Stuart Butterfield
Co-founder & Former CEO, Slack. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Stewart Butterfield is best known for co-founding the photo-sharing site Flickr and workplace messaging service Slack. Remarkably, both multi-billion-dollar communication platforms emerged from pivots after attempting to build multiplayer online role-playing games.
1shows
2appearances
29statements
4resolved
3supported
0contradicted
75%fully supported
Everything Stuart Butterfield said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Butterfield: Team messaging adoption is binary; 80 percent adoption means zero
“Yeah, and it's absolutely binary. So if we get to 80% of the team, And that's it. Then it goes to zero. It's a hundred percent or it's nothing.”
Butterfield: Microsoft is the only competitor Slack really worries about
“To be totally frank, it's the one company that I really worry about from a competitive angle.”
Butterfield: Centralizing tools in one hub outweighs better standalone UX
“Yeah, and I'd even be willing to admit that in many cases using a purpose-built specific tool for each of those items might be the better experience, but the value of having them all in one place just so completely overwhelms any benefit you can get by splitti…”
Butterfield: Slack intentionally excluded mobile-only jobs, omitting 70% of US workforce
“We explicitly said at the beginning, and this has still been our experience, that Slack is not really designed for a mobile-only workforce, and not designed for jobs where people aren't going to have a computing device in their hands most of the time. So we au…”
Butterfield: Facebook at Work will fail to replace internal email
“This is, by the way, what I'm thinking is probably gonna happen with Facebook at work, too. It wasn't quite sufficient to replace email usage internally, or it wasn't quite sufficient to replace use of messaging internally, or whatever it is.”
Butterfield: Slack adoption is binary and requires 100% team usage
“And what we found is that success with Slack is very binary. If we get to 80% of the of the team using Slack, it might sound like I'm about to say something good, but no, zero percent will be using it soon. It has to be a hundred percent.”
Butterfield: Heavy email usage will continue for at least 30-40 years
“And I want to just stress, because we get this in headlines quite a bit, that we want to be an email killer. Not going away. We've got, you know, at least three or four decades left of heavy email uses because it is lowest common denominator, and I mean that i…”
Butterfield: Knowledge teams relying on internal email will lose to competitors
“But I think if you use email as your primary means of communication internally for the kinds of knowledge worker, for lack of a better term, teams that use Slack, that's, you're foolish. I mean, and it's such a big disadvantage that you will eventually be made…”
Butterfield: Hardcoding workflow ideology into database schemas limits software adoption
“The more specific you get, the more that ideology gets cooked into the model, or the scheme, I mean, in the literal sense, the database model, like the field names, and what columns you have the less likely it is going to work for any Given individual, because…”
Butterfield: Email will survive for at least three to four decades
“Email crosses organizational boundaries very well. It's how we set up this conversation. It's how people like us will set up conversations like this 10 years from now in the future. And internet, I mean, sorry, email will probably be around You know, three, fo…”
Butterfield: Slack is growing its revenue at 15 percent per month
“Our multiple has come down pretty dramatically. And it's continuing to come down because we're still growing at 15% a month.”
Butterfield: All-in-one enterprise software suites are no longer viable
“So first of all, the suite would be far too broad for anyone to do, period, and certainly for anyone to do well.”
Butterfield: Search-centric tools drastically lower cognitive cost compared to manual filing
“Where it wasn't just the fact that you could search for the messages and find them again after, which obviously is very important, but the cognitive cost of processing incoming messages fell through the floor in comparison to a world where you had to manually …”
Butterfield: Game development is ideal practice for general software creation
“Games are harder to build. I mean, it's actually in some ways a serious answer that it's good practice for any other kind of software you might want to make for two reasons. One is because technically they're pretty challenging but probably more importantly, t…”
Butterfield: Lateral transparency across functional teams unlocks immense organizational value
“If the marketing team has perfect clarity about what's going on with sales, and can see where they're falling down, see where they need better materials, if the technical operations team can see what's going on with customer support, if the engineers can see w…”
Butterfield: Slack would not have taken off if launched three years earlier
“If we had started Slack three years earlier, we just, it wouldn't have taken off the way it did. It might have been a moderate success, but it wouldn't have taken off the way it did.”
Butterfield: Enterprise clients will yield higher margins and revenue for Slack
“And I think over time we will have higher margins from those customers and they'll represent a greater percentage of our total revenue versus the total users.”
Butterfield: US and Canada comprise 47% of Slack's daily active users
“The US and Canada put together are 47% of our daily active users, roughly 30% in Europe, 20% in Asia. Japan was our number two country, both for paid seats and daily active users, until it got dislodged by the UK and Germany.”
Slack's internal team receives up to 100,000 automated machine messages daily
“So on our team, the Slack team, we have 250 people. We do about 20,000 messages a day from people. And we do another 80 to a 100,000 messages a day from machines.”
Butterfield: Slack maintains an industry-beating monthly churn of 20 basis points
“We have industry beating churn like 20 basis points of churn a month.”
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: 99% of Slack DAUs use desktop, 65% mobile
“99% of our daily active users will log into Slack at least once on that day that they're active on the desktop, but only about 65% will do the same thing on mobile.”
Butterfield: Slack intentionally omitted structured task management features
“When we were first starting on this and we thought about the core feature set and what we wanted to get in and what we didn't want to be, do we decided we wanted to avoid anything that has too much structure or too much ideology behind it, and so Task manageme…”
Butterfield: Slack provides new hires immediate access to historical company communications
“We would have people start, and they would have the whole history of all communication that happened before they got there available to them, and that's in contrast to an email-based organization where on your first day, you literally have an empty inbox, and …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Stuart's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Co-founder & Former CEO, Slack | 2 | 29 | 75% 3/4 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |