Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield is the co-founder and CEO of Slack, the overwhelmingly popular team messaging application. Before that, he was the co-founder and CEO of Flickr, which grew out of his initial work with social game networks.
“A piece of advice I’d give my younger self: Concentrate on the storytelling, on convincing people. If you can’t do that, it doesn’t matter how good the product is.”
— Stewart Butterfield
In your company’s darkest moment, remember: You CAN pivot from failure to success. But only if you slash and burn everything that isn’t working. And then bring everyone else along. Slack’s Co-Founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield has twice navigated this kind of Big Pivot. He launched two different game companies, which turned into game-changing communications platforms (Flickr and Slack).
Behind every successful business is a hidden back-end business powering it behind the scenes. No one knows this better than Jenn Hyman, CEO of Rent the Runway. RTR is known for creating a glamorous “closet in the cloud,” but it achieved ‘unicorn’ status by mastering the businesses behind their public-facing brand — including the world’s largest dry-cleaning operation and a data insights practice that’s changing the fashion industry. Cameo appearance: Kevin Venardos (Venardos Circus); Stewart Butterfield (Slack)