Stewart Butterfield and Slack, his second accidental success story

I’ve been going through some archives of mine, and came across a story I wrote in February of 2014, almost exactly 10 years ago, when I was working for Gigaom in San Francisco. I interviewed a young Canadian guy named Stewart Butterfield about a new thing he had just launched called Slack — a kind of all-in-one chat and workflow discussion app. I freely admit that I was not sold on this app at first, despite Marc Andreessen’s excitement about its growth rate, and I blame that on my lack of interest in corporate productivity apps in general, which I’m sure are really important but in most cases are as boring as watching paint dry.

What really interested me about Stewart and Slack was that the development of Slack happened while Butterfield and his team were trying to launch an online game called Glitch — according to Stewart, they came up with Slack as a way of collaborating with each other while working on the game, because every other form of collaboration (email, MSN Messenger, etc.) didn’t have the features they were looking for. But the really interesting part of the story was that this was the second time Stewart had invented something successful seemingly by accident, while doing something completely unrelated.

The first time was a little app called Flickr, which more or less invented the online photo-sharing market. Flickr grew out of another attempt at an online game that Stewart and his partners (including Flickr co-founder and Butterfield’s wife at the time, Caterina Fake) were working on. This one was called Game Neverending, and it was a very cool exploratory open-world type of animated game — I played it a few times and quite liked it, but it never took off. As part of the game, you could upload an avatar of yourself, a picture or image of some kind, and that feature turned out to be really popular, so Stewart and the Flickr team wisely decided to focus on expanding that, and Flickr was born.

Flickr pioneered a lot of the things we came to associate with the social web, including open APIs, hashtags, and social networking. It also implemeted Creative Commons sharing, which was not widely used at the time. Unfortunately, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo (for about $22 million, which at the time was a lot), and while they didn’t ruin it, they certainly tried hard to do so. Mat Honan described it this way: “They sold out to Yahoo assuming that they’d be backstroking in rivers of money and terabytes of memory. Instead they had to fight for everything: servers, people, time.” When he left, Stewart sent the senior executives of Yahoo a legendary letter of resignation that went semi-viral, in which he talked about the company as though it was an old-time mining company, and he a tin-smith.

“As you know, tin is in my blood. For generations my family has worked with this most useful of metals. When I joined Yahoo! back in ’21, it was a sheet-tin concern of great momentum, growth and innovation. I knew it was the place for me. Over the decades as the company grew and expanded, first into dies and punches, into copper, corrugated steel, synthesized rubber, piping, milling equipment, engines, instruments, weaponry and so on, I still felt at home because tin was the core of the business… Since the late 80s, as the general manufacturing, oil exploration and refining, logistics and hotel and casino divisions rose to prominence, I have felt somewhat sidelined.”

Slack, of course (like so many things I never thought would amount to anything) took off and became massive, and was acquired by Salesforce for about $27 billion or so. I have no idea what Stewart is up to now, but I hope he has moved back to a cabin in the wilds of British Columbia, which is where he grew up — back when his name was Dharma Butterfield rather than Stewart (he said later that he didn’t much like having a hippie name, so when he changed it he tried to find the most boring and normal name he could think of, and came up with Stewart). Or maybe he really did retire to take care of a herd of alpaca. Update: No alpacas apparently — he and his wife, who runs a multibillion-dollar luggage business called Away, have spent about $140 million buying ultra high-end real estate, including designer Tom Ford’s 20,000-acre ranch.

Stewart and his mother behind the log cabin he grew up in

Start ’em early

Pro-life bake sale

She spent 20 years undercover with the FBI’s Sex Crimes unit

From Alex Morris for Rolling Stone: “After seeing the pictures, Bolen asked to meet. While a lot of the men Paulina had encountered in chatrooms like “Sex With Younger” just wanted to trade images and videos of children, Bolen was a “traveler,” someone looking to act upon his obsessions. On Sept. 17, just as they’d arranged, Paulina sat on a bench outside a mall with a stroller parked in front of her, scanning the parking lot nervously. Part of her hoped Bolen wouldn’t show. When he did, she could see he was handsome, a preppy guy in a pink polo shirt and khakis. As he smiled and pulled back the blanket draped across the stroller, he found himself surrounded, handcuffs slipped around his wrists. “Paulina” watched his confusion giving way to distress as FBI agents took him into custody. It was her first undercover arrest. It would be the first of many.”

A game designer writes about what it was like to lose his seven-year-old son

From Lars Doucet: “My seven year old son Nikolas suffered cardiac arrest while undergoing a procedure at the hospital to treat an underlying congenital condition. The doctors performed CPR and succeeded in reviving him but ultimately he suffered catastrophic brain damage. I will describe a bit about what this situation feels like from the inside. If you have not experienced this kind of tragedy, it will likely surprise you, as it did me. Turns out, unfathomable tragic loss isn’t very hard. It’s easy, in fact. Easy in the same way that falling off a cliff is “easy”–gravity does all the work for you. It’s not like climbing mount Everest, desperately putting one foot in front of the other. It’s not like struggling to answer questions in a final exam. Tragic loss is just something that happens to you.”

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NYC cops give “get out of a ticket free” cards to friends and family

From Marginal Revolution: “The NYC police union gives out what are called ‘courtesy cards’ to friends and family, who use them to get easy treatment if they are pulled over by a cop. The cards even come in gold, silver and bronze. An officer who is presented with one of these cards will normally tell the violator to be more careful, give the card back, and send them on their way. The officer can issue a ticket or make an arrest anyway, and there is a chance that the officer who issued the card will understand and nothing will come of it. But it is equally possible that the enforcement officer will come to work one day to find his locker has been moved to the parking lot and filled with dog excrement.”

This Asian religion believes that French author Victor Hugo was a prophet

From Abby Walthausen for Literary Hub: “Ask a French reader about the legacy of Victor Hugo and you might hear about Les Contemplations, a well-respected, well-loved collection of poems he wrote for his favorite daughter, Léopoldine, mostly after her accidental death by drowning. Ask someone in Southern Vietnam, and you might hear about Les Châtiments, a poetry volume about the injustices of Louis-Napoleon and the plight of the poor. But if you ask an adherent of the Vietnamese religion Cao Dai, you may get a different answer still—that Hugo’s legacy lies in the text of the séances he used to contact Léopoldine, and the prophecies that came to him there about a great new pan-religious faith that was to emerge in Asia in the coming century.”

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An oral history of the Blues Brothers movie

The pitch was simple: “John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Blues Brothers, how about it?” But as this Vanity Fair piece describes, the 1980 movie became a nightmare for Universal Pictures, wildly off schedule and hugely over budget, its fate hanging on the amount of cocaine that Belushi consumed from day to day. And it all started after Belushi and Aykroyd met in a Toronto bar in 1973.

I don’t have a great memory — especially for things that happened over forty years ago — but I definitely remember when the Blues Brothers’ first album came out, because I was in my last year of high school, and I was a member of the lunch-hour DJ team, a group of students who were allowed to use the PA system to broadcast music in the cafeteria at lunch. So I decided we should play a few cuts from the Blues Brothers album, including “Groove Me,” a great tune originally recorded by King Floyd. Anyway, right at the beginning, Dan Aykroyd (as Elwood Blues) sings in a Jamaican accent: “Ire iceman, roll me a great big spliff.” And that was my last outing as cafeteria DJ 🙂

That said, the Blues Brothers helped introduce me to the blues for the first time. I was much more a rock and folk kind of guy at the time — either Neil Young or AC/DC — and didn’t have much time for an old genre that my parents might have listened to. But Belushi and Aykroyd made it fun, and it was obvious that they cared deeply about the music as well — it wasn’t just a sketch on Saturday Night Live. Their debut album was not only made up of blues standards, which they did quite a good job with (despite Belushi’s inability to sing), but it was also filled with legendary blues session musicians and sidemen like Donald “Duck” Dunn and Matt “Guitar” Murphy, all of them suggested by Paul Schaffer.

Who was the woman buried alone at the pet cemetery?

From Andrew Keh for the NYT: “Ed Martin III was 14 years old when he began working at his father’s pet cemetery, and in the decades since he has tended to the graves of innumerable dogs, many cats, flocks of birds, a few monkeys, a lion cub, a Bengal tiger and countless other creatures from every corner of the animal kingdom. In all that time, after all those burials, there was only ever one request, a few years ago, that gave him pause. Calling that morning, on Jan. 29, 2020, was Bruce Johnson, a lawyer from New York, who had in his possession the cremated remains of a woman named Patricia Chaarte. Ms. Chaarte had died at her home in Mexico, at the age of 92. In her will, she had requested that her ashes be interred at Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, just north of New York City.”

Research shows that placebos work even when you know it’s a placebo

From Harvard magazine: “Two weeks into Ted Kaptchuk’s first randomized clinical drug trial, nearly a third of his 270 subjects complained of awful side effects. All the patients had joined the study hoping to alleviate severe arm pain: carpal tunnel, tendinitis, chronic pain in the elbow, shoulder, wrist. In one part of the study, half the subjects received pain-reducing pills; the others were offered acupuncture treatments. And in both cases, people began to call in: the pills were making them sluggish, the needles caused swelling and redness; some patients’ pain ballooned to nightmarish levels. This was interesting, considering the pills he gave patients were cornstarch and the “acupuncture” needles never pierced the skin.”

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Great call from the haters

An Iowa paperboy’s disappearance 41 years ago remains a mystery

From Thomas Lake for CNN: “Johnny Gosch left home for the last time on a warm Sunday in late summer, in the pale morning light before sunrise. Just before 6 a.m., a neighbor heard a wagon rattling through the yard and figured it was Johnny taking his usual shortcut on his way to pick up his newspapers. A boy saw a blue car pull up, and saw Johnny talking to a stranger. What happened in the next few minutes would resonate for the next four decades, far beyond the rolling green hills of Iowa. Johnny would become a tragic abstraction, a face on a milk carton, a story that warned other kids away from paper routes and changed the way police handled missing-children cases.”

This language was long believed extinct but then one man spoke up

From Natalie Alcoba for the NYT: “As a boy, Blas Omar Jaime spent many afternoons learning about his ancestors. His mother, Ederlinda Miguelina Yelón, passed along the knowledge she had stored in Chaná, a throaty language spoken by barely moving the lips or tongue. The Chaná are an Indigenous people in Argentina and Uruguay whose lives were intertwined with the mighty Paraná River, the second longest in South America. Ms. Miguelina Yelón urged her son to protect their stories by keeping them secret. So it was not until decades later that he made a startling discovery: No one else seemed to speak Chaná. Scholars had long considered the language extinct.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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