Insight
Butterfield: A CEO's Job Is Crafting a Story People Believe
“Because the job of a CEO is often just to come up with a story that enough people believe that you can make something happen in the world.”
Insight
Butterfield: Best software methodology is solving your own aggravating problems egolessly
“This, by the way, I think is the greatest software development methodology that's impossible to replicate, which is, don't think about what you're doing, have no ego, there's no speculation, there's no, I can imagine a user would want to spend the minimum numb…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Butterfield: Early Slack Relied on Internal Rather Than Cross-Company Network Effects
“So Slack was a really interesting product to scale in the early days, because it had very, very little network effect between companies, but a huge, like, binary, you know, hundred percent or just nothing inside of companies.”
Disclosure
Butterfield: Flickr was born from survival instinct, not grand vision
“It wasn't coming from a grand vision of what photos could be. All that stuff came later. There was no insight. It was just like, can we not go out of business?”
Insight
Butterfield: Games matter primarily as excuses for social interaction
“It's not games that are so interesting to me, it's play as an excuse to interact with people socially.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Butterfield: Tiny Speck Placed Every Single Laid-Off Employee into a Job
“And we ended up getting every single person a job.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Butterfield: Slack launched with the exact pricing and vision in its first deck
“It had the pricing that we went live with. It's exactly the product vision. It's exactly the way we marketed it. Like everything was preset and we didn't have to change it because I think we had three and a half years of practice and finding product market fit…”
Insight
Butterfield: Group-Wide Adoption Friction Converts Directly into High Product Retention
“The benefit of that, though, once you're able to break through, is once the group starts doing it, you, the, what was difficult about it becomes its benefit. It's very hard to get the group to change to anything else once they switch.”
Assertion Supported
Butterfield: Yahoo acquired Flickr roughly 13 months after its February 2004 launch
“We launched in February 2004 and by March 2005, the acquisition by Yahoo had closed. Basically a year in market, and maybe 10 and a half months before we were in the middle of negotiations.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Butterfield: 97% of Glitch Users Abandoned the Game Within Five Minutes
“It was incredibly powerful for the small minority of people for whom it worked. So they spent 20 hours a week playing, and they were very committed. It was a super tight community. But most people, like, you know, 97% who signed up would be out of there within…”
Disclosure
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”
Disclosure
Butterfield: Ludicorp ran so low on money only one parent was paid
“We got to the point where the only person on the team who got paid was the one person on the team who had kids, and we needed some kind of Hail Mary.”
