The element of teamwork is perhaps underappreciated.
I related to the whole hippie, acid-test confluence of the early Internet. The idea that we should be open and interoperate with our data resonated with me.
I was born in a little town called Lund in British Columbia. It's like a fishing village. My parents were hippies. They tried to live off the land, so I grew up in a log cabin, and we didn't get running water until I was 4. The next year, we got electricity. Then we moved to the city, Victoria, British Columbia, so I could go to school.
The scale of revenue growth is unprecedented. If you look back over history, whether you're looking at the railway robber baron era or the 1920s or the '50s or the '70s, it used to take a long time for a company to get to the point where they had tens of millions of dollars of revenue. It was almost never an overnight phenomenon.
Email has the virtue - sounds like a bad thing, but it's the virtue of being the lowest common denominator messaging protocol. Everyone can have it. It can cross organizational boundaries. No one owns it. It's not some particular company's platform.
I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them.
What motivates me is just to do a really, really good job at something. If I were a better musician, I probably would've ended up as one.
Inside a company, you can mandate that everyone use the same technology, which means you can go a little bit, I don't know, higher fidelity than the lowest common denominator technology.
I learned so much in the year after Flickr was acquired. People forget, but Flickr launched in February 2004. And a year later, the deal was done with Yahoo, and we closed it in March of 2005. It was really independent for a relatively short period of time.
In Slack, you create channels to discuss different topics. For a small group of people, those channels are relatively easy to manage and navigate.
It's hard to overestimate how much the perception of the quality of the V.C. firm you're with matters - the signal it sends to other V.C.s, to potential employees, to customers, to the tech press. It's like where you went to college.
I think of myself more as a designer than a serial entrepreneur. As a designer, the easiest way to see that something happens is to start a company and then be the boss, and then people have to do what you say.
You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first. In our case, we knew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we looked at our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.
When we first started Glitch, there were four co-founders of the company. We built Flickr and worked together at Yahoo and then started Tiny Speck. We were split in Vancouver, New York, and San Francisco. So we used an old chat technology called IRC. Almost nothing went through email.
A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently.
All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world.
People sometimes forget how early Flickr came. Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.
For the first five years of my life, I grew up in a log cabin in coastal British Columbia in a very small town, like 300 people, mostly hippies. No running water, no electricity. When I was 12, I changed my name from Dharma to Stewart. At that age, you just want to be normal.
I tend to be a lot more honest and transparent with employees than most bosses are. But I've had people tell me - even those who love working with me - that I'm terrifying, which is hard for me to imagine.
People think I'm smart because Flickr was successful. I'm lucky. Maybe I'm smart, too. But, I'm lucky.
