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Stewart Butterfield

Co-founder & Former CEO, Slack · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveinvestor

Stewart Butterfield is the co-founder and former CEO of Slack. He also co-founded the photo-sharing platform Flickr.

13statements → 5claims → 2claims resolved → 3.69/5average certainty → 2.15/5average debate potential → 39said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 2 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 assertions · 1 opinion · 5 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Stewart argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Butterfield: Microsoft Teams is limited to 5,000 users and 200 channels
“It's limited to 5000 people per instance and critically only 200 channels. And if you want to add a 201st channel, you have to hard delete one of them without the whole history.”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 25:57 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Butterfield: Flickr was acquired months before YouTube was founded
“Flickr was already acquired maybe, like, eight months or something like that before YouTube was even founded.”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 1:55 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
0% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Everything Stewart Butterfield said on the Official SaaStr Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Butterfield: Microsoft Teams competes primarily with Zoom rather than Slack
“Teams, which is the real alternative in some sense, although I think it's much more of a competitor to Zoom or other voice and video calling services than it is a Slack.”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 25:47 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Assertion Supported
Butterfield: Microsoft Teams is limited to 5,000 users and 200 channels
“It's limited to 5000 people per instance and critically only 200 channels. And if you want to add a 201st channel, you have to hard delete one of them without the whole history.”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 25:57 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Insight
Butterfield: Crises give executives cover to push through difficult organizational restructurings
“The backdrop of global pandemic change is so enormous that you can kind of sneak in anything you want. And we see I see that talking to other CEOs today, not my customers, just like, There's essentially a group therapy SAS CEO round table. And it's like, oh, t…”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 13:20 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Insight
Butterfield: Product comprehension and intent matter far more than removing UX friction
“Let's focus on people's comprehension. Let's focus on whether they want to do this thing or not, and less on the friction. You can make it trivially easy and remove every bit of friction from some process, adding an app to a channel in Slack. Let's say, but if…”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 22:57 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Insight
Butterfield: Slack's 80-cent daily per-user cost makes enterprise pricing haggling trivial
“Slack will come out to 80 cents per user per day or something like that, and if you're spending 50% of your time on internal communication and this has a real impact on that, who cares? Like set the thermostat half a degree warmer or cooler depending where you…”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 19:53 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Insight
Butterfield: Crisis accelerates enterprise digital transformation by months to years
“I do think for some customers, we're pushing them three or six months down the road. For others, it's like three or five years down the road of digital transformation.”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 5:49 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Insight
Butterfield: Slack's ongoing challenge is selling without an existing budget line item
“An ongoing challenge for us, maybe not right this quarter, but kind of historically and when things resume normalcy, that there is no line item that we're replacing in people's budgets. Typically there is no other, you know, like what I said in the, it's still…”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 8:45 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Butterfield: Slack scaled its Oracle rollout to 100,000 employees in 15 months
“Oracle had through acquisitions maybe a thousand or 2000 people using Slack, and in 15 months we took it to a 100,000 people wall to wall.”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 10:18 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Disclosure
Butterfield: Slack spends twice as much on Workday as its own software
“You know, we spend, as a multiple of what we would sell Slack to ourselves, obviously we get Slack for free, but we spend about two X that on a work day. And I'm thinking of things that are like basically company-wide. We also spend about two X that on Zoom be…”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 19:32 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Butterfield: Slack processes roughly 1.6 million transactions per second at peak
“At peak, it's like 1.6 million transactions a second or something like that. I could look in the background while we're talking here. it's huge. There's tens of thousands of servers.”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 28:39 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Disclosure
Butterfield: Slack grants free months to customers canceling over COVID-19
“When you cancel, like actually cancel a paid plan, which historically has been, you know, very, very low. So we have excellent retention. We do ask you why, and when we see COVID pandemic, you know lockdown, any of those things in the response, we just write t…”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 15:54 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Butterfield: Atlassian Founders Uploaded Daily Company Videos Early in Lockdown
“I was talking to Scott and Mike from Atlassian, and in the early days, they were uploading a short video, like a 92nd video to the whole company every single day, just to say to people, you know, here's what we're hearing right now.”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 36:49 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
Assertion Contradicted
Butterfield: Flickr was acquired months before YouTube was founded
“Flickr was already acquired maybe, like, eight months or something like that before YouTube was even founded.”
Stewart Butterfield Apr 28, 2020 ▶ 1:55 Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community

The other half of the tape: Stewart Butterfield's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 37 times in 15 episodes on the Official SaaStr Podcast. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Jason Lemkin 14Alan Yen 8Kevin Egan 5Merci Grace 4Maggie Hott 4Danny Herzberg 1Auren Hoffman 1

Statements about Stewart Butterfield, by other people (2)

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemkin: Eric Yuan and Stewart Butterfield learned SaaS from SaaStr
“It's where Eric Wan learned SAST, and Stuart Butterfield learned SAST, and so many, that's why we get so many great speakers, because they were part of SASTR so early on.”
Jason Lemkin Mar 10, 2023 ▶ 15:16 SaaStr APAC AMA with Jason Lemkin, SaaStr CEO
Insight
Grace: Video games act as continuous onboarding experiences until they end
“Games are basically onboarding experiences forever until the game is over, because you're always learning something new.”
Merci Grace Oct 9, 2018 ▶ 7:34 Insider's Guide To Building Great Product w/Merci Grace, Slack's First Head of Product

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0082154201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions
024201820192020202120222023202420252026episodes it came up in
007.52154201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions per episode
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 7 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2023 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2021 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
2019 6 mentions in 1 episode
2018 12 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community Apr 28, 2020 28m
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