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Slack
Stewart Butterfield's fortune is estimated at approximately $ 650 million US.
The BBC series "The Boss" presents each week a different business leader from around the world. This week we are talking to Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr Technicians and Slack
This is not the kind of education you would badociate with any of the heavyweights of Silicon Valley.
Stewart Butterfield spent the first five years of his life living in a township in a remote part of Canada after his father fled the United States to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.
Little Stewart and his parents lived in a hut made of logs in a forest in British Columbia and for three years they had no running water or electricity
"My parents were certainly hippies ", says Butterfield, whose birth name was Dharma .
"They wanted to live off the land but it turned out that there was a lot of work, so we went back to town."
After the family moved to Victoria, the British Columbia's capital, Butterfield saw his first computer and he learned to program himself from a very young age, with only 7 years old.
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Butterfield was self-taught: he learned to program using one of the first Apple Computers.
Four decades later, Butterfield – who is now 46 years old and founded the Flickr photo sharing site and the commercial messaging service Slack – has a personal fortune estimated at $ 650 million.
Because of his unusual upbringing, he says that he tries to live frugally.
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"The truth is that I feel guilty about spending too much of money "he says. "As a Canadian, this world seems very strange and unknown to me."
Butterfield also attributes much of his success to fate .
He noticed that when he was little he was fascinated by the first wave of "In 1980, when I was about seven, my parents bought a computer, it had to be an Apple II or IIE," says -he. "I learned to code using computer magazines."
Butterfield, who changed his name to Stewart when he was 12 years old learned how to develop basic computer games.
when he attended high school and eventually went to to study philosophy at the University of Victoria. He then obtained a master's degree in the subject at the University of Cambridge, UK.
In 1997, he was about to try to become a professor of philosophy when the Internet "really began to take off."
Flickr
Butterfield sold Flickr for $ 25 million, a figure considered low. Photo: Flickr
"People who knew how to make websites relocate to San Francisco and I had a group of friends who earned double or triple as teachers," he says. . "He was new and exciting."
Then he decided to leave the academy and rekindle his love for computers.
After working for several years as a web designer, he launched an online game with the future co-founder of Flickr. who was his wife then?
The game, called Game Neverending (Game Sinfin, in a literal translation of English), did not take off and the couple was running out of time. ;money.
Frantically seeking a plan B had the idea of Flickr and built the photo sharing platform in just three months.
"The first photo phones just appeared and everyone Once again, the households were connected to the Internet, everything was happening so fast …", recalls Butterfield
Launched in 2004, Flickr was the only one in the world. one of the first sites to allow downloading, sharing, tagging and commenting photos.
Only a year later, the founders sold the company to the Internet giant Yahoo for 25 million US dollars, although Butterfield has since declared that was a "bad decision" because waiting longer could have meant
However, he continued to do even bigger business with Slack. [19659015] Copyright of the Image
Slack
Slack allows employees to easily communicate with one to the other. Photo: Slack.
It was in 2009 and he and some partners had created another online game, which again failed. However, this project served as inspiration for another.
"While we were working on the game we developed an internal communication system that we liked," says Butterfield. "We did not think about that, it was in the background, but after a few years we thought that other people would also like that."
This formed the basis of Slack, a service that today 8 ] millions of daily users – of which 3 million pay for the most advanced functions – and more than 70,000 corporate clients
Slack allows employees to communicate and collaborate with each other in groups at work and has grown rapidly. IBM, Samsung, 21st Century Fox and Marks & Spencer are just some of the big names that use it.
After several rounds of investment, Slack is now valued at US $ 5.1 billion .
Chris Green, a Technology Analyst at Consultancy Bright Bee says that it is rare that a businessman believes something successful ashes. a failed project and is "almost never heard do it twice "
"But if you look at Stewart's career, it's not just luck innovated in the background and looked for ways to put order into chaos, "says Green
" That's what Flickr and Slack did in their own way.
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Microsoft
Microsoft has launched a competing service to Slack that it offers for free with its "Office 365" package. Microsoft.
However, Slack has some competition.
Microsoft now offers a free competitor service with its Office 365 pack and the start-up Zoom offers a wider offer for the same price.
"There is immense competition" says Green
The big tech companies found themselves in the line of fire for not paying enough taxes, but Butterfield says it would agree that Slack pays more taxes.
"I would also like a fairer tax policy. I have no problem in paying taxes I do not think companies have enough money, which is more important, I do not think that they are loaded in the right way. "
"So much had to happen to be where we are – among them, a" If I ever wanted to see where I could go, it would definitely be the moment to do it. "
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