Before Slack became the go-to workplace platform, Stewart Butterfield was building an online game. When Glitch failed, the internal tool his team used to communicate took on a life of its own.
What do you do when the thing you set out to build isn’t the thing people actually want? Most successful founders often argue that founders should start by building something they genuinely care about and let the real world reveal whether it deserves to become a company.
Stewart Butterfield’s career unfolded in much the same way. Time and again, he built ambitious digital worlds, watched reality intervene, and then listened carefully for the unexpected ways people chose to use them.
Before Slack, he had already lived through one pivot that became legend. Butterfield co-founded Flickr, a photo-sharing service that was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. It was a formative outcome that put him in the small category of founders who got a second act with real expectations attached.
Before Slack, there was a failed online game called Glitch
When he started again, he did not choose the obvious “enterprise” lane. Instead, he returned to games. In 2009, Butterfield founded a new studio called Tiny Speck, which set out to build Glitch, a whimsical online world with a handmade feel.
The work was distributed across North America, with key executives in different cities. To keep the studio functioning, the engineers built an internal messaging system so the team could maintain constant, real-time chatter while building the game.
That tool was far from what some might consider a side distraction. It was what kept the team’s work from dissolving into missed context and duplicated effort. Over time it became a living archive of channels where decisions accumulated, files resurfaced, and the team’s collective memory stopped leaking.
Glitch, meanwhile, still struggled. It launched and failed to reach the scale the company needed. By 2012, the game shut down, and Tiny Speck faced the familiar, physical aftermath of a startup ending – people recalculating their futures, investors waiting for an explanation that would make the loss feel less final.
Then, there was a pivot that changed everything
And that’s when Butterfield’s most important move became a byproduct of attention. He and the team looked at what they could not stop using while everything else was slipping away.
The internal messaging tool had proven itself under stress, day after day, because it had been built for their own survival. Could it also survive with value outside of their own studio?
Slack emerged in 2013 from that question. Not as an abstract thesis about the future of work, but as a product that was shaped by their own lived frustration when it came to remote coordination, constant iteration and the need to sift through multiple channels just to find an old message again.
From Tiny Speck to Slack – a messaging tool used by millions
Years later, Slack’s public filings revealed how large that accidental tool had become. By early 2019, more than 10 million people were using Slack every day across hundreds of thousands of organizations – tens of thousands of which were paying customers.
The numbers came with a business story, too. At the same time, Slack was generating more than $400 million a year in revenue, with a growing group of large companies paying six-figure annual contracts to run their workplaces on the platform.
Then the story reached its most visible milestone. In December 2020, Salesforce announced it would acquire Slack Technologies in a deal valued at about $27.7 billion.
At the end of the day, the tool in which you’ve probably got pinned on your desktop at this very moment did not begin as a pitch deck or a market analysis. It began as a small studio’s way of staying coherent – and a founder noticing, in the wreckage of a failed game, what had quietly worked.
