Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack recently announced that he will be stepping down. This announcement, however, gave him a chance to reflect on his time with the company – going back to its roots. Butterfield breaks down how he and a few colleagues achieved success after selling their first company, Flickr, to Yahoo for $22 million in 2009 before eventually creating what is now known as Slack.
Why it matters: Slack started as an underground movement for employees who downloaded the software, unbeknownst to IT departments, after hearing about it by word of mouth. Paid accounts eventually came online and upon releasing the software to the public in February of 2014, the company achieved $1 million in annual recurring revenue in just 72 hours.
- Stewart Butterfield interviewed with Inc.’s Christine Lagorio-Chafkin and gave the full account of Slack’s founding and extraordinary success.
- The company was born from another venture called Glitch, which would run games on the Adobe Flash multimedia player. Butterfield and the other co-founders created a unnamed, digital messaging system that gave users the ability to direct message both individuals and groups of people. This was then developed into a comprehensive app which ultimately became Slack.
- Slack has since been immensely successful, and in 2020, was sold to Salesforce for $27 billion.
