Stewart Butterfield - We Don’t Sell Saddles Here - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 43]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses.
I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types.
Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:39)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of Oshanose Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:05)
My guest today is Stuart Butterfield, founder and CEO of Slack.
Stuart's 2014 essay, Why We Don't Sell Saddles Here, had a massive impact on my own business journey, which made this discussion extra special.
During our conversation, we discussed the concept of owner's delusion, how to frame the boundaries between product and market, and the challenge of changing people's mental models and behavior when introducing innovative products. I hope you enjoyed this great conversation with Stuart Butterfield. Before we transition to the episode, I also wanted to highlight our newest series, Business Breakdowns. Each week, we do a deep dive into an individual business to understand what makes it tick. For more information, go to joincolossus.com or search for and sign up for the Business Breakdowns feed on your preferred podcast player.
I found an interesting place to begin our discussion because of something that happened to me in 2017 So I took over our O'Shaughnessy Asset Management business back then and probably like any new CEO, I was a little bit floundering trying to figure out what I was going to do, what direction to take the business, and there was a couple pieces of content that really influenced my direction. One was positioning a book about marketing. Another was this amazing video called Inventing On Principle by a programmer named Brett Victor. And a third was an essay that you wrote in 2014 called We Don't Sell Saddles Here. And so I have to begin our discussion with that essay. Could you give us the background of why you wrote it and sort of what the main message was? And I'll have probably several questions about it because it was so influential on me personally.

**Stewart Butterfield** (3:33)
Sure. Thank you. I guess that there's two interconnected messages in there. And one of them is to really focus on the kind of impact that we want and how we convey that to customers. I think we said, I mean, actually, we still state today, Slack is the kind of thing that you don't know you want, but once you have it, you can't live without it. And that's great, except that people don't know that they want it. And trying to explain to someone why they might want something that they have no idea that they want is tough, not just because you have to create that understanding that's a prerequisite for desire, but also because people have a really finite amount of time and they have a set of concerns that are already occupying their mind more or less all the time.