Stewart Butterfield (Slack) - Serendipity in Design and Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Business, Life Lessons, Creativity, Startups, Strategy, Thought Leadership, Education, Stanford University, Leadership, Challenges, Journey, Culture, Etl, Innovation, Founders, Stanford, Entrepreneurship

4.5 • 740 Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2015

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack and Flickr, shares lessons from his entrepreneurial journey from philosophy student to creator of hugely popular platforms for sharing and communicating, and how they began as minor features embedded in online games that were otherwise flops. Butterfield speaks with Andrew Braccia of the venture capital firm Accel Partners.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
0:10.3	You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.
0:18.1	Today we are very proud to have as our speaker, Stuart Butterfield, the co-founder and CEO of the popular team communications platform, Slack.
0:28.0	You guys, you guys, you guys, yes, please.
0:34.6	If Slack wasn't enough, Stuart is also the co-founder of the leading online photo management
0:40.2	and sharing site, Flickr.
0:43.2	Clap again.
0:45.9	And while we're at it, how many people have heard of Slack?
0:51.2	How many people use Slack?
0:54.0	All right, that's a fantastic rate. And there's no Slack in this audience in terms of capacity, so? All right, that's a fantastic rate.
0:55.4	And there's no slack in this audience in terms of capacity, so that's a great thing.
1:02.5	Starting off with a bit of humor.
1:04.5	In nearly two days of working on the web, Stuart has had a distinguished career as a designer, entrepreneur, and technologist.
1:11.6	He has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine,
1:16.6	Business Week's top 50 leaders, and has been featured in interviews and articles by hundreds
1:20.6	of publications and broadcasters, including the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, the New York Times,
1:26.6	CNN, and Financial Times. What I love is
1:29.9	that Stuart is also a humanist. His educational background is that he graduated with a philosophy and
1:35.0	history of science degree for all the humanists in the crowd as well. This afternoon, Stuart
1:39.4	will be in conversation with Andrew Bracha. Andrew and Stuart worked together at Yahoo a decade ago,
1:46.2	and Andrew is also a general partner at Excel Partners,
1:49.1	a global venture capital firm that focuses on early
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Stanford eCorner, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Stanford eCorner and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.