“Entrepreneurship is about experimenting and finding the way to achieve your goals.”
— Stewart Butterfield, Co-founder, Slack
Stewart Butterfield’s Defining Moment
In 2002, Butterfield’s first online game, Game Neverending, failed. After years of development, the server was shut down. He didn’t stop there. Hidden in the code of the failed game was a photo-sharing feature. He extracted it and turned it into a separate service. Flickr launched in 2004. In 2005, Yahoo acquired it for approximately $25 million. A fragment of the failed game became an entirely different business.
But Butterfield didn’t give up on games. After selling Flickr to Yahoo, he returned to game development. Starting in 2006, he began developing a new game called Glitch, a multiplayer web game centered on collaboration and exploration. The team received millions of dollars in investment and attracted hundreds of thousands of players. However, Glitch didn’t grow as expected. On December 9, 2012, Butterfield announced the shutdown of Glitch. He wrote the announcement himself. He wrote, “I am certain this is the right decision now.”
During the 4 years of developing Glitch, the team worked remotely. Email was slow and existing messengers lost context. Butterfield’s team created an internal communication tool from scratch. This tool worked more smoothly than the game itself. After the game shut down, Butterfield decided to release this tool to the public. In August 2013, Slack launched as a public beta. 8,000 people signed up within 24 hours.
Butterfield experienced two game failures. Both times, instead of collapsing after the failure, he started creating again. Flickr came after the first failure, and Slack came after the second. He didn’t see failure as a conclusion. He saw it as the condition for the next beginning.
Three Core Principles of Brand Philosophy
Don’t Stop Before Failure, Create Again
When Butterfield shut down Game Neverending, he had two choices: abandon game development entirely, or find what was alive within the failure. He chose the latter. Flickr was the result of that choice. When he shut down Glitch, he made the same choice. He transformed the internal communication tool created during game development into an external service. Immediately after announcing failure, the foundation for a new business was already in his hands. What you do after failure defines you. Butterfield moved in the same direction both times.
Build What You Need Directly
Slack wasn’t planned as a collaboration tool from the start. The Glitch team built it because they actually needed it. Not because existing tools didn’t exist. The existing tools simply didn’t fit their workflow. Instead of combining external solutions, Butterfield built it himself. The result was a tool that worked perfectly for his team and equally well for other teams. What someone creates by deeply understanding their own problem touches other people with the same problem precisely. That’s why 8,000 people used Slack within 24 hours of launch.
Sees Experimentation as the Essence of Business
Butterfield said it directly. “Entrepreneurship is about experimenting and finding the way to achieve certain goals within the context of business.” His track record demonstrates this perfectly. Two games, two shutdowns, two completely different companies. There’s no consistent success formula. Instead, there’s a consistent attitude: building what’s needed now even if you can’t be certain of the outcome; extracting material for the next experiment even when failure comes. Slack is now a Salesforce subsidiary and a platform used by tens of millions daily. It’s the result of an experiment started by someone who set out to make games.
Soulpapa Marketing’s Perspective
In his 2012 Glitch shutdown announcement, Butterfield wrote: “I am certain this is the right decision now.” He spoke of certainty while closing something he’d invested 4 years in. The basis for his certainty wasn’t results. It was because he knew what he would do next. He was a person whose speed of acknowledging failure matched his speed of starting what’s next.
When faced with failure, people usually do one of two things: deny the failure or dwell in it. Butterfield did neither. He quickly acknowledged failure. Then he found the material for what’s next and immediately acted. This speed created Flickr and Slack. The way he stepped over failure was the way he was.
He experienced the same kind of failure twice and rose both times. That’s not resilience; that’s method.
References
- Stewart Butterfield — That’s what entrepreneurship is all about — Thought Economics
- Slack: An Accidental Success Story — LinkedIn / John Stackhouse
- Daniel Stewart Butterfield — Wikipedia
Frequently Asked Questions
What prompted Stewart Butterfield to create Flickr after the Game Neverending failure?
Game Neverending failed and the server was shut down, but Butterfield noticed the photo-sharing feature embedded in the game’s code. He turned it into a separate service, launching Flickr in 2004, which Yahoo acquired in 2005 for approximately $25 million.
You mentioned Slack wasn’t originally planned as a collaboration tool. How was it created?
Slack was an internal communication tool created by the team that worked remotely while developing Glitch starting in 2006, born from actual necessity. Because existing email and messengers made it difficult to maintain context, the team developed the tool directly. After shutting down Glitch in 2012, they released it as an external service. After launching as a public beta in August 2013, 8,000 people signed up within 24 hours.
What did Butterfield say when shutting down Glitch, in which he had invested 4 years?
On December 9, 2012, Butterfield directly wrote in the Glitch shutdown announcement, ‘I am certain this is the right decision now.’ Despite receiving millions of dollars in investment and having hundreds of thousands of players, when the game didn’t grow as expected, he made the decision swiftly.
Original Korean: https://soulpapa.co.kr/2026/03/26/ceo-interview-slack-2026-03-26/
Insights from Soulpapa Marketing — Korea’s digital marketing agency.
