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.
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]
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][bettersourceneeded]
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][bettersourceneeded]
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 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 child had run away from home, but they were found alive on April 29, and a 26-year-old man was arrested for abduction.[44]
Ryssdal, Kai; Hollenhorst, Maria (22 July 2019). "What Is Slack?". Marketplace (Interview with Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield). American Public Media. Retrieved 10 August 2019.
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