Quotes from Stewart Butterfield

I'm going to make more money than I need in any outcome.

Those moments of play that we do get in meta-life, like playing music, or golf, or word-play, or flirting - those are some of the best parts about being alive.

I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.

All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world.

Flickr was designed partly to market itself. There are a lot features, in place early on, that let people take their photo, upload it to Flickr and post them elsewhere, on their own Web site or their blog, which meant a lot of incoming links.

About 80 percent of the photos on Flickr are public and searchable by everyone. In one sense, it's a place where people upload snapshots from the family reunion, wedding or the birth of a baby or something like that, but it's also a place where people go to show what the world looks like to them.

If you're not hiring from some groups of the population, then you're obviously missing out.

For most companies, the hard thing is making the product work well enough to convince a single person at a time to switch to it.

Email will probably be around for many decades to come. It's hard to say what will happen 20 years from now, but email has been around for decades, and it will likely be around for decades more.

I think of myself more as a designer than a serial entrepreneur. As a designer, the easiest way to see that something happens is to start a company and then be the boss, and then people have to do what you say.

One of the advantages of something like Slack is that I tap on the app icon, and it's just the people at my company and just the people I work with. There's a strong boundary there which aids in comprehension. It's one less molecule of glucose in my brain to manage it all.

One advantage that I think Slack has for most people who use it is, you pull out your phone, you look at the home screen, there's the Slack icon. You know when you tap this one, it's all the people you work with, and it's only the people you work with. And that's a big advantage.

I no longer file expense reports, so I no longer experience the pain of it. What if everyone had a virtual assistant to do that kind of effort... like approving time off or submitting time-off requests? We want to really encourage developers to create cool things for Slack.

I was pretty entrepreneurial as a kid. I had a lemonade stand. When I was 12, I arbitraged the price of 7-Eleven hot dogs; I'd buy the ones that are pre-wrapped with the bun and then sell them on the beach.

It's very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy.

A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently.

The element of teamwork is perhaps underappreciated.

It's hard to overestimate how much the perception of the quality of the V.C. firm you're with matters - the signal it sends to other V.C.s, to potential employees, to customers, to the tech press. It's like where you went to college.

I think tech lives inside of a society that still has a lot of systemic racism and doesn't stop at the boundaries of the tech industry. But neither is it especially exacerbated by being around technology. But it is maybe exacerbated by the irrational decision making of people who are trying to make money.

People tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change. In the short-term, it's not going to make that much of a difference.

Inside a company, you can mandate that everyone use the same technology, which means you can go a little bit, I don't know, higher-fidelity than the lowest-common-denominator technology. There are a lot of things that Slack gives you that email doesn't when you think about internal use.

I can tell people a story that they believe in and get behind. So I'm good at the leadership part. But I've always said that I'm a terrible manager. I'm not good at giving feedback.

Sometimes you will get feedback that is contrary to your vision. You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first.

Inside a company, you can mandate that everyone use the same technology, which means you can go a little bit, I don't know, higher fidelity than the lowest common denominator technology.