How I Built Resilience: Live with Stewart Butterfield and Steve Holmes

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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Hey, welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition. I'm Guy Raz. So as some of you know, we started a new series of online conversations where each week I'm talking to founders and entrepreneurs about how they're building resilience into their businesses right now. And in case you missed them when they happened live, we are posting excerpts right here in your podcast feed. And today, we're going to bring you two conversations. Later in the show, you'll hear from Steve Holmes, the co-founder of Springfree Trampoline, about the surge in demand for backyard trampolines and the long waiting list to get one. But first, to Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Slack and Flickr. Before the pandemic, Slack was a pretty widely used office messaging platform. But in a single week, starting March 10th, Slack onboarded more than 2 million new users. Among those working remotely are Stewart's 2,100 employees who work in offices in 10 countries around the world. I spoke with Stewart from his home in the Bay Area where he's been wondering what is the future of work and Slack look like? Thank you for being here. How are you doing, by the way?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:32)
I'm doing okay. I mean, I feel grateful that we have a backyard, given that we have two little dogs. That's something. On the other end, we have 2,100 employees around the world. Kind of a distribution of how people are doing right now. Some people are okay. Many people are stressed and anxious. Fears about the economic fallout, about the health of their friends and family and their communities. Some people go in little bunkers, trying to work while being the school teacher to their six-year-old, and the daycare to their three-year-old, and the kids are obviously going crazy. Then people who are cooped up in a small apartment, but kind of by themselves. Then of course, there's the broader world, which is much more mixed.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:15)
You guys basically shut down your offices in San Francisco on March 6th. How did you make that decision so early?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:23)
Well, there's a lot of people talking about it. There is this really day by day, or even in some cases, hour by hour accumulation of events, of things getting canceled, we were debating whether to cancel our global sales offsite, at which we get about 800 people together. This year was going to be in Phoenix and we have guests flying in and that was the next week, I think, and we decided to cancel that with like four days. I was in frequent communication with a couple of my peers, other software companies in the Bay Area mostly, and we were starting to talk about it. And I think I realized that it was going to inevitably happen, and maybe we could defer by a week or something like that, but there was zero point depending by a week. And if one of the incentives here is not just the health and safety of our employees, but kind of being good citizens and good stewards, since we're able to do it, we should do it as quickly as possible.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:19)
And then I think you had an employee who was contacted by the CDC that they might have come into contact with somebody who tested positive. And I'm assuming that that also kind of prompted the decision to just tell everyone to work at home.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:32)
Yeah. Yeah. So actually, I mean, on March 5th was a Thursday. So that was our board meeting. Hadn't really contemplated it. Later that day, we got notified by this employee that the CDC had notified them that they had been potentially exposed. And since they had been back in the office since the exposure, we decided we'll close the office on Friday, March 6th, and over the weekend, do a deep clean. You know, people come in with I think UV lights and a bunch of other stuff. But by Friday afternoon, you know, just the accumulating evidence made it clear that we were going to have to decide to shut it down completely. So we never, you know, after Thursday, we didn't go back in the office. And it turned out that was the last day in the office for most people.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:12)