Philosophy Degrees to Glitch
Stewart Butterfield earned his bachelor’s in philosophy from the University of Victoria and master’s in philosophy and history of science from Cambridge University. In 2002, his team was building an online game when they spun out photo-sharing site Flickr, selling it to Yahoo! in 2005.
The Pivot from Glitch to Slack
In 2009, Butterfield founded Tiny Speck to build another multiplayer game called Glitch. While the game failed, the internal chat system his team built to coordinate across cities became Slack, launching publicly in 2013.
$27.7B Salesforce Acquisition
Slack grew faster than any enterprise software product in history, reaching millions of daily active users and going public via direct listing before being acquired by Salesforce in 2021 for $27.7 billion.
