Live From The HIBT Summit: Stewart Butterfield

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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Hey everyone. So today we've got another one of my conversations from the How I Built This Summit that happened in San Francisco last October. And you know, in the world of startups, one of the most difficult moves to pull off is a pivot to maneuver out of your first idea into something that might have more potential. And Stewart Butterfield, he pulled this off not once, but twice. About seven years ago, out of the ashes of a failed video game, Stewart launched Slack, an office collaboration tool that now has 12 million daily users. But before Slack, back in 2004, Stewart was struggling to get traction with another video game called Game Never Ending. He wound up shutting that one down, too, but out of that failure, he was able to launch a photo sharing site called Flickr, which he sold just a year later for around $20 million. So when I sat down with Stewart on stage, I asked him about both of those pivots, starting with the first one, from Game Never Ending to Flickr.
There was a point, and you talk about this in the podcast, where you had to decide whether to drop all of this work on this computer game, like more than a year, I think two years, of work on this game and pivot to the photo sharing site. And it was a debate, an internal debate. I wonder, how did you know that that was the right thing to do? Because our instinct would tell us to push forward and to keep going, right? Like that's what we think we're supposed to do, to just carry on and march forward.

**Stewart Butterfield** (3:42)
Yeah, there's a lot of advice that's just persevere, grit, resilience, got to keep going in the face of adversity over and over. But there is definitely a point where you, either you know it can't work or kind of like the reverse manifesting of, I don't believe anymore that this could work, which makes it very unlikely. If the person leading the project doesn't believe it can work, it would be a weird fluke for it to actually to work out.
But we were just out of money and it would have been a much more difficult, complex project to complete the game. It would have taken us a minimum of another year, but probably realistic and closer to two more years. And we didn't have that kind of time. Whereas Flickr, we figured we can get a version of this out in a couple months. And it actually was, I don't remember the exact dates anymore, but it's sometime in December 2002 that we decided to do it. And early February 2003, it launched.

**Guy Raz** (4:36)
So you guys end up selling Flickr to Yahoo and you described yourself as briefly internet famous. You actually were like on the cover of Newsweek Magazine with some other people at one point, which I'm assuming got you some attention to allow you to kind of think about the next project. You decide to go back and start another company that was going to be a computer game called Glitch.