Stewart Butterfield
Background
Stewart Butterfield was born in British Columbia, Canada, and earned degrees in philosophy from the University of Victoria and Cambridge University. In 2004, he co-founded photo-sharing pioneer Flickr before selling it to Yahoo!.
Role at Slack Technologies, LLC
Stewart Butterfield is a co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Slack Technologies, LLC. One of the most visionary product leaders in Silicon Valley history, Butterfield achieved the rare feat of building two iconic technology businesses (Flickr and Slack) from the wreckage of two failed gaming startups (Game Neverending and Glitch). Under Butterfield's charismatic, deeply empathetic leadership, Slack grew from an internal chat script into a $27.7 billion global enterprise software giant, fundamentally transforming how hundreds of millions of knowledge workers collaborate. Butterfield's obsession with human communication, linguistic clarity, and playful software design shaped Slack's iconic brand voice, custom emoji reactions, and channel-based collaboration model.