Stewart Butterfield
@stewart
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Slack boss • Flickr co-founder • Thought loser • ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ • I'm trying my hardest!
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Joined September 2006
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My day job (also: night job) is CEO of Slack, a publicly traded company with investors to whom I am a fiduciary, 110k+ paying customers of all sizes, and thousands of employees I care about very, very much. The last few weeks have been 🤯😳😢 Here’s what it's been like. [Thread]
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That feeling when you think "we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter," and then you do. 💫
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This might be the first time I’ve ever been genuinely impressed with AR 😳
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My father died last night. He was kind, ambitious, intellectual, entrepreneurial, generous & loving. Happy Father's Day. I love you so much.
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It’s amazing how simple everything is when you have no idea what you’re talking about!
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I need a name for the phenomenon whereby, despite the fact that all anyone wants from a restaurant website is the menu, address, phone number or opening hours, the people who make them go for auto-playing sound, animated intros, non-tappable phone number image, etc.
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Despite feeling like I had a decade’s worth of CEOing in the last 18 months, today’s news inspires a lot of excitement about the decade to come.
I was told that people on the internet may have opinions, so thought I’d offer mine…
(Bonus: a disclaimer)
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It's amazing how much life can be drained from you from trying to use never-quite-actually-works internet for 4-5 hours. I was a vital living man when I boarded this plane and I leave it as a dry husk, hopeless and petty, aggravated beyond any ability to cope.
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One slightly encouraging thing I don’t remember happening the last time, or the time before that, or the time before that …
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Tuesday: More signs of demand surge. 1,597 days after hitting 1M *simultaneously connected* users in Oct ‘15 (see ) we pass ten million. 6 days later: 10.5M, then 11.0M. Next day, 11.5M. This Monday, 12M. Today 12.5M. 📈
Forget DAU. We're tracking "millisecond active users" now.
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Monday was the first day of our new (temporary) existence as an all-remote company. 2,000+ people from 18 offices across 10 countries suddenly working from home. It’s a big change many are making but I haven’t seen much detail giving a ‘behind the scenes’ view. [Thread]
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I thought I would share this password since I'm not using it anymore. 1Password said it was "Fantastic!" and an online login form called it "Very good"
Feel free to snag it and use it for whatever you want: 47&63EK2;xCsR[BCnxKYfzB8VWs^P>Lc
Thanks! Don't forget to like & follow!
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The whole time
@jennifer
&
@stephkorey
were laughing at their fake proposal thing going viral, the ring was actually in the other room, just waiting for this weekend … 🙃
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Had a profound offline weekend at a retreat contemplating digital distraction & design ethics in the attention economy. One 💡 frame:
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The whole company was energized and moving fast. All hands on deck as existing customers accelerated rollout plans and new team creation continued to increase. But we could tell anxieties were also increasing. Leaders across the company stepped up internal communication. I wrote:
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The deal we’re announcing today with Atlassian is pretty amazing. Indeed, I tried to fit it all in one (280 character) tweet but I just couldn’t do it. So, I’ll lay it out in a few. But first, I wanted to thank Scott, Mike, Jay and the team: incredible to work with you.
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If you’re an employee reading this, I want you to know that what we got done in the last few weeks is incredible, and unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m so, so proud of all of you. And, please, for real: take time out/off. Take care of your family and your health.
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Quick introductory note: I’m a human. I worry about my family and am deeply concerned about the millions whose jobs and health are at risk. But I’m also a CEO and these tweets are about work: the company, money, markets, customers, earnings, guidance, etc. With that in mind …
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The overwhelming majority of the time I start screen sharing on Zoom for just a 15 second share, it is this gif:
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🕤 It matters how we talk about it after & it matters that we at least try to make some progress. So, WSJ editorial board: fuck you!
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Yes. November 14th, 2012 (previous codename was "linefeed"):
Re
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If you think about it, it just makes sense that a company which once built a strange and wonderful game wherein one could milk butterflies now offers a no-code tool which allows you to build workflows for, say, purchase order approvals. Circle of life.
With Workflow Builder, Slack users can easily create custom workflows that allow them to do all sorts of things, like:
❓ Standardize how requests are collected
⏰ Triage outages in real time
👋 Get new team members up to speed with welcome messages
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Let's make today a double-whammy —
@jennifer
, will you marry me? Promise I'm not just a golddigger:
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Some notes about , since it got a lot of 👀.
Over 3+ years since Teams was announced, we’ve grown >500% (our enterprise business grew >1,100%). We continue to win with the biggest companies in the world. We've lost 0% of our 100 largest customers … 🧵/n
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COVID-19 is still the single biggest threat to the lives, livelihoods, health, opportunities & economies of people around the world.
@jennifer
& I are donating $25M to
@UNICEF
/
@UNICEFUSA
to accelerate their global vaccination programs:
Here’s why (🧵):
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Day 35 of WFH — five weeks in — and … my cast iron pans are siiiiiiiiiiiiick, y'all. This seasoning is not something I could have imagined in normal life. Feels great!
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I love, love, love, LOVE this. A bit jealous that we weren't the ones to make it, but (i) it got made and (ii) someone else did it!
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Like everyone, Jen & I have been looking for ways to help. We’ve been making some donations but want to give additional encouragement for all the ❤️ action we’ve already seen. So: I’ll match donations 5:1 (so, $5 for every $1 people send in) up to $1M for the orgs below. [Thread]
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Usually I can talk *a lot*. But right now I’m struggling a bit with what to say.
I couldn’t watch the video this time. The descriptions were enough to make me feel sick.
Unlike so many, I am lucky enough to be able to push the violence & hate out of my mind and “take a break”.
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Almost certainly correlation and not causation. But still :)
(Also, it is a strange-but-good experience to get big enough that you stumble across one of your own ads in the paper, but you didn’t even know it was running.)
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I already apologized to Tim for f'ing up their thing.
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I get an email from the CTO of one of the world's biggest asset managers telling me (a) they’re signing the contract to go wall-to-wall on Slack and (b) this was one of the last big purchases before tightening up due to coronavirus concerns. First time I'd seen that in the wild.
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"And he's just getting started." • It's still so hard to believe that this is real life. Nearly every action seems gratuitously … evil.
Get used to it.
@POTUS
is a man of action and impact.
Promises made, promises kept.
Shock to the system.
And he's just getting started
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Through it all, with average active usage surging past a billion minutes each weekday, our customer experience team has kept pace beautifully. Network ops & infrastructure engineers deserve huge credit for 99.999% uptime through absolutely unprecedented growth. 🙏
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In some senses, we were made for this. Slack’s not specifically a “work from home” tool; it’s more of a “create organizational agility” tool. But an all-at-once transition to remote work creates a lot of demand for organizational agility. From our S-1:
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We want to be “reasonable” and “prudent” and earn the trust of analysts and investors over time by being honest and straightforward.
But we literally have no idea what is going to happen and neither does anyone else, really. The error bars on any prediction will be miles wide.
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Please G-d, just let her absolutely fucking demolish him and I promise I'll be good all year.
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If you’re just getting started on Slack, I’m sorry: there are still some rough spots. It’s not as easy to get used to as we’d like. But we’re working hard to simplify and guide people towards effective usage. It’s worth the effort. When it works, you’ll never go back to email.
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Used to read so many books. Then stopped. Life! (And Twitter.) Was sad. Switched to audiobooks. More than one per week now. No longer sad!
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I second this.
I first read it almost 20 years ago and there is rarely a working day where the basic ideas don’t explicitly come into the conversation.
7+ years since launching Slack, positioning is still our biggest challenge.
“Positioning” is one of the most important books I’ve read.
“The basic idea is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.”
E.g. this is how we came up with the term “Custom Indexing”
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Finally one of the GOP candidates has the
#courage
to break with the pack and endorse the right candidate. Bless you, Governor.
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We must confront the evil — the inequity, the discrimination, the oppression — already in our country, in our culture, and in ourselves.
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Tuesday: Announced “optional WFH” at all other offices globally. A few other companies had also started or were considering starting WFH programs amid growing uncertainty. We noticed upticks in new teams signing up for Slack, especially in Japan, Korea and Italy.
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Two recent ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ books from the last couple of weeks: 'How to Change Your Mind' by Michael Pollan (audiobook with him narrating was great) and 'The Courage to Be Disliked' by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (also listened vs read; recommended).
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▶️ Week of March 2nd-6th ◀️
Monday: Fewer than 100 COVID cases reported in US, but uncertainty increasing. Over the weekend we shut down the Tokyo & Osaka offices, put travel restrictions in place and cancelled our annual Global Sales Offsite, a long-planned 800-person event.
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When I think about the future, I imagine a “cone of possibilities.” The further out you get, the harder it is to predict and the wider the cone gets. Increased risk, volatility, uncertainty push it wider still. Our job in this moment is to help others predict our future. Hmm.
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The adrenaline we ran on for the first two weeks of everyone working from home is starting to wear off. It still feels great to be able to help and for us, right now, locked inside, work is an opportunity to genuinely help. But, also: we’re locked inside. People are more scared.
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Thursday (cont.): An SF-based employee informs us that they’d been contacted by the CDC about a potential SARS-CoV-2 exposure. Decided to close HQ the next day and do a deep clean over the weekend. (The employee had no symptoms and was self-quarantining. Now okay, thankfully.)
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Really hesitated to tweet this follow-up to the first supercut because it is hard to watch. So, please skip it if you need to.
But if you watch it, it's best to turn the sound on to get the full impression.
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Someone who shoots into a crowd of black protesters or a Planned Parenthood clinic is a terrorist, not a "gunman". Same ends, same means.
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Two most useful books I've ever read on either leadership or management were both in the last six months: Crucial Conversations () and Leadership & Self-Deception (); the former for technique and the latter for principles. ★★★★★
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Do VCs actually help?
Lemme tell you: more than 10 years after
@pmarca
&
@bhorowitz
first invested in the seed for Tiny Speck (the company that became Slack), 9+ years after they rolled their angel investment into the new
@a16z
and invested in our Series A … (1/4)
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Big love shoutout to all the nasty women of the world. 👏
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When the possibility of millions of deaths is slowly starting to sink in, it’s hard to say an otherwise normal CEO thing like “the macro environment is creating significant tailwinds for the business” and it felt completely impossible to extrapolate out from this present moment.
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Wednesday: Things speed up. We launch a set of resources for teams that are faced with the prospect of a sudden shift to remote work, began offering free 1:1 live consultations and created new webinar programs in response to growing demand. (See: )
Teams across the company came together in a beautiful way this week to pull together the most helpful resources for customers who are making a faster-than-imagined transition to supporting remote work. It can be daunting but there is a lot of valuable experience out there.
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Leaders always underestimate how often they need to repeat things to keep everyone on the same page and motivated toward the same goals.
<— guilty!
Leaders always underestimate how often they need to repeat things to keep everyone on the same page and motivated toward the same goals.
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It felt like the shift from inboxes to channels which we believed to be inevitable over 5-7 years just got fast-forwarded by 18 months. Good for our business. But what about everyone else? Many sectors were already hit hard and the fallout for small business could be devastating.
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Next week Slack has its quarterly earnings call so I have some extra eyes on me.
I’ll use that attention to amplify Black voices and also to condemn not just the violence, but the indifference, the lack of compassion, the deflection and excuses.
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Thursday: Board meeting. Debated and approved plan for this fiscal year— hiring, budgets, targets, forecasts, etc. Got feedback on our prepared remarks and guidance for next week’s earnings call; felt confident! 👍 Didn't know it, but for most, our last meeting in the office.
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We regroup, revise the script and adjust guidance as the CEO/CFO/IR/Comms crew heads to NYC. Driver from the airport tells me business is down by half, he’s behind on rent and his brother just got laid off from his hotel job, along with 50% of the staff. Darkening clouds.
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Great urban design pattern: sidewalk in tree tunnel, bike lane protected by parking lane. Richards St., Vancouver, BC
http://t.co/kkHXZ6yaeJ
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My prediction for this week:
• 7% of people will be write-my-congressperson level 🤬
• 9% will be 😩
• 14% will be 🙄
• 17% will be 😱
• 35% will be 😤
• 11% will be 🤯
• 5% will be 😄
• 2% will be 😘👌
And a month from now everyone will be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In 2019 there’s a lot to worry about in the world. It can be cathartic to release some of that bottled energy on matters of less heavy consequence and blow off some steam. Well, we’re here to help!
So crack your knuckles, furrow your brows, and prepare to have opinions! Soon.
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🇺🇦 The
@1kproject
has delivered 5,000+ USD$1k direct cash grants to Ukrainian families. Immediate help, no strings, in a time of wrenching crisis. 100,000+ families waiting.
For the next 48 hours,
@jennifer
& I will match all personal donations.
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Forget DAU. We're tracking "millisecond active users" now.
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💕📷🕰️ In 2004 we launched
@Flickr
with all the hope, enthusiasm & optimism that had been present since the dawn of the web.
The “Web 2.0” movement birthed so much of what came next. 15 years later (!) it’s an honor to work with much of the same team
@SlackHQ
.
#Web30
#ForTheWeb
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▶️ March 9th-13th. Earnings week ◀️
Monday: Trading halts six minutes after markets open on a 7% drop in the S&P 500. Everyone learns that the markets have circuit breakers built in. VIX spikes to highest since Oct '08. Suddenly the macro environment seems dizzyingly uncertain.
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Details: • Atlassian is discontinuing Hipchat/Stride • Slack is purchasing the IP to better support those users who choose to migrate • We’re both working closely together to make sure that’s as simple and painless a process as possible …
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And now we saw evidence of a huge increase in demand. This was March 12, so the ultimate impact wasn’t yet clear. But we could see it in, e.g., this chart of newly created “work teams”. (The first chart from March 12. For context, same chart but four days and 11 days later.)
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I wrote a blog post for the first time in many years and I titled it “Why Shared Channels are So Cool”
[Note: I am a professional businessman]
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Saw Get Out last night. Was aMaZiNg. Dystopian horror about a world where everyone uses Microsoft phones & searches Bing on Surface tablets.
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So, on one hand:
✋ Large enterprises were sure to clamp down on spending, our EBCs were closed, salespeople couldn’t travel, no in-person meetings for training programs, and more we couldn’t yet imagine.
And on the other:
👋 Those same customers needed Slack more than ever.
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Any friends or followers I have on the content side of Netflix, Prime, or Apple TV+ (this doesn’t feel like Hulu, HBO or Disney): you should make this. Reality TV-like margins, but you don’t have to feel dirty making it!
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I just literally got trash-talked by Robert De Niro. "I don't know who the FUCK you are."
#lifegoals
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Couple of years ago someone in aisle seat said "you have a bag up here I can hand down to you?" Since then I always do it. Thanks, stranger.
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The images coming out of Philadelphia are making me feel physically sick. These people are terrifying.
These white people are now roaming Philly with the blessing of the police.
This is what the President of the United States just endorsed.
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That evening policy discussions intensified. Reported cases in the US up to 200. News was getting worse. The exec team debated what global office closures would look like, backchanneled to other leaders, and began preliminary planning. All this seems a different universe now.
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(Too impatient to wait for a paper copy? We put the text online: But, support the print media and buy a copy!) 📰
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Friday: Made the call. “Strongly encouraged” all employees to work from home. Planning intensified. There was a LOT of work to do. By the time we communicated to employees on Sat afternoon, there were 400 cases in the US. (I wrote about this time here: )
Monday was the first day of our new (temporary) existence as an all-remote company. 2,000+ people from 18 offices across 10 countries suddenly working from home. It’s a big change many are making but I haven’t seen much detail giving a ‘behind the scenes’ view. [Thread]
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There’s a lot more to the story, but I’m already using way more than my daily allotment of tweets and I don’t want others to have to go quiet. So for now: If you’re a customer trying to scale up or get through this, we’ve got you. We genuinely want to be of service. Call on us.
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Okay! For real! Every reasonable person wants to see a permanent DACA fix. It's been 17 years since the DREAM Act was first proposed. Let's get this unstuck and move on!
(And thanks for the shirt,
@RonConway
!)
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Hard to track donations (opportunity: simplify charitable gift matches!) so redoubled
@aclu
w/
@splcenter
,
@MALDEF
,
@NAACP_LDF
&
@ProPublica
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