Stewart Butterfield facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Stewart Butterfield
|
|
|---|---|
.jpg)
Butterfield in 2017
|
|
| Born |
Dharma Jeremy Butterfield
March 21, 1973 Lund, British Columbia, Canada
|
| Alma mater | University of Victoria Clare College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | Businessman |
| Known for | Co-founder of Flickr Founder and former CEO of Slack |
| Spouse(s) |
Caterina Fake
(m. 2001; div. 2007)Jen Rubio
(m. 2020) |
| Children | 3 |
Stewart Butterfield (born Dharma Jeremy Butterfield on March 21, 1973) is a Canadian businessman. He is famous for helping to start two big companies: Flickr, a website for sharing photos, and Slack, a tool for team communication.
Contents
Stewart Butterfield's Early Life and Education
Stewart Butterfield was born in 1973 in Lund, British Columbia, Canada. His parents were Norma and David Butterfield. For his first five years, he lived in a log cabin. This cabin did not have running water or electricity. His family lived on a commune in a remote part of Canada. His father had moved there to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War.
When Stewart was five, his family moved to Victoria. As a child, he taught himself how to code computers. He changed his name to Stewart when he was 12 years old.
Stewart went to St. Michaels University School in Victoria, British Columbia. While at university, he earned money by designing websites. He got a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria in 1996. Later, he earned a master's degree from Clare College, Cambridge in 1998. His master's paper was about important scientific thinkers from the 1800s.
Stewart Butterfield's Career Journey
In 2000, Stewart Butterfield worked with Jason Classon. They built a new company called Gradfinder.com. After this company was bought by another, Stewart worked as a freelance web designer. He also created a fun contest called the 5K competition. This contest challenged people to design websites that were very small, under 5 kilobytes.
Starting Ludicorp and Flickr
In the summer of 2002, Stewart helped start a company called Ludicorp. He founded it with Caterina Fake and Jason Classon in Vancouver. Ludicorp first tried to create a huge online game. It was called Game Neverending. But the game did not become popular enough to launch.
After the game failed, the company changed direction. They started a new project: a website for sharing photos called Flickr. In March 2005, a big company called Yahoo! bought Ludicorp. Stewart continued to work at Yahoo! as the General Manager of Flickr. He left Yahoo! on July 12, 2008.
Creating Tiny Speck and Glitch
In 2009, Stewart Butterfield started a new company named Tiny Speck. Tiny Speck launched its first big project in 2011. It was another massively multiplayer game called Glitch. The game world for Glitch closed down in December 2012. It did not attract enough players to keep going.
In January 2013, Tiny Speck announced something cool. They would make most of the game's artwork available for free use. This was done under a Creative Commons license. Later, in December 2014, fans started a project to bring Glitch back. They called it Eleven.
The Rise of Slack
In August 2013, Stewart announced a new tool. It was called Slack. This tool helps teams communicate using instant messages. Tiny Speck built Slack while they were working on the Glitch game.
Slack was released to the public in February 2014. It grew very quickly. In its first week in August, over 120,000 people were using it every day. Data from early 2014 showed that nearly 16,000 users joined Slack without any advertising.
That same year, Stewart found an office for Slack employees in San Francisco. The company planned to hire more people during the second half of the year. By December 2015, Slack had raised a lot of money. It had over 2 million daily users. About 570,000 of these users were paying customers.
Inc. Magazine named Slack the "Company of the Year" in 2015. In June 2019, Slack became a public company. Its shares started trading at $38.50. The company was valued at $21.4 billion. In December 2020, Salesforce announced plans to buy Slack Technologies. The deal was worth $27.7 billion.
In December 2022, Stewart Butterfield announced he would leave his role as CEO of Slack. He officially left Salesforce in January 2023.
Awards and Honors for Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield has received many awards for his work. In 2005, Businessweek magazine named him one of the "Top 50" Leaders. He was also on the TR35 list by MIT. This list names the top 35 innovators under 35 years old.
In 2006, Time magazine included him in their "Time 100" list. This list features the 100 most influential people in the world. He also appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine.
The University of Victoria gave him the "Legacy Distinguished Alumni Award" in November 2008. In 2015, The Wall Street Journal named him their Technology Innovator. He also won the Founder of the Year Crunchie award from TechCrunch. He was included in several other important lists that year.
In May 2017, Stewart was featured in Masters of Scale. This is a podcast series by Reid Hoffman, who co-founded Linkedin. Stewart talked about how Slack grew so quickly.
Stewart Butterfield's Personal Life
Stewart Butterfield was married to Caterina Fake. She was his co-founder at Flickr. They were married from 2001 to 2007. They have one child together, born in 2007. In May 2019, he got engaged to Jennifer Rubio. She is a co-founder of Away Luggage. They were married in 2020. Stewart has three children in total.
See also
In Spanish: Stewart Butterfield para niños
