The life and career of Stewart Butterfield, the Flickr cofounder and Slack CEO who just sold his company to Salesforce for $27.7 billion

Butterfield was born in 1973 in a small fishing village called Lund in British Columbia. His parents didn't have running water in their log cabin until he was 3 years old. His family moved to Victoria, British Columbia, when he was 5 so he could attend school, according to BBC.

Source: BBC

Butterfield's father, David, was a sergeant in the US Army who had a moral qualm with the Vietnam war. One night, he decided to desert, driving to Canada to avoid being sent overseas. In Canada, he met Butterfield's mother, Norma, according to Wired.

Source: Wired

Butterfield told BBC that his parents "were definitely hippies" who "wanted to live off the land." They originally named him Dharma, but when he turned 12, he changed his name to Stewart, which he now regrets. "There are no good characters named Stewart," Butterfield told Wired.

Source: BBC, Wired

At age 7, Butterfield got his first computer, an Apple II. He taught himself to code. and once he was in college, he designed websites for extra money. "I was among the first cohort of kids to grow up with computers," he told Business Insider.

Source: Business Insider, BBC

Butterfield graduated from the University of Victoria in 1996 with a philosophy degree. He later received his Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.

Source: Wired

In 2000, he joined his friend Jason Classon at Classon's startup, Gradfinder.com. The internet bubble had just burst, but the pair still managed to sell Gradfinder.com for what Butterfield describes as "a healthy profit" to Highwired six months after launching the company. Classon went to work for Highwired and Butterfield went back to web design freelancing.

Source: Business Insider

Butterfield created a contest called the "5K competition," which encouraged people to design websites in under 5 kilobytes. It took off. "It became unexpectedly huge, in every country in the world," Butterfield told Business Insider.

Source: Business Insider 

Butterfield met Caterina Fake, who was then a blogger, in 2000. They got married two years later and in 2007, they had a daughter together. They got divorced six months after her birth, according to Wired.

Source: Wired

Shortly after their honeymoon, Butterfield and Fake founded Ludicorp, an online multiplayer gaming startup, with Classon. This time, timing did not work in the team's favor: After 9/11 and another tech bubble burst, the company couldn't raise money.

Source: Business Insider 

Butterfield got the idea for his next venture, Flickr, as he was throwing up from food poisoning in a New York hotel. Butterfield's team had created a photo-sharing platform but realized it wouldn't be successful if it required both parties to be online at the same time. They made some changes, and Flickr began to take off.

Source: Business Insider 

 

 

Flickr was revolutionary at the time for a few reasons: For one, photo-sharing in the cloud was a new concept on its own. But Flickr also pioneered features like tagging, user authentication, and adding permissions for which contacts can view your photos. Yahoo snapped up the company in 2005 for between $22 million and $25 million.

Source: Wired

Butterfield and Fake relocated to the Bay Area and joined Yahoo as part of the acquisition. But three years later, Butterfield was fed up and tried to quit. The company asked him to stay on for a few more months to keep up appearances (Fake had just quit too) so Butterfield spent several months doing nothing, not even showing up to the office, according to Wired.

Source: Wired

Finally, in June 2008, Butterfield was able to resign. He sent a now-famous resignation letter where he described Yahoo as a tin-smithing operation and said he was retiring to tend to his "small but growing alpaca herd."

Source: Wired

When he left Yahoo and Flickr, Butterfield wanted to make the multiplayer game he started working on with Ludicorp. He rounded up some of his former coworkers from Flickr and Ludicorp, including Cal Henderson, to found a startup called Tiny Speck. They started building the game "Glitch."

Source: Business Insider

But while "Glitch" had a "hardcore cult following," it was hard to justify the $17 million in venture capital that had been poured into it, Butterfield told Business Insider. "The game was too weird for most people," he said.

Source: Business Insider

Tiny Speck found the perfect pivot: the communication tool Butterfield and his team had built to chat in real-time in the game. It became known as an instant-messaging platform called Slack, which formally launched in 2013.

Source: Business Insider

Slack's growth impressed some of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture capital firms, like Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. It became one of the fastest-growing companies ever, achieving a $1 billion valuation less than a year after it officially launched.

Source: Fortune, TechCrunch

By the summer of 2018, Slack had grown to over 8 million daily active users, even as rumors swirled that Amazon was looking into an acquisition. All told, Slack raised over $1.2 billion in funding, and hit a $7.1 billion valuation in its last round of funding.

Source: Business Insider

In April 2019, Slack filed to go public. It made its stock market debut two months later, for a direct listing over a traditional initial public offering. On its first day of trading, Slack shares surged nearly 50%.

Source: Markets Insider

Around the same time his company was going public, Butterfield experienced another milestone: He got engaged to Jennifer Rubio, the cofounder of the popular luggage brand Away, in Tofino, a town near Vancouver. The couple had planned to get married in Peru but decided to cancel it due to the pandemic, according to Rubio's Instagram.

Source: Jennifer Rubio/Instagram

In December, cloud giant Salesforce announced it was buying Slack for $27.7 billion, making it Salesforce's largest acquisition to date. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a press release: "This is a match made in heaven."

Source: Business Insider