[News Figures] Stewart Butterfield, Slack Founder, Leaving the Company

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Stewart Butterfield, Founder and CEO of Slack / Photo by Slack Official Website Capture

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Juhyung] Stewart Butterfield, founder and CEO of the business messenger Slack, will leave the company in January next year. Starting his career in the IT industry as a game developer, he grew Slack, a messaging application he started as a side project, into a business worth 30 trillion won.

Salesforce, the world's number one customer relationship management (CRM) software company headquartered in the United States, announced on the 5th (local time) that Butterfield, CEO of its subsidiary Slack, will resign. Salesforce acquired Slack in 2020, and Butterfield, the founder and CEO, had served as Slack's CEO for about two years after the company was sold.

Butterfield's successor will be Lydia Jones, Vice President who joined Salesforce in 2019. Salesforce emphasized, "Butterfield was a great leader who made Slack an amazing and beloved company," but did not mention the reason for his resignation separately.

Butterfield introduced Slack in August 2013. Slack, which established its identity as an office messenger app, quickly began expanding its corporate market mainly in the U.S. It attracted famous U.S. IT companies such as eBay, Adobe, and PayPal as clients, and also secured investment funds worth several hundred billion won from SoftBank's venture capital (VC) branch in Japan.

From Game Development Failure to 'Chat App' Startup Legend

Butterfield was born in 1973 in the small town of Lund, British Columbia, Canada. During his childhood, he lived in a shabby house without proper water or electricity, but his family barely escaped severe poverty when his father started a real estate development business. Around the age of seven, his parents gave him a computer. Young Butterfield was introduced to programming through this and dreamed of becoming a developer.

As an adult, he graduated from the University of Victoria in Canada with a degree in philosophy, then went to the UK and earned a master's degree in philosophy and history of science from the University of Cambridge. Around the time he graduated, the 'dot-com bubble' was booming, and internet businesses were rapidly growing. Butterfield had ambitions to develop a massively multiplayer online game and started a business.

His first startup, Ludicorp, developed an online game called "Neverending." However, during game development, the dot-com bubble burst, and investment funds dried up. Ultimately, Neverending ended as an unfinished project. Although the game failed, the game chat system built during the online game development became a new business. At that time, Neverending supported a feature to send photos through the chat window. Butterfield separated this feature and launched a photo-sharing service called "Flickr." Flickr was a great success and was acquired by the search portal service Yahoo in 2005 for $35 million (about 4.55 billion won).

After selling Flickr, Butterfield worked as a Yahoo employee for a while. He resigned in 2009 and founded the game company Tiny Speck. In September 2011, he released the online game "Glitch." However, Glitch failed to secure enough users to be commercially sustainable and eventually announced server shutdown the following year.

Slack integrates various functions necessary for internal business operations. / Photo by Slack website capture

Although the game service failed again, Butterfield launched the chat app "Slack" in 2013 as a separate service, which was created during game development to facilitate smooth communication among employees as an internal messenger system. Unlike Glitch, Slack quickly spread to various U.S. companies upon its release. Major IT giants in Silicon Valley adopted it one after another and praised it. Within just four years of its launch, by 2017, Slack had become a massive platform with 5 million daily users and 1.5 million paid accounts.

Joining the Billionaire Ranks through Slack Sale

Slack attracted $250 million (about 326 billion won) in investment from SoftBank, a major player in Silicon Valley's venture capital (VC) industry. At that time, Slack's corporate value reached about $5 billion (about 6.5 trillion won). In 2020, it received an acquisition offer from Salesforce, the world's number one CRM company. Salesforce's calculation was that combining its cloud customer management solutions with Slack's internal collaboration tools would create a stronger synergy effect.

Salesforce acquired Slack for over 27 billion dollars. / Photo by Yonhap News

The acquisition amount proposed by Salesforce for Slack was a staggering $27.7 billion (about 30 trillion won at the time). With the merger and acquisition completed, Butterfield became a billionaire with total assets estimated at $1.45 billion (about 1.89 trillion won, according to Forbes).

The specific reason for Butterfield's departure from Slack has not been disclosed. However, it appears to be a decision more related to personal motives than corporate management. The U.S. economic media outlet CNBC reported on the 5th that Butterfield left a note for employees saying, "(After leaving) I am not planning to start a new business. It may sound clich?, but I want to spend more time with my family."