Son of a Glitch: Slack’s Tale
How a gaming company became a billion dollar accident.
TL;DR: Stewart Butterfield (CEO/Co-Founder of Slack) has started two massively successful companies — by accident. His first company Flickr (the photo sharing platform loved by bloggers of yesteryear), was born out of a defunct game called Game Neverending — Flickr was strung together from a few of the game’s features. In January 2005, he sold Flickr to Yahoo for a reported $35 million — an offer that many would consider to be a lowball in retrospect. Turns out lightning does strike twice — Stewart later started a gaming company called Glitch that wasn’t a smash hit, but did end up with a pretty cool internal chat system — the very communications tool that morphed itself into the Slack we all know and love today.
Flick it, Good.
Let’s dig deep into our memory banks and remember the pre-iPhone, pre-app store, pre-Instagram days of the early-mid 2000’s; the days when the ownership of a Motorola RAZR made you the coolest kid on the playground.
In the early 2000’s, Flickr was the world’s first and only option to share photos on the Internet. Its original slogan of “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world” — was a tongue-in-cheek understatement that encompassed Flickr in a nutshell. It was awesome, it was ahead of its time (Instagram, anyone?), and it was sold to Yahoo for $35 million — who did with it what they do best, they killed it. Yet, what most forget is that creating a photo-sharing company was never in the original plans of Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake (Flickr Co-Founders), and their team; it was born out of a game called Game Neverending, as a secondary feature that allowed people to share photos online — a novel problem at the time.
When Butterfield was asked about the Yahoo acquisition and whether it was a pre-mature mistake, he responded:
“We definitely made the wrong decision in retrospect. We would’ve made 10 times [what we did]. But it’s not like I regret it.”
Butterfield’s insights on the first-time founder’s dilemma suggest that to those in a similar predicament — with a strong offer from a good buyer — should probably take it. He stands by the decision the team made, with the information they had at the time.
“I’d say most should take it. Everyone wants to be Zuck, keep independent and go all the way. But there’s only one Zuck or Bill Gates. It’s such an individual choice.”
Lightning Strikes Twice.
With a successful exit under his belt, now two-time founder Stewart Butterfield re-entered the gaming world in 2009 — this time with a game called Glitch.
Glitch trudged along for a couple of years, with a core group of dedicated players; but by no means reached gaming notoriety the likes of FarmVille, World of Warcraft, or Minecraft, as Butterfield and Co. may have hoped. Without being able to sort out a business model for the Glitch, the team closed up shop in 2012.
Despite the failure of Glitch, the team found the hints of a secret sauce in the product they built to communicate with each other — their team was split between Vancouver, San Francisco and New York at the time. They had figured out a way to make sharing files, searching chat history, scheduling reminders, and more, to be something that felt social not static, fun not mundane, and simple instead of a clunky chore. Slack was the experimental extension of that very communication system.
With gaming in its DNA, Slack approached creating a business communications tool from a different perspective than its predecessors — leading with a quirky and bold feel, and a name that hit the right balance between slightly provocative, yet memorable.
A gaming company with a secondary tool that led into a massive success? It is a plot-line that Stewart Butterfield knows all too well. The idea of an internal communications system wasn’t new: the Slack team, put plainly, figured out a way to do it better than everyone else. The Glitch/Slack team, with its deeply entrenched credibility in the tech community, sparked word of mouth growth that morphed into a full blown wildfire: Slack has satiated the palates of nearly of 5 million users to date and is the fastest startup to reach a billion dollar valuation in history.
In an InfoQ presentation last December, Slack chief architect Keith Adams noted that the original game design persists today:
“The actual architecture of Slack resembles the architecture of a massively multiplayer online game. So you kind of have your world that you operate in, which is your team, and in order to kind of make that world seem both persistent and interactively mutable with other things in the world, you end up making a pretty thick cache of what’s going on in that world. And then you’ve got a way of getting the latency updates for the changes in that world. So that mental paradigm of “oh, it’s kind of like an online game” actually explains a lot about Slack.”
Will this story find a similar ending to that of Flickr? Not on Butterfield’s watch.
At SXSW in 2016, Butterfield states:
“I think timing makes a big difference. If we had launched three years before we did, it wouldn’t have taken off,[…] I will never have an opportunity like this in my lifetime again,” remarked the serial entrepreneur.
Slack, with the bold goal of becoming the Central Nervous System of every organization on the globe, is on an impressive trajectory. “We’re trying to build empathy at scale,” Butterfield has said. Having struck the seemingly perfect balance between technology and human connection; will they be able to continue to ward off behemoth’s like Microsoft, Apple, and Google?
I say game on.
