in 1996 and went on to earn a Master of Philosophy from Clare College, Cambridge in 1998.^[7]

Career

In 2000, Butterfield worked with Jason Classon to build a startup called Gradfinder.com.^[5][8] Following Gradfinder.com's acquisition, he worked as a freelance web designer. Butterfield also created a contest called the 5K competition, centered on people with the ability to design websites under 5 kilobytes.^[5]

Ludicorp and Flickr

In the summer of 2002, he co-founded Ludicorp with Caterina Fake and Jason Classon in Vancouver.^[7] Ludicorp initially developed a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Game Neverending. After the game failed to launch, the company 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.^[9][1]

Tiny Speck

In 2009, Butterfield co-founded a new company called Tiny Speck.^[10] Tiny Speck launched its first project, the massively multiplayer game Glitch, on September 27, 2011.^[11] 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 website remained online.^[12][13] In January 2013, the company announced that it would make the most of the game's art available under a Creative Commons license.^[14] On December 9, 2014, a fan project to relaunch Glitch under the name Eleven began alpha testing.^{[15][better source needed]}

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.^[16][17] After its public release in February 2014, the tool grew at a weekly rate of 5 to 10 percent, with more than 120,000 daily users registered in the first week of August. In early 2014, the data for Slack's first six-month usage period showed that nearly 16,000 users were registered without any advertising.^{[18][19][better source needed]}

That same year, Butterfield secured an office for Slack employees in San Francisco, and was expected to commence recruitment during the second half of the year.^[18]

As of December 2015, Slack had raised US$340 million in venture capital and had more than 2 million daily active users, of which 570,000 were paying customers.^[20]

Slack was named Inc. Magazine’s 2015 company of the year.^[21]

In June 2019, the company announced its initial public offering with an opening price of $38.50 and a market capitalization of US$21.4 billion.^[22][23]

In December 2020, Salesforce confirmed plans to buy Slack Technologies for US$27.7 billion.^[24]

In December 2022, Butterfield announced his departure as CEO of Slack and left Salesforce early in January 2023.^[25]

Awards and honors

In 2005, Butterfield was named one of Businessweek's "Top 50" Leaders^[26] 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.^[27][28] In 2006, he was named in the "Time 100", Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world,^[29] and also appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine.^[30][31]

In November 2008, Butterfield received the "Legacy Distinguished Alumni Award" from the University of Victoria.^[32]

In 2015, Stewart was named the Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovator for 2015,^[33] awarded TechCrunch’s Founder of the Year Crunchie,^[34] and included in Vanity Fair’s New Establishment,^[35] Advertising Age’s Creative 50,^[36] and Details’ Digital Mavericks lists.^[37]

In May 2017, he was featured in Masters of Scale, a podcast series by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin, along with other successful businesspeople such as Mark Zuckerberg, John Elkann, and Brian Chesky. In it, he discussed the scaling strategy adopted by Slack.^[38]

Personal life

Butterfield was married to Caterina Fake, his Flickr co-founder, from 2001^[39] to 2007.^[40] They have one child together, who was born in 2007.^[41] In May 2019 he became engaged to Jennifer Rubio, co-founder of Away Luggage.^[42]

References

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Stewart Butterfield.