Butterfield: Entrepreneurship is like parkour because stalling causes severe damage
Stewart Butterfield · 20VC: Slack Founder Stewart Butterfield on Leadership Styles, Decision-Making, The 3 Levels of Wealth, IPOs vs Direct Listings & Why Effective Entrepreneurship is Like Parkour · Nov 16, 2020 · at 26:44
Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack, discusses decision-making speed and leadership frameworks for founders on 20VC.
0:00 / 0:28exact quote · 28.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Being an entrepreneur can be a lot like doing parkour, and obviously not physically, because I'm, I would not be a good parkour participant. But what I mean is, you have to keep moving. You have to keep the momentum, and any kind of stalling or hesitating can cause a lot of damage. I like the metaphor of parkour, though, because it's very opportunistic, continually looking around the environment for what can give you the most advantage or the most leverage, and then pursuing that at top speed, and then going for the next thing.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Stewart Butterfield
Butterfield: Founder-CEOs need less leadership skill than hired professional CEOs
“And founders like me, who remain the CEO, I think have a huge advantage. We don't have to be as good as leaders as like a professional CEO would be because we're the founder, because there's like something of the soul of the company that's tied up with us. So …”
Butterfield: Silicon Valley's obsession with A/B testing causes counterproductive incrementalism
“There's a thing that I think has infected Silicon Valley, the kind of corruption of data-driven decision-making. People just haven't really looked at the kind of history and philosophy of science to see how rigorous you have to be to have kind of the scientifi…”
Butterfield: The three levels of wealth are debt, restaurants, and vacations
“So I said in some interview, I don't even remember where now it was, but there's kind of three levels of wealth, and one is I don't have to worry about my debts, and the second one is I don't care what anything costs in a restaurant, because I very clearly rem…”
Butterfield: Channel-based messaging will eventually replace all internal corporate email
“At some point, everyone in the world will be using a channel-based messaging platform for internal communication rather than email.”
Butterfield: Slide decks and static mock-ups are product teams' biggest waste
“The biggest waste of time in product organizations is the preparation of slide decks, of static mock-ups of user interfaces, and then people go to the meeting and they all look at the slides and they give their opinion about whether it'll work or not. And to m…”