YouSaid · the spoken record

Stewart Butterfield

lines on the record: 87
first: 2018-07-30
most recent: 2018-07-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And there's been an enormous amount of hard work by a lot of people. There is this real tailwind that we have that really just makes all of that cephalot easier.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did work hard and were clever, and we were able to call on a lot of experience. I think we did a lot of things right. But there's a real increasing returns dynamics. Once you start to have some success, the rest of the success becomes easier and easier. And you look at Slack is the ultimate example of this. We were growing really, really quickly even before we launched. And because of that, the press would write about us. And because the press wrote about us, investors were interested. And because investors were interested in wanting to invest, we were able to raise all this money. And that got us more headlines. And that got us more interest from great applicants who wanted to come work at the company. And the opposite is absolutely true as well. You know, one stumble and you lose a couple of good employees and now investors are kind of skeptical. You have to scale back your ambitions. Now you're not doing anything interesting. No one writes about you. No one wants to come work at your company. Investors are really not interested and you go to business. So, you know, while I am proud of all that we have,”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm trying to remember where I read this, but there's a nice visual, and there's a billion blades of grass on this massive field, and people are playing golf, and every blade of grass says, like, I believe the golf ball is going to fall on me. And someone hits a golf ball, and sure enough, it falls on some blades of grass, and they say, see, it was me all along. The ball was going to fall somewhere. This is kind of like the I was on the cover of Forbes magazine when Flack was really successful. If I didn't do this, if Slack wasn't successful, if it wasn't me, it's not like Forbes was just like, okay, well, we won't publish a March. No cover this month. Someone was always going to be on the cover. Someone was always going to be successful. And I tried to remain very conscious of that fact. Like there's...”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the ultimate level of wealth is I don't care what vacation costs, like, I don't care how expensive the hotel is or which flight we go on. Beyond that, I really don't think it makes any difference. So I'm feeling incredibly fortunate and it's great to have all these resources. But I'm just going to give almost all of it away because there's no, I don't get any additional happiness in spending it. Yeah. And there's a lot of suffering in the world, and there's a lot of inequality. And I think that's a place where, not just me, but the whole company can make a difference.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it certainly makes my life easier. And there's all that research, and I don't remember where we're at with the latest version of this, but like beyond a certain amount of money, it doesn't make your life any better. I really feel like there's three levels of wealth in the world. The first level is I'm not stressed out about debt. People who no longer worry about their credit card bills or their student loans. That's like level one of wealth. Level two is I don't care what stuff costs in restaurants. You know, you're like, oh, I really want this thing, but it's $18, but the other thing is $12, so I'll get the $12 one. There's a level where suddenly it doesn't really matter how much you spend on a particular meal.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One nominal correction. We've been around for a long time as a company, and I have four co-founders, so I'm not even a billionaire on paper.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It can be really difficult to kind of hold it together. And a lot of this has just kind of dawned on me over the last year. And I think it was probably, I feel like as a CEO, 18 months behind where I should be. And those challenges are starting to become clearer and clearer.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trivially easy for everyone to understand what's going on. You get to 100 people and that's suddenly it's hard. In 2016 we went from 80 people to 320 so we doubled twice. And that meant we have an all hands. I say, hey, put up your hands. If you've been here for less than a year and 75% of the company puts up their hands really difficult when the average 10 year is so low and not only that, but there's two people or whatever on the Android engineering team. And then they're working their butts off developing the app, but they're also trying to hire the third person. And the third person starts, and they have all these questions, and they don't know what they're doing. And then meanwhile, you're trying to hire the fourth person. And in that chaos,”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it was like a series of strategic decisions that made all the difference. But what I found is what matters is performance at the level of the organization because to the degree that everyone's pushing in the same direction, you're able to achieve something. If people are pushing in opposite directions, then you can put as much energy as you want in and nothing happens. So when we were eight people, it's...”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I lose all kinds of sleep. And this is where it gets really interesting. And this is to me the most fascinating part of the journey. So through a combination of inexperience and probably arrogance, when we were smaller, I thought like my job is to be smarter than everyone and to make all of the important decisions. And if I make all the right decisions and I'm smart enough, then we'll be successful. Because that's the story that we tell after the fact around a lot of companies.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. Or that I mentioned the difficulty in telling the team and what that felt like. It was hard not to let that just crush me because it is so embarrassing. It's so humiliating. And it's such a, it was such a hard decision to make. I think partly because what you hear is the never give up in your dreams, resilience, grit. You got to keep going. It's all about the fight. It's the slog. And I think that's generally true. And I think it's really important to persevere through things that are difficult. But there's also a point beyond which you're just making a mistake.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it feels like all of the years of sweat and toil and sacrifice, all of the years pressing on with a game of failure after failure have been more than rewarded, like rewarded dozens of times over. Because we thought all of the other eight-person software development teams in the world would use this. And that happened not that long after we launched. And now there's like three-star Michelin restaurants using it. And there's like the Norwegian Department of Labor and Welfare Administration. There's like the Hartford, Connecticut Police Department. There's like NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There's all these enormous companies. There's all these small companies. We never thought it would become this big. Even in our grandest ambitions, it was a tenth of what it is today.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a pretty mad scramble, you know, and that year we went from maybe 10 or 11. We hired a couple people at most 12 employees up to about 40, 50. We might have ended that year at 80 people. And it was breakneck. We had to move offices and we don't have enough desks. People are sharing desks. Gradually we put some systems into place. We started hiring professionals to manage different parts of the business. And now there's a thousand people. It's amazing.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was completely insane. And, you know, at that same period, we're still growing like somewhere between 5 and 10% a week.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. To be fair, it took us many, many more weeks to get the second million because that was in all the pent up demand. But yeah, we were off to the races. Unlike almost any enterprise software ever, people would talk about it. Like they would be in line in the coffee shop and they would say, oh my God, you got to start using Slack. It's amazing. It changed my life. And they would post to Twitter and say, I recommend. And no one ever says that about the software that they have to use at work. No. So it was a completely different experience.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It cost $80 per person per year. So you would pay, you would only pay for the people who are actually using it. So if you have a 50 person company and there's 20 people using it, then you just pay for 20 people using it.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we also told all the people who had been using it for free, like, hey, now you're going to have to start paying, we'll give you a nice, healthy credit to thank you for being one of our early testers. And we found the conversion was excellent. Within maybe two weeks or three weeks of launching that officially, we had sold a million bucks worth of slack.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The leaky bucket problem that I talked about in the context of the game was completely eliminated. We found that once people started using it, as hard as it was to get people to start, once they started, they almost never stop. And at that point, people weren't paying us. They were just using it for free. But we could see that they were getting utility. They were logging out at the end of the day, and first thing in the morning they were right back in there.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our grand ambition, which was, hey, we believe that there's, you know, we could one day get to $100 million in revenue with this business and thereby be a billion dollar business. And you guys have no idea what you're doing. You don't understand what it is to sell into companies. You're going to need all of this expertise. You're up against X, Y, Z, different companies, different technologies. And they were like, good luck with your stupid little thing.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This totally makes sense. Like, you know, we probably from the practice of trying to convince people, we had definitely convinced ourselves. We were sure that this was going to be something that was big. What's funny is we went back to our investors, so including Andreessen Horowitz, which is now like a really big, successful venture capital firm. And this group had a lot of experience in enterprise software, which suddenly we were an enterprise software company instead of a game company. And we went in there and told them our plan and”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we would go back and forth with this for a while. There's like always a million objections. So it took us a long, like to get the first three or four external teams using it took us forever. And then finally, we convinced”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I would say, oh, this will be like a huge boon because you'll start to consolidate all the communication that's happening in all these other channels. And critically, you'll build this archive. And the archive increases in value over time. So the longer you use it, the more you get out of it, because you can find the answers to questions that people had had before. It's this resource that's shared across everyone. You have to spend a lot less energy. And then, of course, you would object again. And I would have more and more stuff to read.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I can't send you a message unless you're also using it. So it has this real challenge at the beginning, especially when no one's heard of it. No one knows anyone else who uses anything like this. It's brand new software from this flaky company that just failed to make a massively multiplayer game. So who knows how long they're going to be doing this? Why am I going to trust them? What we imagine would be a really easy sell. We would go and say, hey, you should try this. It's great. It worked amazing for us, was just received with cold stares. You go back to the same company like five, six, seven times, and we would show them demos and we would try to explain. It was great practice, though.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, there's two things. So, one was the internal communication system that we had built that was just really jury-wigged. But what was as a blueprint for what we wanted to build, it was more or less perfect. So we had that. We started development completely from scratch in December 2012, January 2013. A couple months later, we had enough done that we could start using it. A couple months after that, we had enough done that we could invite some friends to try it. And then suddenly we realized, look, oh, oh, here's a challenge. We had been working like this for years and it just felt perfectly natural for us and the advantages of it were just obvious. In fact, so obvious that we were hard to articulate. And we tried to convince our friends at other companies to use it, and they were like, why would we do that? Another thing to check. And the really hard part of it was, unlike most software, you can't unilaterally decide to use Slack with your colleagues. Everyone has to buy in.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Slack, speaking of dot com registrations, was registered by this guy in 1993, lives in somewhere in the Midwest, I think Wisconsin, who is an electrical engineer, and there's no more iconic internet thing than this. He had it as a website with pictures of his cats. So it's just like the domain was just sitting there. Slack.com, and you can go in the internet archive and look at his old website with pictures of his cats.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a bunch of criteria we had that wanted to be a regular English word. We wanted people to be able to spell it if we said it. We had to be able to get the trademark and we had to be able to get the domain. There's the negative connotations that slacker slacking off. But there's also these positive connotations to pick up the slack or to cut me some slack. And I think that the negative connotations, I felt like because this would be an unexpected and unusual name, it would be more likely to stick with people. Having said that, we spent like the next four months arguing about different names, like dozens of different names, and all of them in the end either ran into like we couldn't get the trademark or we couldn't get the domain name.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's pretty much it. None of them wanted their money back. 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 keep our ownership in the company and see what you can do. That turned out to be the best decision any of them had ever made in investing.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But to me, they're fundamentally similar for two reasons. One is, I just like making software, and I like doing it with these other people. They all like making software as well. And then on the other hand, whereas there was two massively multiplayer games and there was a massively multiplayer Photosharing, Slack is massively multiplayer communications at work.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we were. You go through a trauma with a group of people and you really get bound to them. It makes you very close. And so I think we all wanted to continue to work together. In fact, we wanted to work with many more of the people that we didn't have the opportunity to keep the happy story is we ended up hiring back quite a few of the people who worked on the game, including that one software engineer I mentioned who I had just convinced to move. He's been an early Slack employee for a long time. They might sound completely different. One's enterprise software that has all this Fortune 100 customers, and the other one's online game.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was myself and the other three co founders, so those four of us. And then there were four employees that we kept, one of whom we had worked with back in the Flickr days, who's a back-end programmer, iOS or mobile engineer, our head of QA, and one designer.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny. We have these conversations and we had them in our internal communication tool, the thing that predated Slack. And so there's timestamps. My memory is very different than the reality. My memory is it took us months to decide this and there's a lot of debate. In fact, it took us like less than a week. The core was there almost instantly.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once we had decided to shut down the game, that we realized, hey, this system is actually pretty good. We would never work without a system like this again. It's so much better than anything else we had used before. Maybe other people would like it.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you were right in the first place. We didn't even think about it. I think if someone asked me, what do you do for internal education? I would have shrug my shoulders and said, I don't know, like whatever everyone does. We didn't think about it at all. And it was only...”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so the interesting thing about Glitch was while it wasn't successful as a business, we were extraordinarily productive. And there was a system for internal communication that we had developed that we didn't think about as a thing. Like it didn't have a name. We never talked about it. It was just how we happened to communicate. And it was all built around the concept of a channel. And you can have a channel that create it for anything, for a project, for a functional group, for a topic of conversation. The channel exists whether you're a member or not, and it can continue to exist after you leave. And it's kind of an inversion of the typical interoffice communication, which is entirely”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the end of that process, we had gotten every single person who worked there who was getting laid off, and there was 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 they had. And I think that making sure everyone got hired generated an enormous amount of goodwill, like in the community at large. And I think that was very helpful for us down the road when we started Slack and people were more willing to give us a chance.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is where I feel glad that we made the decision when we did because we still, we had raised all this money. We still had like over $5 million in the bank. It was late in the year. We're going to give, keep paying everyone for several months so they had a chance to find another job. We built a website called Hire a Genius and we had everyone's like a portfolio, their name and endorsements. We wrote reference letters. We helped people with their resumes. We made introductions.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost everyone in the room, I had personally convinced that they should come work at this company, that they should accept our stock options, that they should believe in the project, that they should believe in me. And so it's... Like it's humiliating. There's a real sense that I had failed all these people, that I had an obligation to them. And I had locked eyes with this one software engineer. Who had just three months before moved, he had an infant daughter, I don't know, like maybe six months or a year old. He was moving away from his in-laws who were helping take care of the kid, moving to a new city with his whole family. And now I was telling him he didn't have a job anywhere.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a horrible experience. And I say we're going to have an all hands meeting and everyone files in and gets together. People have their coffee in the morning and their chit-chatting. And finally, I stand up and the meeting starts and I start to tell them that we're going to shut down the game. And before I could even get the first half of the sentence out, I was crying.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wrote to all the co founders and then to our board of directors and just said it's over. And that definitely was not a unanimous point of view and there's a lot of kind of contention and argument.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so I was losing a lot of sleep in those days. I was up really late one night. And it was like two or three in the morning. I was in bed and I hadn't been sleeping for hours. I just realized I don't believe this can work. I don't believe it anymore. And I realized right in that moment there's a saying, if you're thinking about firing someone a lot, you should just fire them. Meaning that intuition, if that keeps coming up, it's almost certainly correct. And you wouldn't be thinking that all the time if there was a real shot at making the relationship work. I think it's exactly the same thing with a business. Once I began not to have little doubts, but once at a fundamental level, I was just like, I don't think this is going to work. It's not going to work. So first thing that morning...”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they didn't stick with it. And it was always the next thing that was going to fix it. The next game dynamic we added. The next bit of customization, the next, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. But as we continue to try those things, we just never found that magic formula that would make it work economically. It would have been a fine, what people call lifestyle business, but it was never going to become the kind of business that would justify $17.5 million of venture capital investment.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, being in business, and I think especially being a CEO requires a lot of unnatural optimism. And at some point, it's just that optimism is exhausted. So we had what's called a leaky bucket. So people would come in the top of the funnel, and the funnel is kind of describing like first people hear about your thing, then they go to the website, then they sign up, then they, in our case, play the game a little bit, then they end up paying you. And each of those stages, you kind of, some people fall out of the process, so that's why it's called the funnel. The leaky bucket is you get people in the top, but they just fall out. Like they fall out the process too early. Not enough of them make it all the way through.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was that good for a very small population. In fact, it was really hard for us to get people even to go through the first few minutes of the game because it was just so different and so weird. Most people who tried it were like, what the hell is this? And just pieced out in the first three minutes of gameplay.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. It was very easy for us to raise money. So we started off with a million and a half dollars. We were able to hire someone. We were able to afford all the technology we wanted. And as we started developing the game, we had a bunch of really positive early indications. We charged people money and they paid a lot. The average person who paid was paying $70 a year.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So in this game, it was a bizarre, fantastical world, really tried to encourage individual creativity and people could create stuff inside the world. But in the world, you would milk butterflies in order to get butterfly milk, and you could eggs grew on trees. And the look was kind of like Dr. Seuss meets Monty Python, meets modern-day graphic novels. So as you moved around the world, the look changed dramatically.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there was me and three of the engineers, including Cal Henderson and Eric Costello, and another one named Sergei Morachov, who's in Vancouver. What we decided to do, which was called Glitch, was completely different than anything that anyone had ever seen before.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we apparently didn't. I mean, so the world looked pretty different at that point. So now it's the beginning of 2009. There was at least an order of magnitude more people online, whereas in 2002, the majority of people didn't have internet access at home. Now the majority did. Computers are way faster. All the hardware was way cheaper. online games were something that we were really popular. And so we figured like, oh, this time we can't fail. All of the conditions are perfect, so we should do this.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There wasn't an immediate short-term plan. It was definitely to take some time off because that had been a real whirlwind. But it didn't take long for a lot of the same people who worked on Flickr and had worked on the previous game to decide that we wanted to work on the game again. You want to go back to...”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that stress isn't like, okay, I can leave it at the office and go home to my family, which is totally independent. The other really interwoven. So I think it was a difficult time. By the time that we left Yahoo, pretty soon after that it was just over.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, it was. We had only recently had a kid, and we didn't work together that closely at Yahoo, but it's pretty challenging to work with your spouse, especially in the early days of a startup. So this is going back many years now when we first started working on Flickr, like out of money, and it's not just the businesses out of money, it's like we're out of money. You're out of money.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT