Tiny Speck
company on 8 shows · 12 statements across 6 episodes · said 18 times in 6 episodes since 2016
Founder's Journal 6 
the Official SaaStr Podcast 4 
the MAD Podcast 3 
20VC 3 
the a16z Podcast 1 
All-In 1 
Masters of Scale 
How I Built This
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
Founder's Journal 6the Official SaaStr Podcast 4the MAD Podcast 320VC 3All-In 1the a16z Podcast 1
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 4 mentions in 1 episode
2022 6 mentions in 1 episode
2020 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 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
- E14: Salesforce acquires Slack, DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough, Trust Fund Socialists & more
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2016 3 mentions in 1 episode
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
12 statements about Tiny Speck, every show
Hoffman: Glitch Raised $17.5M and Employed 45 People Over Four Years
“Four years of development, 45 employees, tens of thousands of players, 17 and a half million dollars raised.”
Butterfield: Glitch Investors and Co-Founders Wanted to Keep Going
“And that was a tough conversation with our board and our investors, because they actually wanted us to keep going. It was a tough conversation with the other co-founders who also wanted to keep going.”
Butterfield: Tiny Speck Placed Every Single Laid-Off Employee into a Job
“And we ended up getting every single person a job.”
Butterfield: Tiny Speck had $5.5M left when pivoting away from Glitch
“We still had five and a half million dollars or something like that left in the bank. So we didn't have to shut down”
97% of users abandoned Tiny Speck's Glitch game within five minutes
“97% of people who signed up for Glitch left within five minutes.”
Tiny Speck had $5M–$6M remaining when pivoting to Slack
“We had five or six million dollars left when we decided to shut it down and work on Slack”
Only 8 of 45 Glitch employees stayed to build Slack
“So there's 45 people at the company, and eight of them were going to stay on to work on Slack. So for the other 37 people, we did kind of career coaching. We wrote reference letters. We set up interviews for them. We ended up getting everyone a job”
Butterfield: Early Slack team grew to 45 employees using zero email
“When we hired the first employees, the number five at the company through to the 45th employee, everyone got an IRC, everyone started using it, and we didn't use email at all”
Butterfield realized Glitch could never justify its $17.5M venture investment
“It was never going to become the kind of business that would justify 17 and a half million dollars of venture capital investment.”
Butterfield shut down Glitch with over $5 million still in the bank
“We still had, like, over five million dollars in the bank.”
Butterfield ensured all 37 laid-off Glitch employees secured new jobs
“By the end of that process, we had gotten, you know, every single person who worked there who was getting laid off, and there was like, 37 of them, I believe. Every single one of them got another job, and in most cases, they got a better job than the one that …”
Investors treated the Slack pivot like buying another lottery ticket
“None of them wanted their money back, and not for altruistic reasons, but we had already spent two-thirds of it, so their options were, like, we can get back a third of what we gave you, or they can buy one more lottery ticket and say, keep the money we'll kee…”