The Big Pivot w/Slack's Stewart Butterfield
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2019
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
In your company’s darkest moment, remember: You CAN pivot from failure to success. But only if you slash and burn everything that isn’t working. Slack’s co-founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield, has twice navigated this kind of Big Pivot. He launched two different game companies, which both (surprise!) turned into game-changing communications platforms: Flickr and Slack. Hear the thinking behind making a hard left turn —and bringing your team along with you.
Read a transcript of this interview at: https://mastersofscale.com/stewart-butterfield-the-big-pivot/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now, |
| 0:07.8 | with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed. |
| 0:17.0 | We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time. |
| 0:24.8 | So search for rapid response in your podcast player |
| 0:28.0 | and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes. |
| 0:31.2 | I'll see you on the other side. It's 2002, dark days in Silicon Valley. |
| 0:46.7 | The dot-com bubble had burst. |
| 0:49.1 | Tech investors were quiet. |
| 0:51.0 | Almost nothing of note was launching online. |
| 0:54.0 | And then out of nowhere came an experimental video game called Game Never Ending. |
| 1:00.0 | A role-playing game that was all about social interaction. You work with other players online to create a world. You build buildings, houses, and other objects. |
| 1:10.0 | For the gaming nerds out there, it was kind of a precursor to Minecraft. |
| 1:17.0 | You could pool your resources with friends to build structures, invent new objects, and reach higher levels together. |
| 1:25.8 | Your objective, just keep building. |
| 1:30.7 | You gotta keep going |
| 1:35.4 | keep going |
| 1:36.4 | Keep going |
| 1:38.6 | There was no way to win this game It's no way to win |
| 1:40.8 | Hence the title game never-ending but a goal that the most hardcore fans aspire to |
| 1:46.2 | was to build the final item of the game a game never ending so meta. |
| 1:51.6 | That is so meta. |
| 1:54.0 | It was an offbeat self-war game that didn't take itself too seriously. |
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