Background
Butterfield was born in Lund, British Columbia in 1973.
Butterfield was born in Lund, British Columbia in 1973.
He was educated at Saint Michaels University School in Victoria, British Columbia. Butterfield went on to earn a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge in 1998, where he specialized in the philosophy of biology, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind.
He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria in 1996. Ludicorp and Flickr In the summer of 2002, he co-founded Ludicorp in Vancouver with Caterina Fake and Jason Classon. Ludicorp initially developed a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Game Neverending.
The game did not launch, but the company then started a photo sharing website called Flickr.
In March 2005 Ludicorp was acquired by Yahoo!, where Butterfield continued as the General Manager of Flickr until he left Yahoo on July 12, 2008. Tiny Speck In 2009 Butterfield cofounded a new company called Tiny Speck.
Tiny Speck launched its first project, the massively multiplayer game Glitch, on September 27, 2011. Glitch was later closed due to its failure to attract a sufficiently large audience.
The game world closed down on December 9, 2012, but the web site, with most of the content, is still available.
In January 2013, it was announced that the company would make most of the game"s art available under a Creative Commons license. On December 9, 2014, a fan project to relaunch Glitch under the name Eleven began alpha testing. Slack In August 2013, Butterfield announced the release of Slack, an instant-message-based team communication tool built by Tiny Speck while working on Glitch.
Since its public release in February 2014, the tool has grown at a weekly rate of 5 to 10 percent, with more than 120,000 daily users registered in the first week of August 2014.
As of August 2014, Slack has garnered United States$1.5 million in revenue and raised United States$60 million in venture capital. In early 2014, the data for Slack"s first six-month usage period since the preview release was published, showing that nearly 16,000 users were registered without the use of any form of advertising—growth was based solely upon word-of-mouth.
Butterfield secured an office for Slack employees in San Francisco in 2014 and was expected to commence recruitment during the second half of the year. As of December 2015, Slack has raised United States$340 million in venture capital and has more than 2 million daily active users, of which 570,000 are paid customers.
Slack was named Incorporated. Magazine’s 2015 company of the year.