Words matter. These are the best Stewart Butterfield Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Email is the lowest common denominator. It’s the way you get communications from one person to another. There isn’t really an alternative. Sometimes people will have Facebook messenger turned on, but 99 percent of the time, if you’re sending a message to a human you don’t know well, you’re using email.
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.
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.
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.
The experience of being able to search back over all your team’s communications for, in our case, millions of messages, is super-valuable. But you don’t know what that’s like until you actually have it.
The element of teamwork is perhaps underappreciated.
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.
It’s easy to hire too fast and have chaos and disorganization and insufficient management.
Slack is actually a technical term in product management that means the excess capacity the system has to absorb any failures or to take on new work. That’s something that was really on our minds when we came up with it.
When we first started Glitch, there were four co-founders of the company. We built Flickr and worked together at Yahoo and then started Tiny Speck. We were split in Vancouver, New York, and San Francisco. So we used an old chat technology called IRC. Almost nothing went through email.
There are two big benefits from moving conversations from a mode where you’re addressing individuals, or groups of individuals, to addressing a channel which is a topic, a project, a functional discipline, or whatever.
I think we are reluctant to move people out of an organization when there is not a good fit. It is typically not because someone is stupid or lazy or incompetent; it is a lot more subtle than that.
Slack is gratifying to work on in the same way that Flickr was. The mission is to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive.
I almost never go to news sites – it’s overwhelming how much content is out there. But I will pay attention to what my friends are picking up and sharing.
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.
Hard numbers tell an important story; user stats and sales numbers will always be key metrics. But every day, your users are sharing a huge amount of qualitative data, too – and a lot of companies either don’t know how or forget to act on it.
Internally, we sometimes say Slack is like a nervous system, connective tissue, or the internal network.
There’s a lot of automation that can happen that isn’t a replacement of humans but of mind-numbing behavior.
The useful part of Microsoft was that everything worked together.
People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn’t add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.
What motivates me is just to do a really, really good job at something. If I were a better musician, I probably would’ve ended up as one.
A lot of companies lock up for a few weeks once a year for performance reviews. But there’s a way to collect feedback in real time from Slack so that by the end of the year, you’ve already stored up all of this information.
I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them.
I think email’s going to be around for, like, another 10,000 years. It’s a great way to cross organizational boundaries.
In Slack, you create channels to discuss different topics. For a small group of people, those channels are relatively easy to manage and navigate.
There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong, and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them, too.
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 work at a 10,000-person company, and you’re using e-mail as the primary means of communication, then you probably have access to a couple hundredths of 1 percent of all the communications happening across the company. But if you use Slack, you might have access to 10 or 20 percent.
A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently.
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.
Inside all the computers of any large corporation is every decision that gets made. But people spend a huge amount of time trying to find the correct piece of information.
I’m going to end up with a lot more money than I feel like I’m entitled to, given how hard I work.
Anything we can do that lets people find information more quickly is something we’re interested in.
