Startup Profiling: Stewart Butterfield - founder of Flickr and Slack

Startup Profiling: Stewart Butterfield - founder of Flickr and Slack

image: money.cnn.com

Startup profiling is our new addon where we profile startup founders with more emphasis on the failed startups and especially those that were able to bounce back from such fails. 

Don't miss any of it. 

Our first startup to be profiled this week is Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr and Slack.

These two startups have gone ahead to be huge successes but not without having their own near-death challenges. You know Flickr – the image-sharing platform acquired by the then Internet giant – Yahoo and Slack – the awesome collaborating tool for workers.

Both startups are a unicorn in their own rights.

About the Stewart Butterfield:

The Slack founder was born and raised in British Columbia, Canada and became interested in programming during his teens. After graduating from college, he worked at communicate.com and eventually HSBC, managing development projects.

The Business that started from Marriage:

Stewart and Fake first met each other in 2000 at a party, where the latter made is affection and admiration clear but was rebuffed by Fake because she had a boyfriend at the time.

But after six months, Stewart found out through her blog that she had broken up with her boyfriend and traveled all the way to San Francisco to try his luck again. This time, she accepted.

Caterina Fake grew up in Pennsylvania, USA. She began her career as a designer and web developer, and taking up the role of Art Director at Salon.com gave her a glimpse into ‘blogging’.

After their marriage, Stewart didn’t want Fake as just a marriage partner but also a business partner. Two weeks into returning from their honeymoon, the duo launched their startup company – Ludicorp, the business would be a multi-player online game they named Game Neverending.

In the wake of the dotcom crash, the game ran into difficulties, part of which is the difficulty they faced in raising venture funding, engineering team running behind schedule, and more issues mounted. At one point, the founders even talked about selling their furniture to pay Ludicorp’s bill.

All these happened in 2002. But in 2003, Stewart had one of those startup magic moments at a conference in New York and suggested to Caterina Fake, his wife that they turn Game Neverending into a photo-sharing service. 

Caterina quickly jumped on the idea as she saw the saw the huge opportunities in photography as a social experience – humans love to take and share their beautiful pictures with their loved ones.

But, they have a team that has to agree with them, so December 8th, 2003 they took a vote and the employees were asked if they want to keep Game Neverending in its existing form or move to the photo-sharing alternative. The vote to move to the photo-sharing service won over Game Neverending by just one vote.

And then Flickr was birthed…

-    In 2003 before Christmas, they received $450k from Telefilm – a Canadian new media agency.

-    Flickr was not always ‘Flickr’; it came to a brainstorming session for the name of this new business and they settled for ‘Flicker’ but unfortunately someone else had already registered the name and wouldn’t give it up. So, they removed the last ‘e’ and called it ‘Flickr’.

-    On the 10th of February 2004, they went live to the public. A trial version was released at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference.

-    March 20, 2005, just 12 months after launch, Yahoo bought Flickr and its original company – Ludicorp for a whopping $35m.

-    In 2008, Stewart and Caterina Fake left the company they founded.

After leaving Yahoo, Stewart Butterfield launched a computer game company called Tiny Speck, which later evolves to ‘Slack’. While Caterina Fake started Pinwheel.

Anyway, after their leaving Yahoo to start their individual company, they are still married. But another great startup was on the way through Tiny Speck.

The Tiny Speck Story…

And then SLACK was born with over 3 million daily users, after failure with Glitch.

Check back for the follow-up story.

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