Stewart Butterfield

Last updated
Stewart Butterfield
Web Summit 2017 - Day 1 CG1 6591 (38187890026).jpg
Butterfield in 2017
Born
Dharma Jeremy Butterfield

(1973-03-21) March 21, 1973 (age 51)
Alma mater University of Victoria
Clare College, Cambridge
OccupationBusinessman
Known forCo-founder of Flickr
Founder and former CEO of Slack
Spouse
(m. 2001;div. 2007)
(m. 2020)
Children3

Daniel Stewart Butterfield (born Dharma Jeremy Butterfield; [1] March 21, 1973 [2] ) is a Canadian billionaire businessman, best known for co-founding the photo-sharing website Flickr and the team-messaging application Slack.

Contents

Early life and education

In 1973, Butterfield was born in Lund, British Columbia, to Norma and David Butterfield. [3] For the first five years of his life he grew up in a log cabin without running water or electricity. His family lived on a commune in remote Canada after his father fled the US to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War. [4] [5] His family moved to Victoria when Butterfield was five years old. [5] As a child, Butterfield taught himself how to code, and changed his name to Stewart when he was 12. [6]

Butterfield was educated at St. Michaels University School in Victoria, British Columbia and made money in university designing websites. [5] He received a B.A. degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria in 1996 and went on to earn a Master of Philosophy from Clare College, Cambridge in 1998. [7] His thesis was on scientific thinkers of the 19th century. [8]

Career

In 2000, Butterfield worked with Jason Classon to build a startup called Gradfinder.com. [5] [9] Following Gradfinder.com's acquisition, he worked as a freelance web designer. Butterfield also created a contest called the 5K competition, centered on people with the ability to design websites under 5 kilobytes. [5]

Ludicorp and Flickr

In the summer of 2002, he co-founded Ludicorp with Caterina Fake and Jason Classon in Vancouver. [7] Ludicorp initially developed a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Game Neverending. After the game failed to launch, the company started a photo-sharing website called Flickr. In March 2005, Ludicorp was acquired by Yahoo!, where Butterfield continued as the General Manager of Flickr until he left Yahoo! on July 12, 2008. [10] [1]

Tiny Speck

In 2009, Butterfield co-founded a new company called Tiny Speck. [11] Tiny Speck launched its first project, the massively multiplayer game Glitch , on September 27, 2011. [12] Glitch was later closed due to its failure to attract a sufficiently large audience. The game world closed down on December 9, 2012, but the website remained online. [13] [14] In January 2013, the company announced that it would make the most of the game's art available under a Creative Commons license. [15] On December 9, 2014, a fan project to relaunch Glitch under the name Eleven began alpha testing. [16] [ better source needed ]

Slack

In August 2013, Butterfield announced the release of Slack, an instant-message-based team communication tool, built by Tiny Speck while working on Glitch. [17] [18] After its public release in February 2014, the tool grew at a weekly rate of 5 to 10 percent, with more than 120,000 daily users registered in the first week of August. In early 2014, the data for Slack's first six-month usage period showed that nearly 16,000 users were registered without any advertising. [19] [20] [ better source needed ]

That same year, Butterfield secured an office for Slack employees in San Francisco, and was expected to commence recruitment during the second half of the year. [19]

As of December 2015, Slack had raised US$340 million in venture capital and had more than 2 million daily active users, of which 570,000 were paying customers. [21]

Slack was named Inc. Magazine’s 2015 company of the year. [22]

In June 2019, the company announced its initial public offering with an opening price of $38.50 and a market capitalization of US$21.4 billion. [23] [24]

In December 2020, Salesforce confirmed plans to buy Slack Technologies for US$27.7 billion. [25]

In December 2022, Butterfield announced his departure as CEO of Slack and left Salesforce early in January 2023. [26]

Awards and honors

In 2005, Butterfield was named one of Businessweek's "Top 50" Leaders [27] in the entrepreneur category. In the same year, he was also named in the TR35, a list collated by MIT in its MIT Technology Review publication, as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35 years. [28] [29] In 2006, he was named in the "Time 100", Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world, [30] and also appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine. [31] [32]

In November 2008, Butterfield received the "Legacy Distinguished Alumni Award" from the University of Victoria. [33]

In 2015, Stewart was named the Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovator for 2015, [34] awarded TechCrunch’s Founder of the Year Crunchie, [35] and included in Vanity Fair’s New Establishment, [36] Advertising Age’s Creative 50, [37] and Details’ Digital Mavericks lists. [38]

In May 2017, he was featured in Masters of Scale, a podcast series by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin, along with other successful businesspeople such as Mark Zuckerberg, John Elkann, and Brian Chesky. In it, he discussed the scaling strategy adopted by Slack. [39]

Personal life

Butterfield was married to Caterina Fake, his Flickr co-founder, from 2001 [40] to 2007. [41] They have one child together, who was born in 2007. [42] In May 2019 he became engaged to Jennifer Rubio, co-founder of Away Luggage. [43] On April 21, 2024, it was thought that Butterfield's 16-year-old daughter had run away from home, but she was found alive on April 29, and a 26-year-old man was arrested for abduction. [44]

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References

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Further reading