Live From The HIBT Summit: Stewart Butterfield

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 Stuart 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, Stuart 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 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 Stuart on stage, I asked him about both of those pivots, starting with the first one, from Game Never Ending to Flicker.

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. Um I I wonder how did you know that that was the right thing to do? Because our instinct

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