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

“I said that there were good parts as well. And I got to say, you know, I use the bootcamp analogy in a deliberate way. I learned an amazing amount. Some of it was negative lessons, like, you know, don't do this. But a lot of it was positive lessons. And it also was just really eye-opening. It's like I certainly, I learned a lot more than I ever would have learned in any MBA program. Just being exposed to, because Flickr was pretty high profile, I had access to all of the executives and I could see all these decisions and I was involved in all these things that I never would have been involved in otherwise.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at the time we required, it was nine people being acquired by what at the time I think was like an 11 or 12,000 person company. And suddenly, everything that was just easy, like we would just decide something, and then it would be decided, became this massive process. Now, when we wanted to get more servers, we had to go to the hardware review committee, and you had to make an appointment, and you couldn't get an appointment for like five weeks. Meanwhile, the site's going to fall over. When we wanted to blog something like make an announcement publicly or add a feature, we would just do it before we were. And then after we required, there was whole TOMS team. It just took a lot of getting used to. So it's just almost all my energy went into things other than making Flickr a great product.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I was never in the Army, but I looked back at that time the way I would imagine some people look back at boot camp, which was it was horrible at the time, but very rewarding and enriching. I learned a lot and developed character and stuff like that. What was horrible?”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not so for life. Part of that acquisition, what's called earnout. It's conditional on the employee staying with Yahoo for a time.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, dude. The look on her face was just amazing. And then she just scanned the rest of the magazines and checked me out, and that was it.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'll tell you, I grabbed a stack of them at the newsstand inside of JFK and I slapped them down. I have like a dozen copies or something like that. And the woman who was checking me out, she didn't look up and she scanned one magazine and she flipped it over and scanned the other one. And she said, honey, you know all these are the same. I said, yep. And then she looked up at me and then she looked down at the magazine. She looked up at me again and she was like really her eyes lit up. She was so excited. And then she read the cover of it and said something like Web 2.0 from Flickr to MySpace, something, something. And she was just crestfallen. She was just like, oh my God, I thought you were going to be someone important. You were going to be a movie star or like American Idol contestant or something like I cared about.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I would say still a little bit internet famous because I was in New York and I was flying back to the West Coast when that newsweek issue came out.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Smart move for sure. Like 100% of the time they would give the opposite advice today. Yeah, right. But it was really, yeah, Flickr was like a really singular thing in the internet at that time.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So suddenly all the friends and family who invested in the dumb game a couple years prior were in a good position. And everyone who worked there who had deferred their salaries and kind of sacrificed along the way was in a good position. And the feedback that we got from our investors was hey, look, this is going to be a life changing amount of money. You'll be able to do what you want to do after. And who knows if this opportunity will stay around? So you should just take the acquisitions.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to some of the other existing photo sharing sites, fast forward another six months or so, now it's Christmas of 2004, so it's about to turn into 2005. And we also had a bunch of venture capitalists who were interested. At the same time, Yahoo is getting really, really serious. So the search part of Yahoo made an offer to buy us. And then over that Christmas New Year's period, 2004, 2005, we had to choose, do we want to take this money from the investors and build this into something bigger? Or do we want to take the money now from? So in the end, what we decided to do.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But because Flickr was really taking off in the public imagination, we actually got some people who are interested in investing. So we actually raised a little bit of money, so we were able to buy the servers, and we were growing really quickly. And we actually had people buy in pro accounts, you know, not very many, but we also didn't pay ourselves very much. So we're covering a bit of the cost through actual usage. And suddenly companies wanted to buy us.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So every week we would put an order to Dell. UPS would deliver boxes from Dell and then every Friday night Jason and I would go down to where the servers were and screwdrivers and put servers onto the racks and to set everything up.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We sold what we called Pro accounts, which let you, I believe it was you could see the whole history of your photos, whereas if you didn't buy a pro account, you could only see 200. And that actually went pretty well. But you're right, hardware at that time was just astronomically expensive”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so around that time, Google had bought Blogger, which was one of the early blogging programs, and they didn't have a way to host photos. So they put in their help materials online when people said, how do I upload photos? They said, use Flickr. It was like the one. Standout of that time where the world had kind of soured on the internet that kind of rose from the ashes of all that destruction and became like a cool, interesting thing that people could get involved in that was fun about the internet again.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a pretty big deal when it launched in that closed community. There wasn't nearly as many people online. This is probably a decade before the majority of people got smartphones. That internet wasn't still perceived as this kind of like weird, creepy place. Like if you saw a popular image of an internet user, it would be like a really overweight guy in the basement.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it was something that we could complete faster, you know, like we could actually get it out. And we were at this point, Eric was the one person on the team who had kids. So he was the one person who got paid. We just weren't able to pay anyone anymore. So we had this vote I lost or Flickr lost in game one so that I had to call Eric on the side and like do some what I imagined happens in the Senate some kind of like horse trading to convince him to change his vote and that worked and that decision was December 2003 and in February 2004 we launched Flickr we all flew to San Diego for this conference and”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, whether to switch our efforts to Flickr and to really pursue that instead of the game. And then I lost. What was the”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. So I actually forgot about this until a couple years ago when I was reminded of it. I kind of laid out everything and said, this is the situation. We're just not going to be able to finish the game. And I let everyone vote.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like a fan. And his name was Cal Henderson. Cal was such a geek, like one of the nerdiest people I'd ever met in my life. He was also a prodigy programmer. And so when I convinced him to start to work with us on making Flickr, he was really into it. And on the train to London every day, two hours in, two hours out, he wrote almost all of the guts of Flickr, the way to upload the photos and to process them, to store them, display them. The original payment he got was me buying stuff off his Amazon wish list. So it was like radiohead EPs and rare vinyl and stuff like that.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had developed a bunch of stuff to illustrate the social networks inside the game. We didn't have any APIs for him to use, but it turned out had hacked into our internal mailing list when we were working on the game and had been reading all of our messages, which is why he was able to develop all this stuff.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you could do stuff with it. So when I say do stuff, I mean, people could draw a little rectangle on the photo and then make an annotation of that part of the photo. They could chat about them. They could send them to other people. They could change the title. And everything happened dynamically. So when I did something, you would see what was happening on your computer. So again, technologically for the time, amazing, like just mind-blowing, people were incredibly effusive. And let me just pause for a second to say. This was the first version of Flickr, which was not good and which we quickly changed. And the reason we were successful is because we changed it. And this is like a good point to introduce another character. We've got so many threads going here. So one of the players of the game was like early 20s hardcore, just nerd, who lived in a tiny village in England and had a job in London. He commuted to London every day in the train for a couple of hours.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A way to take the interface that we had developed for the game, which let people chat, which let people change locations, which let people manipulate these objects, like to pull them into their inventory and do stuff with them. And instead of the objects, we'll just have photos. So you can upload a photo.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we had at that time developed a whole bunch of really interesting and relatively novel technologies. So we had a game that you could play in a web browser. And despite the fact that it was pretty rudimentary graphics, it was still, from a technological perspective, totally fascinating and new. And this story sounds like too good to be true and kind of ridiculous. A group of lawyers had organized a conference called Law and Virtual Worlds in New York, and they invited all these people and I went.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I put my money into it, some of us working on it put our money into it. We hired a couple of people. We raised a couple hundred thousand dollars of friends and family money. And when I say friends and family, I mean literally friends and family. By the middle of 2003, we've now been working on it in a year. It was clear how complex this was going to be, would you realize we're never going to be able to finish it for the amount of money we raised? And we were desperate for something else that... We could complete in a shorter amount of time. And that thing ended up being Flickr. I think when we started it, the intention was we'll build this, and someone will buy it for like a million dollars, and then we can use that million dollars to finish the game. And of course, that's not what happened at all.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was 2002, 2003. So the graphics weren't even Minecraft quality. It was more like there was a map. There's different objects and you could click on them to pick them up or click on them to do stuff with them. They're really rudimentary. So we tried everything to raise some money for this. And there was zero interest in investing in this because now it's like the middle of 2002. No one wanted to invest in anything that had anything to do with the internet”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there's a whole type of KME that existed before graphical games took off. And they were the precursor for everything that came after, World of Warcraft being the example that most people would know. But we weren't interested in fighting games. We were interested in creativity and play as kind of a pretext for social interaction. So, this idea still has a lot of appeal to me. It's a horrible idea commercially. Like, it's just there's not enough people who are interested in it. But, you know, there was a group who used the prototype and were very enthusiastic in the seeds of this incredible community. And we thought, hey, we built this prototype. People liked it. We can make this into a real project.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And sparked up a friendship with him. And by this time Jason had come back from the Gradfinder acquisition. And we all started working together on a project called Game Never Ending, which was an attempt to build a web-based, massively multiplayer game.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. Yeah, in 1999, I started a web log, and there was a couple hundred people or so around the world who had blogs, and we all knew each other. One of the bloggers whose blogs I admired was a woman named Katarina Fake. She had a website called Katarina.net, and it still exists now 20 plus years later. Around that time, we met and a year-ish later we got married. And it was an interesting time because, you know, because all of the dot-com era hype had completely dissipated. A lot of companies had imploded, but there's a lot of creativity. So in late 99, I started this competition called The 5K, which was to build the smallest, any website or web page that could be done in five kilobytes of data. Of the people who entered the competition was a guy named Eric Costello who lived at the time in St. Louis”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, a bunch of more tens of thousands. I don't even remember exactly what it was, but it wasn't like millions of dollars. But it was probably a good job.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's like a giant directory of high schools. And in each high school, you could have a graduation year and people would just sign up and message each other and stuff like that. We worked on it from six or eight months, and it got acquired by Yeah, so we're lucky by one of these dot coms that had raised a ton of money, like I don't know, $150 million. I don't even remember what it was called now. This is like the last gasp, so this is the end of the year 2000 And they ended up going bankrupt a year later”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I convinced one of the guys who happened to sit next to me, Jason Klassen, who was running a website on the side called Gradfinder, which was a competitor to classmates. So this is many years before Facebook existed. And I convinced him to leave when I had my $35,000. And we went out and raised a whole $50,000 of money from other people and started it up as a real business.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or tickets to Brazil or boxing paraphernalia or whatever the But no one had anything really to do. No one knew exactly what we were doing. It was really early.com. It seemed like this was incredibly valuable. We're going to have a contest giveaway at BMW Z3, which was like a Net James Bond movie, so it was like the hot car at that time. So that we got people to sign up. What are they signing up for? I don't know. It got worse and worse and worse, like day by day because no one knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing and the management meetings turned into screaming matches. And so around the end of February of the year 2000, I quit. I walked away. I thought I was walking away from like $10 million in equity. And I got bought out for $35,000 on my way out. And of course, like 10 days later or two weeks later was the first dot-com crash. And so in the end, I got $35,000 more than I would have had I stayed. Yeah.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bought them up. I didn't even know you could buy.com domains in 93. Like, that was really, really. And the way that we thought back then was we would develop one universal e-commerce back end and then have all these domain names be the front end.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The guy who founded it had bought in 1993 all of these domains like vietnam.com and brazil.com and makeup.com and perfume.com.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the Hindu and then later Buddhist concept of the path, the way. And when I was 12 years old, like most 12 year olds, really wanted to be normal. So it changed it to Stuart because for some reason I had the impression that Stuart was the most normal name you could have.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they had restored an old lock cabin that was built around the turn of the last century. Didn't have running water until I was three, didn't have electricity until I was four. It was actually a funny story of my mother's father who came from Poland to Montreal in between World War I and World War II, coming to visit them. And they had a bathtub in the front yard and just trying to eat the food that they were growing and didn't have many possessions. And he was like, I can't believe I escaped the Stettel in Poland and sent all of you to university. And then now you're back living in this dump.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were sure that this was going to be something that was big. But we went back to our investors, so including Andreessen Horowitz, and we went in there and told them our plan and, you know, we could one day get to $100 million in revenue with this business and thereby be a billion dollar business. And they were just like, 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. And they were like... Luck with your stupid little thing.”
2018-07-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT