Daniel Stuart Butterfield "A Man with Two Deals in Life"
Every time he worked on a commercial project, he created original and much more interesting than the original assumptions of the work. So a philosophy graduate and self-taught computer scientist who grew up in a hippie commune invented Flickr and Slack and made a fortune along the way.
Billionaire and child prodigy from Silicon Valley, Daniel Stuart Butterfield (1), he was born in 1973 in the small fishing village of Lund, Canada, where his parents belonged to a hippie commune. His parents chose the Buddhist name Dharma (2) for him and raised their son without running water, electricity or a telephone in the house.
2. Stewart is still like a hippie Dharma with his mother
When Dharma was 5 years old, they turned the boy's life and their own upside down. They left their commune and log home to live in the Victorian metropolitan area on Vancouver Island. They gave it to 7 year old Dharma first computer, a technological marvel. To a small boy, the device was like flying into space on a private rocket, something that most of his peers could not achieve. Thanks to the computer, Dharma developed his technical skills, spent hours coding.
He was becoming a geek, but his Buddhist name didn't match. At the age of 12, he decided that his name would be Daniel Stewart. The parents, of course, accepted it. Like a trip to China and his new interests, because of which he gave up the computer for a while. Butterfield he founded a jazz band, and the music absorbed him almost completely.
I returned to programming during my studies. Young Philosopher with Coding Skills he made money creating commercial sites, and then independently studied programming and, as a philosophy student, got his first shell account with access to the university server. But more interesting was philosophy. A few years later, he confessed to reporters: “Thanks to philosophy, I learned to write really clearly. I learned how to follow through with an argument, which is invaluable in meetings. And when I studied the history of science, I learned how it happens that everyone believes that something is true.
In 1996 he received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria, and then continued his studies at the University of Cambridge, where two years later received a master's degree in philosophy. He wrote an article about the teachings of Spinoza, his favorite thinker. He was planning to get a PhD in this field when a friend Jason Klasson brought him to his startup Gradfinder.com.
2000 turned out to be a difficult year for young IT companies. The bursting internet bubble has shaken up the fledgling tech industry. Klasson sold his business, and Stewart returned to the proven path of earning money and became a freelance web designer. Then he invented, among other things, the 5K Industry Competition - for sites under 5 kilobytes in size.
Pioneer Web 2.0
In the summer of 2002, Stewart, Klasson and Netscape developer, Katerina Fakefounded Ludicorp. The timing was still bad for technology projects, and investors were still counting their losses. The partners collected everything they had: their own savings, family, friends, inheritance and government subsidies. This was enough for rent and salary for one person who had a family. The rest had to rely on future profits from Game Neverending, the game they had just been working on.
The project was never completed. The startup was in dire need of funding. It was then that Stuart came up with a brilliant and simple idea - creation of a site for the presentation of photos. The program, however, in need of improvement, already existed. It was used in the company to share photos between employees. That's how he was born Flickr (3) The platform quickly gained popularity among bloggers and professional photographers, and then photography enthusiasts. The dynamic growth of the site's popularity led to the fact that the project became profitable, and a team of 9 people finally received money for their work.
Flickr, which gave users more control over databases on websites, has become a symbol of innovation and Web 2.0. In 2005, just one year after Flickr was made available to Internet users, Yahoo bought the site for $30 million. Both Stewart and Katerina Fake, who were a private couple at the time, continued to run Flicker as Yahoo employees. They lived in the corporation for less than two years. Yahoo proved to be a powerful bureaucratic machine, and Stewart preferred to work alone.
He started working on another project under completely different circumstances. Earlier in 2005, Butterfield was named one of the "Top 50" leaders by Businessweek magazine, and the MIT Technology Review named him one of the world's top 35 innovators under 35. The following year also brought a rain of awards. He was included in the list of 100 most influential people in the world. Time, and Newsweek put his photo on the cover.
So this time, the name Butterfield meant success and investor confidence. He easily raised $17,5 million to realize his original idea for a multiplayer web game. New startup Tiny Speck, in 2009 he introduced users to a game called Glitch. It attracted more than 100 thousand users, but the profit was disappointing. However, by the way, Stuart had a brilliant idea.
It all started with a chat
The company had an internal chat for employees, which caught his attention. Butterfield reorganized as Tiny Speck, paid generous severance pay to some employees, and started a new project with a small team. Sluggish. This time, he had the capital and the comfort to develop his own idea without the approval of his superiors.
Slack was launched in February 2014 and immediately gained recognition as a convenient and useful tool for communication in a company that does not require changes in the company's work. Slack can be used by the entire company or just a small group of people working together on a project. Eight months after its debut, Slack was valued at $8 billion. Butterfield told reporters that Slack's earnings have repeatedly exceeded what he considered "the best possible scenario." In less than two years, Slack has had over 1,1 million daily active users, including over 1,25 people. paid accounts, had 370 employees and generated $230 million a year in revenue.
Against this background, The success of Flickr it didn't look that impressive, but 10 years ago there were far fewer people using the Internet. Slack (4) has become so popular in business that some companies have started mentioning messaging as a bonus when hiring new employees. In 2019, the company entered the stock exchange, which valued the popular messenger for business at $23 billion. What made Slack so successful? Butterfield has no doubts that excellent customer service and updates are made with user preferences in mind. Stewart is rumored to personally respond to customer comments.
4. Slack Headquarters in San Francisco
“The greatest innovation is not about profit,” Butterfield told Forbes. “I also haven’t met a single innovator who is successful in business and is driven solely by profit. Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang and David Philo, none of them started a business because they wanted to get rich."
