Stewart Butterfield

Cofounder of Flickr; founder and CEO of Slack

• Born: March 21, 1973
• Place of Birth: Lund, British Columbia

Primary Company/Organization: Flickr, Slack Technologies

Introduction

Stewart Butterfield is one of the pioneers of the Canadian technology evolution. His desire for nonviolent online communities that foster communication and sharing is a hallmark of his life's work. After he helped solidify the concept of Web 2.0 and image-sharing online, Butterfield returned to the programming life. Whether through his work in online video games or his revolutionary photo-sharing platforms, Butterfield has proven the importance of user-driven content. By providing Flickr users with the site features they need to store and share their images with the world, Butterfield's platform has changed the way people think about photo sharing.

Early Life

Dharma Stewart Butterfield was born in Lund, British Columbia, on March 21, 1973. He studied philosophy in college, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria in Canada. He earned a master's in philosophy from the University of Cambridge in England. He began his career as a computer programmer in Vancouver, working with several large corporations, including Sears and HSBC. In those early years, Butterfield provided design consultancy services for several big names, including The Economist magazine and the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

Butterfield's parents ran their own real estate agency in Vancouver, modeling a married couple who could successfully run a business together. Butterfield met Caterina Fake, the future cofounder of Flickr, in San Francisco in 2000. Despite Fake's initial refusal to date Butterfield, the two eventually got together, marrying in June 2001. Before that, however, they began a company called Ludicorp.

Life's Work

Butterfield and Fake founded Ludicorp in 2002. The company was meant to be a video-game maker; the first game released for beta testing Game Neverending, reflecting the vision of the new company. The role-playing game was online and interactive, allowing users to chat with one another and even share their own uploaded photographs. Many view Butterfield's desire to create a virtual role-playing platform as growing out of his childhood, when role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons were extremely popular. By moving such games to the Internet, many companies had been successful. In the beginning, however, that was not the case for Ludicorp.

Ludicorp struggled to develop Game Neverending for about a year. In 2003, money grew tight. The couple had to mortgage their home to keep the company afloat. Butterfield began to wonder about the time and money being invested in the video-gaming project. One day, during a particularly bad bout of flu, Butterfield decided to ditch Game Neverending and focus on the photo-sharing aspect of the game, which was proving popular with users.

The decision to change Ludicorp's focus was not welcomed by the employees of the young company. The game designers and code programmers wanted to continue the project they had started. An initial vote resulted in a stalemate. After some dialog, a coder was convinced to vote in favor of Butterfield's idea. He broke the stalemate. Flickr became the focus of Ludicorp despite an unenthusiastic and small staff. At the time, only one of the employees was receiving a paycheck; the rest were friends who worked without payment. Finally, a loan request was approved, and Ludicorp had some money to move forward with the Flickr idea.

Ludicorp expanded its photo-sharing application into a platform that allowed folks to upload their personal photos, providing a limited amount of free online storage space. The new photo-sharing platform was called Flickr, at the suggestion of a friend. Ludicorp wanted to call it Flicker with an e, but that domain name was already spoken for, and the owner refused to sell the name.

Flickr officially opened for business in February 2004. Butterfield's image-sharing platform offered both free services and premium membership features to paying subscribers. This provided revenue and increased the number of users rapidly. The programmers and game designers of Ludicorp began to focus on making the website more user-friendly. They added features, such as tagging, that allowed the users to attach certain words to their image so it could be found in a search. Bloggers were able to post images directly from Flickr to a blog, increasing the start-up photo site's popularity. Flickr allowed users to upload images for free. It also allowed members to place a “Creative Commons” tag on their images so they could be reposted around the Internet.

From its launch, Flickr grew users and content every day. Because the website's members were responsible for developing all the content, Ludicorp was free to continue to develop the platform. It was not long before the social aspect of Flickr flourished. Both amateur and professional photographers began to enjoy not only the thousands of images on the site but also the sense of community their shared interest fostered. After a year of operation, Flickr had 1.5 million registered users.

The burgeoning website made a bleep on the radar of Internet giant Yahoo!, Inc. At the time Flickr came into existence, Yahoo! already offered its own image-sharing platform. However, the Yahoo! image site lacked the features that made Flickr easy for users and popular among photographers. Yahoo! wanted to buy Ludicorp so it could substitute Flickr for its own lackluster image platform (which it would eventually do on September 20, 2007).

In 2005, there were fourteen thousand images being posted to Flickr every hour. The site made more than $4 billion in revenue by end of 2005. The first time Butterfield and Fake met with Yahoo! to discuss the future, they also had a meeting with Google later in the day. Despite a not very successful first meeting, Ludicorp met with Yahoo, not Google, six months later to continue discussions, and Ludicorp was ultimately sold to Yahoo! The programming and code for the online community and photo-sharing site was transferred from Canada to the United States. This legally made Flickr an American website. Butterfield and Fake continued to run the company for Yahoo! after the sale. They moved to the company headquarters in San Jose, California.

Butterfield admitted in an interview that he sold the company to Yahoo! because he was worried about another dot-com crash. If he had retained the company even a few months longer, the $35 million he did receive would have been pocket change in comparison to the profits that were on the horizon. Butterfield left Yahoo! and Flickr on July 12, 2008. The cofounder of one of the web's most popular image-sharing sites decided to leave California and return to Vancouver to help develop the growing city's technology culture.

Butterfield began another online gaming start-up, Tiny Speck, Inc., in 2009. The idea was to provide online gaming with an alternative to the violent video games that then dominated the web. He wanted to provide a richer game-playing experience to adults in comparison to the games on social networking sites. Butterfield's online gaming world, Glitch, offered a creation story, a purpose, and time travel. This second venture, like the first, did not pan out as expected; however, after unprofitable three years, Butterfield transformed the internal multichannel communications tool he had devised into its product instead and thus Slack Technologies was born. In 2021, Slack was purchased by cloud software company Salesforce. Butterfield remained as Slack CEO for a year before stepping down in December 2022. As of March 2024, his net worth was estimated to be $1.7 billion.

Personal Life

Butterfield and Fake have one daughter together, Sonnet, who was born in 2007. The couple divorced soon after their daughter's birth.

Butterfield is also a professional speaker, providing presentations to corporate clients. He and Fake won the Webby Award for Special Achievement in 2005. He also acts as a judge for the creators of the Webby Awards, sponsored by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Butterfield received a Chrysler design award in 2001. He has appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek magazines. In 2005, he was named one of the TR35 (Technology Review's “35 innovators under 35,” an annual list thirty-five top innovators under the age of thirty-five) when he was thirty-two.

Bibliography

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Farrelly, Glen. “Top 15 Canadians in Digital Media.” Backbone 20 Nov. 2011. Web. 8 Aug. 2012.

Fitzgerald, Michael. “How We Did It.” Inc. 1 Dec. 2006. Web. 7 Aug. 2012.

Kopytoff, Verne G. “At Flickr, Fending Off Rumors and Facebook.” CNBC, 31 Jan. 2011, www.cnbc.com/2011/01/31/at-flickr-fending-off-rumors-and-facebook.html. Accessed 8 Mar. 2024.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Annual List of the 35 Innovators under 35.” Technology Review 2005. Web. 8 Aug. 2012.

Scalza, Remy. “The Philosopher Game King.” BC Business 7 Feb. 2011, www.bcbusiness.ca/people/general/stewart-butterfield-philosopher-game-king/. Accessed 8 Mar. 2024.

"Stewart Butterfield." Forbes, 8 Mar. 2024, www.forbes.com/profile/stewart-butterfield/?sh=4b8d3b975182. Accessed 8 Mar. 2024.