Boss Talk: Slack CEO wants to free you from email
Boss Talk: Slack CEO wants to free you from email
Perhaps more than any other Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Stewart Butterfield has succeeded in failing to create video game companies.
When his first multiplayer videogame start failed to gain ground, he transformed it into the Flickr photo sharing website, which Yahoo Inc. bought in 2005.
Four years later, Butterfield co-founded another company whose video game also failed to take off, and the company eventually transformed a game feature into a messaging platform operator now known as Slack Technologies.
Slack, based in San Francisco and with Butterfield as CEO, has grown to more than three million customers who pay since the launch of the messaging service in 2014, as companies use it to supplement or replace internal email and online chat
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield talks to The Wall Street Journal about the challenges of building a startup, the disadvantages of running a private company and his favorite computer game. Photo: Michael Bucher for The Wall Street Journal
Slack was valued at $ 7.1 billion in a fundraising round for August. So far, the company has resisted making it public, although that could change. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Slack is Preparation for an initial public offering in the first half of 2019According to people familiar with the subject.
Butterfield said he had no specific plans for the time of the IPO. He recently sat down with The Journal for an interview. Here are edited extracts:
WSJ: What have you learned from Flickr in your experience so far that has helped you run a company?
Mr. Butterfield: I thought that my job two or three years ago was to be smarter than everyone else and to make all the really important decisions. It turns out that it really was not work. There may be a point like when you have eight people, but that disappears very quickly. Now, I really think of three different categories. One is to establish the general vision and the strategy. The second is governance, supervision, administrative duties. Then, the last group, which is the most important, is to ensure that the organization as a whole performs at the highest possible level.
Q: You have been growing rapidly. There were points where it has become unmanageable and you wanted to reduce the speed?
A: About 18 months ago there was a time when we really stepped on the brakes, mainly on the product and engineering side, because the complexity is a bit higher there, and we wanted to make sure we had sufficient management and leadership capacity. Keep people productive and stay organized.
Q:
has launched a competitor product, as it has done
Why do you think you can take on a company that is 100 times more valuable than you?
A: A lot of great examples throughout history, starting with Microsoft itself versus
IBM
,
that at that time it was the largest and most powerful corporation in the world. The moral of that story for us is that small, focused start-up with good traction with customers can win against a major traditional operator.
Q: Do you expect Microsoft to invest more in your product than it has raised?
A: If you observe the effort in dollars in personal hours, or something like that, it is almost inevitable that they invest more. But I also believe that the bigger it gets, the less effective a dollar is, because it's much harder to coordinate giant organizations.
Q: You have resisted selling Slack. What would change your mind?
A: We believe that we are a small percentage of the way we penetrate the great opportunity, so it would be foolish. With a terrible execution, we will continue to be many times bigger than what we are today and a massive success. At the lower end of a good execution, it is 10 times from where we are now. At the high end of a good execution, it is 100 times from where we are now. It is also more fun.
Q: Why are you still private?
A: If this had been 15 years ago, we would have been public now with security, with many times more revenue than companies would normally make public. But companies in that era did not grow as fast as we did. And the companies of that era did not have this market completely private, without historical precedents.
Q: You have raised $ 1.2 billion. Is most of that still in the bank?
A: Yes.
Q: Why increase so much if you're not going to put it to work?
A: I would like to be able to protect myself against a significant change in market conditions, because having this pile of cash is an excellent position in which you are when you suddenly cash [is] expensive. Also for the clients, so that they understand that we have the resources to continue providing support if they are going to invest in the platform.
Q: How does your phone look in terms of how many applications you have that can send messages?
A: I ended up turning off almost all the notifications, because I only look at my phone enough so that it does not matter and the red dots stress me out. It seems to me that it is very rare for me to spend 45 minutes without looking at the phone while I am awake. That is a good window to know what new messages have been received in different services.
Write to Eliot Brown in eliot.brown@wsj.com
Corrections and Amplifications
The first name of Stewart Butterfield was written incorrectly as Stuart in a previous heading and a summary of the home page. (October 10, 2018)
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