Stewart Butterfield, Cofounder and CEO of Slack

Hello. Stuart is a pleasure to have you here today. Thank you. How are you doing? I'm well. Cool. So typically we would start these with a question asked in the students how many you use Slack. But since it's the official communication platform for the GSB, we're going to have to do something a little different. How about a game of two truths in a law? All right. Cool. So up here on the screen, and just a second, we're going to see three statements that I pulled from my extensive research of your past. We're going to ask the audience to guess which one of them is a lie. So statement one, you were born with a name, Stuart Butterfield. Okay. Statement two, you have two philosophy degrees. All right. Statement three. Flicker, your first successful startup. It was conceived while battling with food poisoning. Okay. So with the audience, raise your hand if you think statement one is false. Oh, wow. It's a lot of people. Raise your hand if you think statement two is false. Okay. Raise your hand if you think statement three is false. Okay. Stuart, you look pretty good. It's number one. It's number one. So you were not born Stuart Butterfield. I was born Dharma, Jeremy Butterfield, to hippie parents in a little town called London, British Columbia, which is literally the end of the road. So Pacifico's highway is the same road that goes all the way down to Chile and then all the way up to where the fjords of British Columbia and the fact that there's no only people living any further north means that it was foolish to continue building the road. So, born there and grew up in a long cabin for the first couple of years. So grew up in a long cabin, Abe Lincoln also grew up in a long cabin. Very, yeah. That's why I bring it up for the positive associations. Yeah. So trust me understand, my parents named me Trvorski Tyling Garrett and as a four year old, I was not riding Trvorski on every spelling test. Yeah. So, I go by Tyling and you actually know me by Ty. Yeah. So, Qi-Y is very... I think it's like, so when I was 12, I really wanted to be normal. And for some reason I thought Stuart was a normal name, like Mike or something like that. And Stuart, it's a pretty bad name. Like, you'll notice this after I say, anytime you watch a movie, TV show, there's a character named Stuart, there's like the jerk version and then there's like the sad sack, kind of loser version. There's never like, there's never a protagonist with the exception of the mouse, Stuart Little. That was one of my favorite movies growing up. So if you could pick any name today, what would it be? It would be Darmajermi Butterfell, it's a second name.

你好。Stuart，很高兴你今天来到这里。谢谢。你怎么样？我很好。很酷。通常我们会问学生有多少人使用Slack，但由于它是商学院的官方沟通平台，我们需要做点不同的事情。我们来玩个叫“两个真相一个谎言”的游戏吧。好的。好的。现在，我们将在屏幕上看到三个陈述，它们都是我通过对你过去的广泛研究得出的结论，我们要求听众猜出其中一个是错的。第一项陈述，你出生时名字叫Stuart Butterfield。好的。第二项陈述，你有两个哲学学位。好的。第三项陈述，Flickr是你第一次成功的启动，而这个想法是在对抗食物中毒时产生的。好的。请举手，如果你认为第一项陈述是假的。哇，好多人。请举手，如果你认为第二项陈述是假的。好的。请举手，如果你认为第三项陈述是假的。好的。Stuart，你看起来很好。是第一项。是第一项。所以你的名字不是Stuart Butterfield。我出生时名叫Dharma，Jeremy Butterfield，我的父母是嬉皮士，在一个叫伦敦的不起眼的小城镇出生，它位于加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省的最西部，太平洋海岸公路是通往智利等地的一条公路，到了不列颠哥伦比亚省的峡湾，没有人居住更向北，所以继续修路是愚蠢的。我在那里出生并在一个长木屋子里长大了几年。所以我和艾布·林肯都是从长木屋里长大的。非常，是的。这是我提到它的原因之一，有积极的联想。我的父母给我取名为Trvorski Tyling Garrett，四岁时我并没有在每次拼写测试中写Trvorski。所以我以Tyling为名，你实际上认识我是以Ty为名的。Qi-Y是非常......我想当我12岁的时候，我真的想过要变得正常。出于某种原因，我认为Stuart是一个正常的名字，就像Mike之类的。但是，Stuart是一个很糟糕的名字。当你观看电影，电视节目时，你会注意到一个名叫Stuart的角色，有一个是讨厌的版本，还有一个是悲惨的、失败的版本。从来没有一个主角，除了老鼠Stuart Little。那是我小时候最喜欢的电影之一。如果今天你可以选择任何名字，你会选择什么？它将是Darmajermi Butterfell，第二个名字。

Cool. So you handed it a little bit on your parents. What have been the most lasting influences from their parents though? That's a good question. I mean, it's hard to separate out that from what life would have been without those influences. My mom is incredibly supportive to the extent that when I was 16, I got into car accident, just totaled the car. My dad's car and my mom's reaction was, well, it's really good that you did that because you learned an important lesson about driving safety, which is not the reaction I was expecting. My dad was a real estate developer and real estate development usually works, the people incorporate a new entity for each project or each development. Maybe there's a management company that takes management fees, but it kind of isolates the investments, which means that it's like creating a business over and over again. Every two or three years, there's a fundraising cycle and there's kind of putting together the vision and a plan. And then over the next decade or so, that plays out. So I think that was a big influence for me just because I got to see the development of, I don't even know, but over the course of my childhood, once I was aware of what was going on, maybe five or six different businesses. And that was good practice because I think I started looking at the world that way.

非常酷。所以你的父母在你身上有影响吗？ 但他们的最持久的影响是什么呢？这是一个好问题。我的意思是，很难将这些影响与没有这些影响的生活分开。我妈妈非常支持我，以至于当我16岁时，我发生了一次车祸，把车撞坏了。我爸爸的车。我妈妈的反应是，“这真的很好，因为你学到了一个很重要的关于驾驶安全的教训。”这不是我想要的反应。我的爸爸是一个地产开发商，地产开发通常是这样做的，人们为每个项目或每个开发设立一个新实体。可能会有一个管理公司收取管理费，但它会隔离投资，这意味着每隔两三年就会有一个筹款周期，需要制定愿景和计划。然后在接下来的十年左右，这种情况会发生。所以我认为这对我是一个很大的影响，因为我得以看到在我童年时期，一旦我了解正在发生的事情，可能有五到六个不同的企业发展。这是很好的练习，因为我开始用这种方式看待世界。

That's cool. That's cool. So you were born Dharma Butterfield. You were raised by parents who aspire to live off the land. It only makes sense that you would be drawn to technology. So what led you to teach yourself to program at the age of seven? Computers were just so cool. And even, you see now, any three month or six month, all of it's just drawn to the iPad in a way that seems like it must be indicative of a lower level brain function that was hijacked in order to be attracted to this.

太酷了，太酷了。所以你出生时叫达玛·巴特菲尔德，你的父母追求自给自足的生活，你迷上了科技，这很合理。那么是什么促使你在7岁时自学编程呢？计算机太酷了。现在，不论是三个月还是六个月，我都被iPad吸引，似乎这必须意味着一种低级别的大脑功能被劫持以被吸引到这个设备上。

So for me, any, many screen just like, you know, any child, any screen was a super attractive. The idea that you could control what appeared was really magical. And this 1979, 1980, somewhere around there, I got an Apple TV at home. So we had one in the classroom. So the very first class at my school to have a computer in the classroom. And I would buy a copy of a magazine called Bite, which in the back, a couple of pages had programs that you could just type out yourself in Apple Basic. And you could change. a couple things and see what happened. And it was really, I have difficulty describing why it had such a powerful hold.

对我来说，任何屏幕都像是孩子眼中的糖果，非常吸引人。能控制屏幕上显示的东西的想法真的很神奇。在1979年或1980年左右，我在家里得到了Apple电视机。所以我们在教室里也用了一个。我学校里的第一个教室里有电脑的班级。我经常买一本叫做Bite的杂志，里面有几页可以自己用Apple基础语言打出来的程序。你可以修改几个东西然后看看会发生什么。我很难解释为什么它有如此强大的吸引力。

But what was interesting is if you fast forward like 20 years, there was, I liked, I had an early game console called an Intellivision. So I liked video games like most boys in my age. The numbers are, the arcades where you went and put quarters and machines and stuff like that. But computers themselves became less and less interested in me over the course of high school. But when I got to college, I got an account on the school's Unix machine and discovered the internet. This was 1992. And that was just totally mind expanding and almost couldn't believe that such a thing was possible.

但有趣的是，如果你向前快进20年，我喜欢早期的游戏机Intellivision。和我这个年纪的大部分男孩一样，我喜欢玩电子游戏。数字是指像游戏机房这种地方，你需要投入一些硬币玩那些机器之类的。但是在整个高中期间，我对计算机的兴趣越来越少。但是当我上大学后，在学校的Unix机器上得到了账户，发现了互联网。那是在1992年。这真的是开拓了我的思维，我几乎无法相信这样的事情是可能的。

And it had the same feeling of wonder, but to a higher degree, because it was like we, as a species, had developed the ability to transcend geography in a much more profound way than like long distance phone calls had or the telegraph had. You could find community, an agro up in, it's going to college in Victoria, British Columbia, which is again on the edge of the continent, very remote kind of provincial. And you could find people who were interested in exactly what you were anywhere in the world and that communication is happening at the speed of light. So that really opened it up.

这种感觉让人惊叹，但是这种惊叹感更加强烈，因为我们这个物种已经发展出了一种在地理上超越的能力，这种能力比长途电话或电报更为深刻。你可以在世界上任何地方找到志同道合的人，无论是在乡下、去维多利亚学院（这是加拿大卑诗省的一个边缘城市，十分偏远）、还是在其他地方，而且这种沟通是以光速进行的。因此，这真正开启了一种新的可能性。

And then fast forward another 10 years. So like in the early 2000s, I had this experience finally where I had my laptop with me. And what at one point in my life had been like the Steve Jobs bicycle for the mind, like this incredible machine that you have anything was possible and all this amazing software, when it wasn't connected to the internet was inert. It was basically kind of useless.

再向前快进10年。那么就像在21世纪初，我最终有了这个经验，我随身携带了我的笔记本电脑。曾经在我的生活中，那些有着无限可能和惊人软件的神奇机器，有点像乔布斯给大脑的自行车，但当它没有连接到互联网时，它就是静态的，基本上没什么用处。

It was like a rock. So it was a very interesting experience to think about like the successive layers of what really matters. The first one being that ability to run arbitrary codes would generate more or less anything that a human can imagine and then the ability to put all of those together. And I think that was like the thing that has guided my career ever since is the exploration of that idea of computing technology as a means of facilitating human interaction. It's amazing.

它像一块石头一样。所以，思考真正重要的连续层面是非常有趣的经历。第一层是能够运行任意代码，它可以生成几乎任何人类可以想象的东西，然后再把所有这些东西组合起来的能力。我认为这就像是一直指导着我职业生涯的东西，这是探索计算技术作为促进人类互动的手段的想法。这太神奇了。

So that's what drew you to technology initially, but you actually studied philosophy. So what inspired that decision? I really wanted to do a degree in cognitive science, but the school that I went to didn't have cognitive science.

所以最初是技术吸引了您，但您实际上学习了哲学。那是什么启发您做出这个决定的呢？我真的很想学认知科学的学位，但我上学的学校没有认知科学。

So cognitive science is usually computer science, psychology, linguistics, and psychology. And so I wanted to take courses in all four to do an honors degree in psychology. Like every single course was requirement. In fact, you had to do like extra. Whereas philosophy is a pretty light set of requirements even to do an honors degree. So I chose philosophy literally like that. It was like of those four, the one that had the few requirements.

认知科学通常包括计算机科学、心理学、语言学和哲学等学科。所以，我想要在心理学方面攻读荣誉学位，需要学习这四个学科的所有课程，每门课程都是必修的。事实上，你还需要学一些额外的课程。而哲学的课程要求相对较少，即使是攻读荣誉学位也不例外。因此，我选择了哲学，因为在这四个学科中，它是课程要求最少的一门。

But after I started studying it, even though I was like, it was really, a deep philosophy of mine is really interested in neuropsych as an undergrad, the fundamentals of philosophy I found super fascinating. And this is, this is sounds bad. And it is bad in one sense. It's good in another sense. So you think about the last 2,500 years of kind of the history of inquiry of all different kinds. At some point everyone was a philosopher.

但是在我开始学习哲学之后，即使我一开始不太感兴趣，我发现哲学的基本原理非常有趣。我在本科时对神经心理学非常感兴趣，但哲学的基础知识也吸引了我的注意力。这听起来有些糟糕，确实有些糟糕，但另一方面也是好的。想一想过去2500年来各种探索的历史。在某个时候，每个人都是哲学家。

If you were interested in the world in an a religious way, like the beginning of science was philosophy. At some point mathematics, geometry, astronomy split off over the next many hundred years. Things like biology in the 19th century split off into its own discipline and psychology, anthropology, sociology, computer science, linguistics, women's studies. So all you had left was like an area of inquiry that has not directed at anything except for like itself and language.

如果你对宗教方面的世界感到兴趣，就像科学起源于哲学一样。在接下来的几百年里，数学、几何、天文学分开了。在19世纪，生物学分离出成为自己的学科，心理学、人类学、社会学、计算机科学、语言学、女性研究等等也都分离出了自己的学科。因此，你所剩下的只是一个没有任何特定研究方向，只有自身和语言的探究领域。

So in one sense, it's really boring. So if you didn't ever study philosophy and you pick up a book of contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy, it is super, super boring. It's almost impenetrable without this giant vocabulary that weighs into it. But once you're into it, I still find it really fascinating because there's so many unanswerable questions. It's good to know.

从某种意义上说，这真的很无聊。如果你从未学习过哲学，然后拿起一本当代英美分析哲学的书，它会格外、格外地无聊。它几乎是无法渗透的，除非你掌握了庞大的词汇。但一旦你进入它，我仍然觉得它非常有趣，因为有许多无法回答的问题。了解这些是好的。

So who was the most influential philosopher to you? I have a pretty broad range and I liked all kinds of thinkers, but like back to Aristotle, it's been those more contemporary, client and Donald Davidson. But if there's one, it was Vickish Lank, because that's why I ended up going to Cambridge. Amazing. Amazing.

那么，你心目中最有影响力的哲学家是谁？我喜欢很多思想家，范围比较广泛，但如果回溯到亚里士多德，更现代的有克莱因和唐纳德·戴维森。但如果非得选一个的话，那就是维克什·兰克，因为这也是我最终选择去剑桥的原因。简直太神奇了。

So we're in 1997 now. You're armed with two philosophy degrees and a name for a philosopher, a butterfield. But you decided to become a web developer. What led you back into technology?

现在我们来到了1997年。你有两个哲学学位，一个哲学家的名字Butterfield。但你决定成为一个网络开发者。是什么促使你回归科技界？

Well, so like I said, I got to college in 1992, which was like at least for my awareness, six months to maybe a year before the web really took off. I think Mosaic had been invented but wasn't really widely deployed. So the internet was email, IRC, a UNIX program called Talk. More than anything else, it was using that. And that meant that as soon as the web became a popular medium that started supplanting things like GoFur and Waze, I was there. And it was really, the HTML back then was just dead simple.

嗯，就像我说的那样，我在1992年上大学，那时候我知道的是，在网络真正兴起之前至少已经有六个月甚至一年了。我认为Mosaic已经发明了，但并没有得到广泛应用。因此，互联网是电子邮件、IRC以及一个叫Talk的UNIX程序。最重要的是，我使用的正是它们。这意味着，当网络开始成为一种受欢迎的媒介，开始取代GoFur和Waze时，我就在那里了。到那时，HTML还是非常简单易懂的。

So very easy to teach yourself. So 93, I was, I don't know, one of five people in my hometown who knew HTML, which meant that 94, 95, 96 every year, my summer job, but also just my job during the school year was making websites for people who didn't know how to make websites because pretty much no one did. And it was 98, I finished my masters and was enrolled in the PhD. And it was the beginning, so a friend of mine had just finished his PhD in philosophy and went to a great school and did great thesis work and was really at the top of the range.

非常容易自学。我生于93年，不知道为什么，我在我家乡是五个懂HTML的人之一，这意味着94年，95年，96年每年暑假的工作，也是我在学校期间的工作，是为那些不知道如何制作网站的人制作网站，因为几乎没有人会。到了98年，我完成了硕士学位，也被录取到博士班。这是一个新的开始，我的一个朋友刚刚完成了哲学博士学位，在一所优秀的学校完成了非常棒的论文工作，并且真的站在了巅峰。

And got his first job, which was at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and he really didn't want to live in Kentucky. And it was a crappy job with low pay and it's a sessional position. So it renews every nine months. I thought of how many hoops I had to jump through just to get to that point. Or because it was 98 and the dot com thing that started to take off and I knew the web and all of my friends who were early web people were moving to San Francisco and getting jobs that paid two or three times as much and it was exciting and dynamic and we were changing the world.

他得到了他的第一份工作，是在肯塔基州路易斯维尔大学，但他实在不想住在肯塔基州。这是一份低薪和只有九个月合同期的临时工作。我意识到之前为了到达这一步我跨越了多少障碍。或者因为当时是1998年，互联网公司开始兴起，我了解网络知识，很多早期从事互联网的朋友们都搬到旧金山找到了两到三倍的工资，那是个令人兴奋和充满活力的时代，我们正在改变世界。

So I had advice from a couple professors over the course of my career who essentially were this is a terrible life, please don't become an academic. If you're interested in this stuff, you can subscribe to the journals and attend the conferences. You don't have to actually do a PhD and then go be a professor. So I took that advice. Okay.

在我的职业生涯中，我从几位教授那里得到了建议，他们认为这是一种糟糕的生活方式，希望我不要成为一名学者。如果你对这些东西感兴趣，可以订阅杂志和参加会议，而不必真的去攻读博士学位，然后成为一名教授。于是我采纳了这个建议。

That's good to know. So I'm actually curious. Raise your hand if you have a humanities degree. Okay. Keep your hand raised if you're considering a career in technology. Okay.

知道这件事情很好。所以我很好奇。如果你持有人文学位，请举手。好的，保持你的手仍然举着，如果你正在考虑从事技术行业，请继续举手。

So my question there is what were the advantages and disadvantages in having a humanities degree within the technology industry? It's tough because I mean there's multiple technology industries. So when I would say when I started in 98, the web was tech but it was populated much more by people with the background in like graphic design or architecture if you're making web development, the serious backend programmers had a parallel track to web server development but it was really like a totally different era and there wasn't anything in between like the architects and the graphic designers on one side and the people this won't be a familiar reference to many of you but the people using web logic and ATG, Dynamo and these like from today's contemporary perspective kind of really horrible application servers that had a fundamentally different approach to doing web development.

我的问题是，在科技行业中拥有人文学位的优缺点是什么？这很困难，因为我的意思是有多个技术行业。当我在1998年开始时，互联网是技术，但它更多地被拥有图形设计或建筑背景的人所占据，如果你在开发网站，严重的后台程序员有一个与Web服务器开发平行的轨迹，但这真的是完全不同的时代，没有在建筑师和图形设计师一侧与使用Web Logic和ATG，Dynamo和这些今天的当代视角看来真的很糟糕的应用程序服务器之间的任何东西，对于你们中的许多人来说，这并不熟悉。

It was stateful applications, things like enterprise job beings and so I don't think it really made any difference. What your background was at that point? It could have been history, could have been finance, could have been physics and meanwhile there's a different technology industry which is like all of the descendants of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel and HP and a bunch of companies that were native to this area but that was completely different. The design of circuit boards and processors and manufacturing computers was totally unrelated to the web and still today I think we say tech industry broadly, I think mostly what people mean is at least around the Bay Area is companies that receive VC backing as opposed to anything else. They're not necessarily specifically technology companies and the side effect of software eating the world in the famous smart and recent phrase is that every company is a technology company.

那时候，它是有状态的应用程序，比如企业作业开始等等，所以我不认为它会有什么影响。在那个时候，你的背景可能是历史、金融、物理等方面，与此同时，还有一个全然不同的科技产业，像是Fairchild Semiconductor、英特尔和惠普等公司的所有后代，这些公司都是本土的，但是它们与网络完全不相关。电路板和处理器的设计以及计算机制造与网络毫不相关。即使到今天，我认为我们广泛地说科技产业，大部分人想表达的是至少在湾区（硅谷）周围获得VC资助的公司，而不是其他任何东西。它们不一定是专门的技术公司，而软件吞噬世界的结果就是在广为人知且最近流传的名言中，“每个公司都是一家科技公司”。

You can look at like Visa or MasterCard probably employ close to an order of magnitude more software developers than Stripe and everyone would say Stripe as a technology company is PayPal a financial services company or tech company is Airbnb a tech company or hospitality company. It's really it becomes increasingly hard to make that distinction unless you mean like technology is Huawei making 5G antenna chips and it's like Dell and then software businesses like lock. Thank you for that.

你可以看待像Visa或MasterCard这样的公司，可能雇用接近一个数量级更多的软件开发人员比Stripe，而每个人都会说Stripe作为一家技术公司，PayPal是一家金融服务公司还是技术公司，Airbnb是一家技术公司还是酒店业公司。除非你指的是像华为生产5G天线芯片这样的技术公司，否则很难做出区分，就像戴尔这样的软件业务公司。谢谢。

So you worked as a web designer for a few years before starting a video game company and launching your first video game never ending. What was your vision for that game? So when I said 92 the thing that was most interesting to me about the internet was using that. Using that is a those of you who don't know it. A hierarchical directory of news groups and it covered Moral's everything so they began with the three letter abbreviation so SCI was science and there was science physics and geology and so on. And then rack, rack dot music dot, rack dot music dot G dead grateful dad was in 92 the netflix of its time in the sense that it used more bandwidth and any other single thing on the internet. There's so much traffic of people discussing grateful dad that it kind of surpassed everything else.

你在成为一名网页设计师数年后开始了一家视频游戏公司，发布了你的第一款游戏《永不停止》。那时你的愿景是什么？当我提到92年时，最吸引我的是互联网的使用。互联网上有一个层次结构的目录新闻组， covers了 Moral's everything，所以它以三个字母的缩写开头，例如SCI代表科学，然后按照科学、物理学和地质学等进行分类。然后rack，rack点音乐点，rack点音乐点G dead grateful dad是92年在网上使用带宽最多的东西，就像当时的netflix一样。有很多人讨论Grateful Dead，因此它几乎超越了所有其他东西的流量。

So 93 I guess probably a year later I had the first experience of having a crush on someone that I had never actually met was just like from her online persona her sig files the things she said in comments. And the idea that that kind of connection was possible was I mean this really early stage was like very interesting to me. You go forward to 98 99 2000 and people had blogs there were the early social networks like six degrees and then friends to her was probably 2002 ish around there but people had started developing a persona and having interactions with other people over the internet in a bunch of different virtual communities. Some of those are really explicit like the wells are like one of the ancient ones but both in board systems discussion boards moves kind of like interactive chat based games. And the I said earlier that the idea of social interaction mediated by computing technology like the new possibilities that opens up was a thing that was really fascinating to me.

我大约在93年时，第一次体验到喜欢上一个从未见面的人，只是因为她在网络上呈现的形象，她的签名文件以及在评论中说的话。而这种连接是可能的这种想法，对我来说非常有趣。随着时间的推移，到了98年，99年，2000年，人们开始写博客，有了早期的社交网络，比如six degrees，以及2002年左右的朋友们，人们开始在许多不同的虚拟社区中展示自己的形象并与其他人进行互动。其中一些社区非常明确，像井口这样古老的系统还有讨论版块、游戏等，这种计算技术介导下的社交互动的新可能性，对我来说真的很是迷人。

So when you say game I think people have the assumption that there's puzzle games and there's shooting games and there's sports games and stuff like that. This was none of those and this was just play as a pretext for social interaction. So this is a description that may or may not have appeal to some of you I will tell you that it does not have broad commercial appeal. And that's like whimsical world of like absurdist humor and kind of hopefully delightful little things to discover but it's mostly like a venue for people to interact and to form community with one another. And super popular among the small group of people from we developed this prototype and were testing it but that was 2002.

当你说游戏时，我认为人们会假定有益智游戏、射击游戏、运动游戏等等。但这款游戏不是那些游戏，它只是一种为社交互动而玩的借口。这是一种描述，可能对你们中的一些人有吸引力，但我要告诉你们，它并没有广泛商业吸引力。它是一个奇幻世界，有着荒谬的幽默和一些美妙的小发现，但主要是一个让人们互动和相互建立社区的场所。这个原型在我们开发和测试它时受到了小团体人的超级欢迎，但那是在2002年。

So some of you are probably were just little babies in 2002 but there was the dot com crash which started in 2000. There was the World Com and Enron accounting scandals. There was 9.11. It was just like a really dark time for financial markets. The NASDAQ was down I think 80 or 85% from its peaks and the S&P 500 was out of 65%. It's kind of like hard to imagine even in comparison to 2008. So no one wanted to invest in internet stuff period but definitely no one wanted to invest in web based massively multiplayer games. That was just like as frivolous as you could possibly be. We should bet that no one would invest in us and we didn't have enough money to finish it and we tried to cast around for something that we could do with the technology we developed that would create a commercially viable product and that turned out to be Flickr. Yeah so ironically game never ending didn't.

在2002年，你们其中一些可能还只是婴儿，当时发生了互联网泡沫破灭，从2000年开始就有这种情况。同时，发生了World Com和安然会计丑闻，还有9.11事件。那时金融市场非常黑暗。纳斯达克指数下跌了80%到85%，标普500指数下跌了65%。与2008年相比，这种情况难以想象。当时没有人想投资互联网，尤其是不想投资基于网络的大型多人在线游戏，认为这太过浪费。我们觉得没有人会投资我们，而我们又没有足够的钱来完成，于是考虑如何利用我们开发的技术开发出一个商业上可行的产品，结果就是Flickr。所以，讽刺的是，游戏永无止境从未完成。

So how did you feel when you realized you had to shut down the game? Horrible. But at the same time they kind of happened like we were developing Flickr and in the games side by side for a couple of months. The decision to make Flickr and then its launch was three months separating those so it happened pretty quickly. But in that case it felt like it was a path forward. The team got to stay together. We had like we disappointed a lot of people who were playing it but also a lot of them are like cool Flickr is interesting too and they're just kind of migrated. So that wasn't that bad.

当你意识到必须关闭游戏时，你感觉如何？非常糟糕。但同时，我们在几个月内开发 Flickr 和游戏并行进行。决定制作 Flickr ，并且进行其发布时，有三个月的时间间隔，所以它发生得很快。但在那种情况下，它感觉像是一条前进的道路。团队可以保持在一起。我们让很多正在玩游戏的人感到失望，但也有很多人认为 Flickr 很有趣，他们就转移到了那里。所以，那并不是很糟糕。

So you realized you had to shut down the game but not before flying to one last video game conference in New York. What happens next?

所以你意识到必须关掉游戏，但在飞往纽约最后一个视频游戏会议之前。接下来会发生什么？ 这段话表述了一个人在关掉游戏之前，去参加了最后一个视频游戏会议，询问之后的发生情况。

So it was a conference on law and virtual world in New York and flew from Vancouver where I was living and got food poisoning on the flight and I don't know if I could to vivid but it's just like puking in the immigration hall, JFK, puking in the cab on the freeway, get to the hotel and like step out of the cab and puk all over the car. So sorry little vivid.

这是在纽约举行的有关法律和虚拟世界的会议，我从我居住的温哥华飞过来，并在飞行中食物中毒。我不知道能否描述得过于生动，但就跟在JFK机场移民厅呕吐、在高速公路上的出租车中呕吐，当我到达酒店时，下出租车就在车上呕吐一样。非常抱歉描述得如此生动。

I couldn't keep down anything. like ginger ale, water and that night at like three in the morning after being up a kind of feverish and frantic rode out the whole first version of Flickr. What it would be and how it would take advantage of those technologies. I will say this though that was the very first version which is very different than one and it had become and it was not actually very good. It got us going. So I have am yet to have a battle with food poisoning be so productive.

我什么都吃不下，包括姜汁汽水、水，在凌晨三点钟的时候，我发高烧，情绪也很激动，在那个夜晚我写出了Flickr的第一版。我想到了它应该是什么样子，以及如何利用那些技术。不过，我必须说，那是Flickr很不同的第一版，远非它现在的版本，并且实际上并不是很好。但是它却让我们开始了。所以，我至今还没被食物中毒打败过，让我产生那么多成果。

So Kudos to you there. You decided to focus on Flickr. When you made that shift did everyone on your team buy in immediately or what was that process like? No, so I'm pretty democratic leader sometimes. Maybe less so now than back then but we had a vote and there was a tie. So I called Eric Costello. It's actually one of the founders of Slack as well and just like does some background lobbying to get him to change his vote so that we could go ahead with it.

那么赞赏你们。你们决定把重点放在Flickr上。当你做出这个转变时，你的团队中的每个人是否立即接受了它，或者这个过程是什么样子的？不是的，我有时是一个比较民主的领导者。也许现在比当时少一些，但我们进行了一次投票，最后结果是平局。因此，我给Eric Costello打了电话，他实际上也是Slack的创始人之一，想说服他改变他的投票，以便我们能够继续进行这个计划。

There's definitely like there's people who are still interested in making the game and felt like it was a shame to leave it behind. It was also I think in terms of the number of people online way too early, the technology that was available way too early. I think people forget. 2002 was the first year that any country got more than 50% internet penetration at home and that was the Netherlands. And even then that was almost all dial up connectivity so most Americans didn't have internet access. If they did it was at work and it was very narrowly prescribed and if they did anything online it was like maybe check sports doors and stock prices or something like that.

有一些人仍然对制作游戏感兴趣，并认为放弃这个游戏是一件遗憾的事情。从在线人数来看，这个游戏还远远太早了，科技也还不够成熟。我想人们可能已经忘记了，2002年是任何国家在家庭中使用互联网渗透率超过50%的第一年，而荷兰是实现这一目标的国家。即便如此，那时几乎所有连接方式都是拨号上网，所以大多数美国人没有互联网接入。如果他们使用互联网，那也只是在工作中，并且受到非常狭窄的限制，如果他们做了任何在线活动，那只是可能会检查一下体育新闻或股票价格之类的东西。

So there wasn't really a market for it but I just like making software just in the same way that I did when I was seven years old and I think everyone else on the team did too so we just got to make a different than a software. And in the end it was the game was play as a pretext or social interaction. Flickr was photography as a pretext for social interaction. It was the first one of the designers there called it massively multiplayer photo sharing which I thought was pretty accurate because it was the first thing other than the web shots which I heard about later where you could put a photo online and people could see it and comment on it and you could have a title and description and you could tag it and create groups and all of that kind of stuff. So it was a social network that revolved around photographs.

当时，并没有市场需求，但我喜欢制作软件，就像我七岁时做的一样，我认为团队里的每个人也都是这样。所以我们就开始制作一种不同于其他软件的东西。最后，这个游戏成为了社交互动的借口。Flickr是以摄影作为社交互动的借口。设计团队的其中一位设计师称其为“大规模多人照片共享”，我认为这很准确，因为除了之后听说的Web Shots之外，这是第一个可以在线发布照片供他人查看和评论的平台，你可以为照片加上标题、描述、标签和创建群组等操作。所以它是以照片为主题的社交网络。

I think it started right around the same time as Facebook but Facebook was still just a harvard for another six months or a year and then just the IVs for another close to a year after that. Cool. So not to spoil the story but you eventually sell Flickr to Yahoo for excess of $20 million. I'm curious looking back now as you're leading Slack what lessons from your time at Flickr have been most influential on the leader that you are today?

我认为这一切大约是在Facebook开始的时候，但Facebook仍只是哈佛大学的一个社交网站，持续了大约六个月或一年左右，随后又持续了近一年的时间才走向了新的高峰。很酷。好了，不想让故事失色，您最终以过20亿美元的价格将Flickr卖给了雅虎。现在回顾过去，您从Flickr时期学到的哪些经验对您如今领导Slack最有影响力？

It's hard to say because it was so long ago. We started developing in 2003, launched in 2004 and then this summer, sorry the winter break in 2004, 2005. There's this big decision about whether we're going to take VC funding or we're going to get bought by Yahoo. So it's 2005 to 2008 that I was there and there's definitely not something that stands as like the thing that I learned. There other than how hard it is to get something done or how hard it is, I mean that is a good lesson, how hard it is to get something done in an organization that size.

很难说因为那个时候已经很久了。我们在2003年开始研发，2004年推出，然后在2004年至2005年冬季，这个暑假的时候，我们做了一个重大决定，是接受风险投资还是被雅虎收购。所以我在那里的时间是2005年到2008年，除了知道在那样的组织中完成一件事有多么困难之外，没有什么特别重要的经验。

It was about 12,000 people and I think there's a couple things that were wrong with it at that time but the biggest one was it had basically stopped growing and in an environment where the pie isn't growing anymore, suddenly the game theoretic, the calculus especially among executives is very zero sum. So it was like people battling each other internally. But even to forget that for a second, any organization that fans thousands of people and it requires such an extraordinary injection of will to make anything happen that most things are for our practical purposes impossible.

那时大约有12,000人参与其中，我认为有几件事做得不太对，但最大的问题是这个组织基本停止了增长，在一个环境中，饼干不再增长，计算尤其是在高管之间是非常零和的。所以人们内部互相争斗。但是，即使暂时忘记这一点，任何一个吸引数千人的组织都需要投入极大的意志力才能发生任何事情，大多数事情对我们实际来说都是不可能的。

Okay, so we fast forward to 2012. You have left Yahoo which by the way if you have not read Stuart's resignation letter from Yahoo, please Google it. He likenes himself to a 10 Smither named Brad. It's quite hilarious. So it's 2012, you're starting another video game company this time, TinySpec. At TinySpec you launch a game called Glitch. What gave you more confidence in the gaming area this time around?

好的，我们快进到2012年。你离开了雅虎，如果你还没有读过斯图尔特在雅虎的辞职信，请到谷歌上搜索一下。他把自己比作一个名叫布拉德的10个码农中的一个。这非常搞笑。所以现在到了2012年，你又开始了另一个视频游戏公司——TinySpec。在TinySpec，你发布了一款名为Glitch的游戏。这次你在游戏领域有什么更多的信心呢？

So in 2009 we started the company in 2012 when we shut it down but it's the same group of people, you know, so four of us who had worked on Flickr and we all worked together. But 2002 to 2009 was pretty amazing time in the history of the internet so suddenly everyone had internet access and there were phones that were capable of internet access and black barriers and trios and there were a lot of people had high speed internet by that time. The world of open source software specifically to support development on the internet. We had just exploded so there was really not much available in 2002 but by 2009 we had a very robust mature Apache foundation and all of these great networking technologies. And computers were much faster and there's many more people online. We were much more experienced. It was very easy to raise money. Like if you just look at any factor in a giant matrix of like things that would lead this to be a good plan or to be successful we had shifted from like a two out of ten to an eight nine or ten out of ten except that that idea was still not very commercially viable.

在2009年，我们开始了这个公司，但在2012年我们关闭了它，但是人员组成依然相同，我们是从Flickr过来的四个人，一起工作过。但是从2002年到2009年是互联网历史上相当惊人的时期，突然所有人都有了互联网接入，手机也能够接入互联网，还有黑莓和三星手机，很多人当时就已经有高速互联网了。开源软件世界专门支持互联网开发。我们的发展突飞猛进，2002年几乎没有什么，但到了2009年，我们已经有了非常强大成熟的Apache基础和所有这些伟大的网络技术。计算机速度更快，网民更多了。我们更有经验，筹集资金也非常容易。如果你看大量因素中的任何一个因素，能够导致这个计划成功的话，我们的成功概率已经从两分之一提高到了八九或十分之一了，但这个想法仍不是非常商业化可行的。

Same idea like better graphics. Do you think that idea is ever going to be commercially viable? Well I mean so not I mean we could have kept going and paid all of our salaries and been happy and it would have been interesting but we had taken by that point like 17 million dollars in VC money. So I felt like it would have been an aberration and responsibility and the kind of contract we made with them to just do that. So we had to think of something else.

“就像更好的图形一样”，你觉得这个想法有商业价值吗？我的意思是，我们本来可以继续发展并支付所有薪水，让我们感到快乐并且这个想法很有趣，但是我们在那个时候已经拿到了1700万美元的风险投资。所以，我觉得这样做会违反我们与他们达成的协议，并且需要承担更多的责任。所以，我们必须想出其他办法。

So you said 17 and a half million and funding you had you were around 45 employees around the time. So you find yourself in a familiar situation and you have to shut down that game again. What was the toughest part about that decision the second time around? So the second time around it was very different because it wasn't just hey everyone we are now as a group when a switch wasn't working on because there was animators and musicians and writers and illustrators, level designers, a whole bunch of people who just didn't have skills that were transferable to us so a lot of people were going to get laid off. I think there was 35 and in the three and a half years that we have been running the various versions of glitch there was pretty strong and very active robust community.

你说你们有一千七百五十万的资金，大约有四十五名员工。所以你又陷入了一个熟悉的境地，不得不再次关闭那个游戏。这个决定里最困难的是什么？ 第二次很不同，因为不仅是“大家现在成为了一个团队”，因为还有动画师、音乐家、作家、插画家、关卡设计师和其他很多人没有可移植技能，在这个决定中被解雇。我认为有三十五个人，在我们经营各种版本的游戏期间，我们的社区非常强大、活跃和有活力。

There wasn't like the couple hundred people who tested game and branding could just start using flicker they were going to disappear. And I think this is a hard thing to relate to or understand if you haven't gone through it and it's maybe somebody that hasn't happened in a long time and might not happen again. Like Tumblr seems like the last platform that had closed communities like that where it's now everything like Instagram is just one world connected to Facebook as well and Twitter is like everyone and there are definitely sub-communities but when communities exist in one specific platform and that platform disappears it's a little bit like that moment in the first Star Wars when Alder on gets blown up like it's just that society that little culture those relationships just won't exist anymore.

当时测试游戏和品牌的好几百人都不能仅仅使用Flicker就消失了。如果你没有经历过这样的经历，那么理解这件事可能很难。这可能是很久以前的事情，也可能不会再发生了。像Tumblr似乎是最后一个有封闭社区的平台，而现在Instagram只是与Facebook相连的一个世界，Twitter则是包容所有人，虽然肯定有子社区，但当社区只存在于一个特定的平台上，并且那个平台消失了，那就像第一部《星球大战》中奥德隆被摧毁的那一刻一样，那个文明，那个小文化和那些关系就不再存在了。

So that was very sad but obviously for me it's first of all embarrassing did all this press and made all these claims I had convinced all these people to come and it convinced any time we got any press and it was my head convinced I'm going to do it every time we got invested I had convinced I'm going to do it but more than anything else I had convinced all these people to come work on this and I told this story many times but the day that I made the announcement internally it called this all hands and people already a little bit apprehensive because we've been through a couple of different like here's the last thing we're going to try and there wasn't a day when we normally had an all hands and I locked eyes with someone as soon as they started talking about two or three months before I had convinced to move to a new city with his wife and two year old daughter away from where his in-laws lived and in-laws were helping to take care of the kid he moved to new city bought a house and now I was going to tell him that he didn't have a job anymore it was really really hard.

那真的很令人悲伤，但对于我来说，首先是尴尬。我跟众多媒体宣传，提出了所有这些要求。我说服了所有这些人来参加，每一次得到媒体的报道或有人投资，我都许下承诺。但最重要的是，我说服了所有这些人来参与，我已经说过很多次了，但是在我内部宣布这个消息的那一天，我们进行了一次全员大会，人们已经有点紧张，因为我们已经经历过几次像这样的尝试了。但是，在我们通常进行全员大会时，我看着一个我在两三个月前说服他和他的妻子以及两岁的女儿搬到一个新城市，远离他父母舒适的城市，而他的父母曾经帮助照顾他家的孩子。他搬到了新城市，买了一套房子，为他说我不能再给他工作做好了准备，这真的太难了。

I think that's the like the impact on me reputationally or financially was in the grand scheme of things and relatively insignificant like I would just bounce back again but it's that's more than just disappointing someone like I was going to come meet you for dinner and I bailed the last minute or something like that this is like I convinced you to change the ultra the course of your life in a really significant way and then didn't it didn't happen so that was very very difficult in the end.

我认为在大局上，无论是对我的名誉还是财务影响，都相对微不足道。我会再次振作起来，但这不仅仅是让人失望的问题。就像我本应该和你一起共进晚餐，但在最后一刻放弃一样，但这次事情更加严重，因为我说服你在你生命中的道路上做出了重大改变，然后却未作到。最后，这是非常困难的。

You like a little bit of positive news because we had five and a half million dollars left of that money we're able to shut down in a relatively elegant way so we've made a portfolio site which had everyone's resumes and did a bunch of reference letter writing. and kind of career coaching and helped get everyone a job and in most cases a better job than they had when they were working for us and we are able to give customers the choice of their money back where we could donate it to charity or whatever and that one person Tim leftler and that joining Slack book a year later so that part all worked out too but it doesn't mitigate at all like what it felt like in that moment it was really it was pretty terrible that's pretty heavy.

你喜欢一点点积极的消息，因为我们剩下了五百万美元的资金，我们能够以相对优雅的方式关闭业务，所以我们制作了一个投资组合网站，其中包含了每个人的简历，并做了一些推荐信写作、职业指导，帮助每个人找到了工作，大多数情况下是比以前工作更好的工作。我们能够让顾客选择退款，或捐赠给慈善机构等，只有一个人Tim Leftler离开了，一年后加入了Slack的团队，所以这部分工作也得到了解决，但这并不能完全缓解当时的感受，那真的很糟糕，这让人感到非常沉重。

So how do you go from that terrible moment to launching Slack which reached a billion dollar evaluation and record setting pace of eight months? That worked out super well. We had developed this system that was the proto Slack again 92 I mentioned one of the software network tools that I used was called IRC or internet relay chat and we used IRC at Chinese back the company they made glitch and it's a very old technology so it's with most messaging systems of probably every messaging system you've ever used there's a concept of what's called store and forward so I'm a friend of a message to you but I can't reach you right now like there's no connection to your endpoint your client or your device it'll just be held and then forwarded to you the next time you connect but IRC didn't have that if you weren't connected at the moment that I sent the message you would just never receive it so we built the system to log the messages but once we had the message in database you wanted to be able to search them so we built search on top of that and then like bit by bit kind of feature by feature we built things to integrate with our file server so when someone uploaded a file and we get announced into IRC or if an alert went off in our data center then that would get put into IRC and slowly we developed the system which was like really the foundation of all of the ways in which the company communicated and was really beneficial and so we realized none of us are ever going to work without something like this ever again other teams of eight software developers would probably like it as well and so we decided that's what we're going to do and we thought that one day in the fullness of time if we had every single person who could possibly use this we would have a hundred million dollars in revenue and thereby be a billion dollar company and that just happened very quickly.

那么，你如何从那个可怕的时刻走向Slack的创立，它达到了十亿美元的估值并创下了八个月的记录速度呢？这个方法非常成功。我们曾开发出了一个原型Slack系统，就像我在92年提到的那样。我曾使用的一种软件网络工具叫做IRC或互联网中继聊天，我们在中国用了IRC回到了那家公司，他们制作的是故障和旧技术，所以在大多数消息系统中，可能是你使用过的每个消息系统中都有一个叫做“存储和转发”的概念，所以我给你发了一条消息，但我现在无法联系你，就像你的端点、客户端或设备没有连接一样，它只会被保留，然后在下次连接时转发给你，但是IRC没有这个功能，如果你不在我发送消息的那一刻连接，你就永远收不到消息，所以我们建立了一个记录消息的系统，但是一旦我们把消息记录在数据库中，你希望能够搜索它们，所以我们在此基础上建立了搜索功能，然后逐步地、逐个特征地建立了一些与我们的文件服务器集成的东西，所以当有人上传文件时，我们会在IRC中通知，或者如果数据中心发出警报，那么它将被放在IRC中，慢慢地，我们开发了这个系统，它真正成为了公司交流的所有方式的基础，并且非常有益，于是我们意识到，我们永远不会再没有这样的东西来工作了，其他八名软件开发人员的团队可能也会喜欢它，所以我们决定这就是我们要做的事情，我们认为，如果有每个可能使用这个系统的人，我们在收入方面将有一亿美元，因此成为一个十亿美元的公司，这很快就发生了。

Yeah I definitely think the math checks out so it's Slack you created a product that not a lot of companies knew they needed how did you convince them otherwise that was tough the first first like three or four external teams to use like it took dozens of tries like going to their office and showing them and I think we learned a lot there about marketing probably isn't the right term but I think we actually had this problem a little bit with Flickr because Facebook came out and just stole the social photoshide market while Flickr was trying to decide whether it wanted to be social photo sharing or like a community for people who are interested in photography but if you can't explain what you're doing well enough that someone to whom you explain it can go on to explain it to someone else then it's a real problem because otherwise you're going to have to do all the exciting so we struggled to figure out the way to talk about it like what advantages it had what it was for but when you're when it's net new and it's not replacing something else it's very difficult there's I don't know if it's still frequently read but there's a classic book in marketing called positioning Jack Trout and Alan Reese I think and one of the things to talk about is if something's a new concept for you it's almost impossible for it to get purchased in somebody's brain somebody's mind so you have to find something else that they that already exists there and then alter that idea which is why you hear Uber for whatever because if you had to explain the whole thing from scratch it's very difficult it's why you hear like movie pitches that are you know jaws meets star wars or something like that and it's much easier to get that than to start from scratch but it was like it was a real slog to get anyone to even try it and the encouragement thing was once people started trying. it they almost invariably stuck with it they logged in every day it became like it was for us the foundation of how they communicated and so from 2014 to 2017 there was limited competitors for slack giving that it was such an innovative idea but in 2017 when slack had more than 100 million revenue which you predicted 650 employees and evaluation of around five billion dollars Microsoft launched their teams app how did you feel when you found out that app was coming out?

我确实认为数学计算是正确的，所以Slack是你创建的一款产品，很多公司不知道他们需要它，你是如何说服他们的呢？那很困难，一开始前三四个外部团队使用它时，需要尝试了数十次，到他们的办公室展示，我认为我们学到了很多有关营销的东西，可能并不是正确的术语，但我认为我们在Flickr上也遇到过这个问题，因为Facebook推出了社交照片隐藏市场，而Flickr还在尝试决定它是社交照片共享还是一个关注摄影的社区。但如果你不能很好地解释你在做什么，让你解释的人能够继续向其他人解释，那就是一个真正的问题，因为否则你就必须做所有令人兴奋的事情，我们努力找出如何谈论它的方式，它的优势是什么，它的目的是什么，但当它是全新的并且没有代替其他东西时，这是非常困难的，我不知道它是否经常被阅读，但市场营销有一本经典的书叫做Jack Trout和Alan Reese的定位，他们谈论的其中一件事是如果对你而言某些东西是一个新概念，它几乎无法在某人的大脑中被购买，你必须找到其他已经存在的东西，然后修改那个想法，这就是为什么你会听到“Uber for whatever”，因为如果你不得不从头开始解释整个事情，这非常困难，这就是为什么你会听到像“jaws meets star wars”的电影点子，比从头开始要容易得多，但是得到任何人甚至尝试它都是一个真正的挑战，激励的事情是，一旦人们开始尝试它，他们几乎总是坚持使用它，他们每天登录，它成为他们沟通的基础，所以从2014年到2017年，Slack的竞争对手很有限，因为它是一个如此创新的想法，但在2017年，当Slack获得了超过1亿美元的营业收入，你预测650名员工和约50亿美元的估值时，微软推出了他们的Teams应用，你发现他们推出这款应用程序时的感受如何？

I think mostly just good because it validated the idea and we had some advanced notice that it was coming up so we worked with Microsoft on some like early stuff with Microsoft research building question answering bots for first lock and had a pretty good relationship with by name Chilu who was a software exec at Yahoo who was the CTO of Microsoft left around then to go be to take over by do but we weren't especially worried just because when it was the first you know before it was first announced it was called Skype teams and had a pretty different approach and was just so far behind us from a product perspective that we weren't worried about people switching. Okay so now in 2020 how do you feel about Microsoft's team app?

我认为大多数只是好的，因为它验证了这个想法，我们得到了一些提前通知，所以我们与微软合作开发了一些与微软研究构建答案机器人相关的早期东西，为第一个锁定做好了准备，并与一位名叫Chilu的 Yahoo 软件执行官建立了良好的关系，他是微软的CTO离开后去接管了By Do，但我们并不特别担心，因为在它被首次宣布之前，它被称为Skype团队，有着非常不同的方法，并且从产品角度来看与我们相差甚远，我们不担心人们会转换。 那么现在在2020年，你对微软的团队应用感觉如何？

It got a lot better as Microsoft. I think there's a bunch of things that make it much more of a challenge for us today than it was then and it's not just that it's better because it's actually not better enough compared to how it was that any of our large customers could switch to it. Like our biggest single user is IBM, somewhere close to 300,000 daily active users, over 10,000 workspaces and teams is limited to 5,000 users per workspace and you can't federate them together so there's just be no way to support that kind of structure so it wouldn't work for them and there's many other things that are very, very fundamental limitations so for 5,000 people you can have 200 channels and if you want to add a 200 and first you have to hard delete one with all of the messages but none of that really matters in the face of if you want to be able to collaborate on a word doc like with track changes and send it back and forth your lawyers working on a contract or marketing people working on a press release and you are an Office 365 customer you more or less have to use teams now and the 100 million users of Skype for Business are being migrated over to teams because Skype for Business is being shut down so there's a bunch of things that are kind of for us it but maybe most fundamental is we have 12 million that only remember what our public number is on daily active users 12.

作为微软，它已经变得更好了。我认为有很多事情使它比以前更具挑战性，这不仅仅是因为它变得更好了，因为与之前相比，它实际上并没有变得足够好，以至于我们的任何一位大客户都可以转向它。比如，我们最大的单一用户是IBM，大约有30万个日活跃用户，超过1万个工作区，而Teams每个工作区的用户限制是5,000，你不能将它们联合起来，所以根本不可能支持这种结构，因此对于他们来说是不可行的，还有很多其他非常根本的限制，对于5,000人，你最多只有200个频道，如果你想添加第201个频道，你必须硬删除其中一个频道及所有相关的消息，但所有这些在协作处理Word文档时并不重要，就像跟踪更改并来回发送它，你的律师在处理合同，市场营销人员在发布新闻稿，如果你是Office 365的客户，你更或多或少必须现在开始使用Teams，而1亿个Skype for Business的用户正在迁移到Teams，因为Skype for Business正在关闭，所以有很多事情对我们来说很关键，但最基本的可能是我们有1200万个每天活跃用户，只有这个公开数字。

So 12 million and there's at least 200 million people for whom Slack or something like it is the preferred way to work so 200 million people who's working lives are mediated by email and they're moving over I think is inevitable so that's 6% which means 94% of people don't use it yet and if you don't use it and you don't have any idea and you hear that there's two alternatives one Slack and one's teams and because you're an Office 365 customer teams is already free and integrated with all the Microsoft tools then why would you give an evaluate Slack or Microsoft was aggressive in a way that was surprising to a lot of people even who watched the company closely like putting out a press release with our daily active users in it during our quiet period post the listing but if they can put it in press release and tank our share price then and you're not watching this stuff very close you don't have a fine degree resolution then you might think as a customer why would I invest in Slack and I think you know there's going to be out of business in three years like Microsoft's going to inevitably kill them that doesn't be a waste of my time to even look at it and it's not like at that point the fact that they're different really matters to you because you don't use either and it's not really replacing anything so it's much more of a thread now I think we underestimated the degree of importance like the financial times person of the year was Sachin Adela so there's a big right up of that and there's six consecutive paragraphs that are about Slack and there's like there's no other maybe the names of some competitive companies are mentioned in one sentence here and there but like it's it's the biggest chunk of it and so I think that's because all the things that can be used as leverage by Microsoft to expand relationships inside of businesses exchange the email server and the fact that people are very used to outlook is like the principle one that kind of gets them in and that makes it difficult for people to switch and if people stop paying attention to email email declines in relative importance compared to the other software use that's a really difficult position for them so from their perspective I think this is what would cheat Lou thought back like 2016 this is slack successful to the you know to the maximum extent that's an existential threat to Microsoft I don't think that's actually true because so many things so many other things would change in the world on the path to that but I think there is a that is a thought process.

目前有1200万人正在使用Slack或类似工具，而至少2亿人认为这是首选的工作方式，也就是说，已有2亿人的工作方式通过电子邮件得以传递，并且被移动。因此，这是不可避免的，这只占总人口的6％，意味着还有94％的人尚未使用它。如果你不使用它，并且你对它没有任何概念，同时又听说有两种选择，一种是Slack，另一种是Teams，因为你是Office 365客户，而Teams已经免费并且集成了所有的Microsoft工具，那么你为什么要考虑Slack呢？而且，即使Microsoft在某些方面表现出惊人的侵略性，比如在我们的安静期发布了含有每日活跃用户的新闻发布，从而导致我们的股价下跌，但是如果他们可以通过新闻发布来毁掉我们的股票价格，而你并不太关注这些，那么你可能会认为，作为一个客户，为什么要投资于Slack呢？我认为，Slack会在三年内破产，而Microsoft会不可避免地消灭它，所以这只是浪费时间，我甚至不需要考虑它，而在这一点上，它们的差异对您来说并不重要，因为您都没有使用过这两个工具，也没有替代任何工具，因此它现在更像是一种威胁。我认为我们低估了它的重要性，比如财经时报的年度人物撒欣·阿德拉，在六个连续的段落中提到了Slack，其他竞争公司的名字在此间也许会提到一两次，但这是最大的一块，因此我认为，微软能够以股票为杠杆，扩大企业内部关系，交换邮件服务器，人们很容易习惯于Outlook，这是他们进入的主要方式，这使得人们难以切换，并且如果人们不再关注电子邮件，相对于其他软件的重要性会下降，那就更加困难了。从他们的角度来看，我认为这是2016年键盘侠卢思聪的思考方式：Slack的成功将极大地威胁到微软的生存，但我认为这并不是真的，因为在迈向这一目标的道路上，许多其他事情也会改变，但我认为这是一个思维过程。

Despite selling out and actually becoming a consultant I studied mechanical engineering and undergrad and as a black engineer I really appreciate what Slack has been doing on from the perspective of diversity inclusion back in 2015 Slack shared a diversity report which revealed that most of their black employees were in technical roles contrasted with a lot of companies that were hired black individuals primarily into administrative roles and in that same report 45% of managers will female females so to a room full of individuals who will start companies or be at companies what advice you have for creating diverse workplaces start early I think that's the biggest thing when we were 20 employees I would say due to the 2030 maybe like wow there's a lot of white dudes and in that case it wasn't too late but it was close to too late you know it was like more of a slug to get started because what happened was you we have one black woman engineer and then someone another one comes to interview and she sees the first one and suddenly it's like a completely different assessment of what's going on here and then there's two and then the third one comes for an interview and it feels like there's community and people talk and have a network so that getting started early I think is the most important thing and I think it can be a kind of a fraught topic I think for people like people aren't sure what to say or they're uncomfortable and I think there's a really pervasive and incorrect belief that you would have to lower the bar to hire someone who isn't like the canonical candidate like the archetypal candidate for this role I think that's usually not the truth for two reasons.

尽管我不得不承认我已经成了咨询顾问，但我在本科阶段学习了机械工程，并作为一个黑人工程师，我非常欣赏Slack在多元化包容方面所做的努力。 2015年，Slack发布了一份多元化报告，其中揭示了他们的大多数黑人员工都在技术角色中，而许多公司主要雇用黑人个体到行政角色。同样在该报告中，45％的经理是女性。对于即将创立公司或加入公司的人，你们有哪些创造多元化工作场所的建议呢？ 我认为首要的是早点开始。当我们只有20名员工时，我会说到2030，可能像“哇，有很多白人小伙”。在那种情况下，还不算太晚，但已接近太晚了。因为当我们招来一名黑人女工程师时，当另一个人来面试时，她看到第一个人，突然整个评估变得完全不同了。然后有第二个，第三个来面试，感觉有社群和人们互相交流。所以我认为，早点开始是最重要的事情。我认为这可能是一个棘手的话题，对人们来说可能不确定该说什么，可能会感到不舒服。我认为有一种普遍而不正确的信念，认为你必须降低标准来雇用那些不是典型候选人的人，而我认为通常这是错误的，原因有两个。

One is you just have to look harder you're going to see more people in fact that can raise the bar but people have different challenges in their life and I don't think you can you know perfectly understand someone's background just from their gender identity or their ethnicity but on the whole to for a woman to get to a certain place in her career they had to work a lot harder than for a black engineer to get to a certain place and in his or her career they had to work a lot harder than this is where it gets fraught in Ben Horowitz's words Jewish Chinese or Indian guys in Silicon Valley because there's just like these these networks that are that are very powerful and you have an enormous advantage so for two people with like equivalent. credentials the person who's probably going to be more talented more capable and had to overcome more obstacles to get to where they are is going to be the one who doesn't have the traditional archetypal presentation. That's amazing thank you for sharing that I'm sure I hope people were taking notes.

有一件事是你必须更加努力地寻找，事实上你会发现有更多的人可以提高标准，但生活中不同的挑战让人们具有不同的背景和种族认同。然而，总体而言，相比于黑人工程师，女性要在职业生涯中达到某个地位需要更加努力，而印度、犹太和华裔男性在硅谷有着强大的社交网络，他们也享有巨大的优势。因此，对于两个具有相同凭证的人来说，那个没有传统典型形象，却更有才华、能力更强并且克服了更多障碍的人往往会更有优势。感谢你的分享，我希望人们都能学到一些东西。

So we've gone through the journey of your career you started as a web developer you found in a company that you that was acquired by Yahoo you launched a second company that raised more than $1.2 billion in venture funding and you eventually took that company public you've been a leader throughout this entire time what has changed about your leadership style and what stayed the same. It's always hard to really to to to assess yourself I think I'm relatively self aware even of those things that don't work and it doesn't matter that I know that they don't work I still can't change them but there is a difference in the mechanics of being a leader at different scales because when it's 20 people and we all kind of know each other it's very different like my I say something and then we argue about it maybe I changed your mind and it's all good and you know there's a power dynamic where I'm a CEO and whoever and everyone else is not the CEO but when you get to 500 people or a thousand people where we're at now a couple of thousand people it's very different.

所以，我们已经审视了你的职业历程，你开始是一名网页开发人员，然后加入了一家公司，这家公司被雅虎收购，你创立了第二家公司，筹集了超过12亿美元的风险投资，并最终将该公司上市。在整个过程中，你一直是一个领袖，你的领导风格有哪些改变，有哪些保持不变？很难真正评估自己，但我觉得我相对自我意识较强，即使我知道那些不起作用的事情，我仍然无法改变它们。不同规模的领导机制是不同的，当只有20个人，我们彼此相识时，一切都很不同，我说一些话，然后我们会争论，也许我能改变你的想法，一切都很好，但当你达到500人或1000人，或者像我们现在有几千人时，情况就很不同了。

The someone's going to come into a presentation for some new product development and it's like a relatively new designer or engineer or product manager we've never met before. To me this is just like a one more 30 minute meeting in my schedule which is to to to to to to to to to to and for them this is something they've been thinking about for weeks like but probably talked to their spouse about it and they're either excited or they're nervous they want to know so the degree of impact that my words have is like from the perspective of me crazy out of proportion to the amount of action. It's another words like this it's like a super super powerful microphone on at all all the time so if anything's negative or critical if I have a relationship with someone that I've worked together for a long time it's not really a big deal if it's someone that you know that might be the only time they interact with me ever in their whole career and slack or like you know that might be the first year actually they never have a company and they might not have another one for several years it carries a huge amount of weight so it's hard because is that the amount of time we have like including questions from everyone that is okay I'll try to be a little more concise.

有个人会进入一个关于新产品开发的演示会议，可能是一位相对较新的设计师、工程师或产品经理，我们以前从未见过面。对我来说，这只是我日程表中又一个30分钟的会议时间，但对他们而言，他们可能已经想了好几周，甚至与配偶讨论过，他们可能充满期待，也可能很紧张，想了解我的发言会产生怎样的影响。从我的角度来看，我的话语在作用上被夸大了许多，就像一个全天候的超级强大的麦克风。如果我有什么负面或批评性的意见，对于我与长期合作的同事而言并不是什么大问题，但对于某些只与我接触过一次的人来说，这可能是他们整个职业生涯中与我进行的唯一交流，这种影响力会非常巨大。因此，在有限的时间内，包括大家的提问时间，我会尽量更简明扼要。

I'm reading on Twitter people arguing about Warren's tax plan and someone said something like if Dwayne the Roth Johnson just paid this tax at this rate then we would have an extra $50 million and then that's a much it would cost to solve the plant water crisis and it's not me it's just a totally absurd argument because federal budget is something like $2.7 trillion so $50 million plus or minus is not the reason why that doesn't get solved it doesn't get solved for all kinds of reasons and people think that way all the time that it's just like money or it's just resources for anything significant to happen certainly anything involved dozens of people that alone hundreds or thousands.

我在 Twitter 上看到人们正在争论 Warren 的税收计划，有人说如果 Dwayne the Roth Johnson 只按照这个税率缴纳税款，我们就可以多获得5000万美元，这就足以解决植物水危机，但这个观点完全荒谬。因为联邦预算大约是2.7万亿美元，所以大约增加或减少5000万美元不是导致问题无法解决的原因，问题的根本在于各种各样的原因。人们经常这样思考，认为只需要有足够的钱或资源就可以发生重大变化，但实际上，对于任何涉及几十人甚至上百人或上千人的事件，都需要更多的支持。

The amount of will that has to go in the amount of like selling the amount of vision the amount of like coercion and cajoling and the amount of encouragement and support all of those things is just enormous so the game does change as the company gets bigger and things evolve and I think probably only gets more difficult but that's you know what I've been learning this whole time is how to do that without like crushing people how to do that without creating an environment where it's you know entirely top down like iron fist from above and it can be tough.

推销自己的愿望、迫使和哄骗他人的数量、以及鼓励和支持他人的数量都是巨大的，特别是随着公司变得越来越大和事物的发展，这些变化会影响到游戏。我认为，这只会变得更加困难，但在整个过程中我一直在学习如何做到这一点而不会压垮人，如何在不完全由上方全权决策的环境下完成任务，这可能会很艰难。

Because you know I have a different perspective than anyone else because I see everything so I talk to someone in engineering I get you know that head of sales reports to me head of marketing reports to me head of finance reports to me our general council reports to me so I have a very different perspective than than what is ultimately relatively narrow and generally a better idea what we do because I also talk to customers more than pretty much anyone else other than a sales person and I talk to our investors more than anyone else I talk to our board more than anyone else yes it's really you know I think there are better sources than me for like top 10 tips because I don't none of them seem that simple to me and it's not that they're they're not out there but the real challenge of leadership and maybe there's one book I would recommend which is leadership and self-deception the real like fundamental challenge leadership is the same as the fundamental challenge of just being a human being.

因为你知道我有一个不同于任何人的视角，因为我能看到一切，所以当我和工程师谈话时，销售部门负责人向我汇报，营销部门负责人向我汇报，财务部门负责人向我汇报，我们的总法律顾问向我汇报，所以我有一个非常不同于最终相对狭窄且普遍得到更好的理解，因为我与客户沟通的例子比任何一个人都多，除了销售人员，我与我们的投资者沟通的例子比任何一个人都多，我与我们的董事会沟通得最多，是的，我真的认为在像“十大提示”这样的东西上，有比我更好的信息来源，因为我觉得它们没有一个对我来说是那么简单的，它们并不是没有存在，但领导力的真正挑战和也许有一个我会推荐的书籍，那就是领导力与自我欺骗，领导力的基本挑战与作为人类的基本挑战是一样的。

And I think that's so sound a little bit weird perhaps but like living with an open heart and not seeing other people as on one hand either instruments that can be used to your advantage or obstacles that are in the way of something that you're trying to do which is the kind of default judgment of all people with whom you are not close instinctually so like you're on a southwest flight and there's like people are still aborting and the middle seat between you isn't taken you're like please not take the seat please don't take the seat please don't take the seat a person has a whole life you know on their own ambitions and desires and partics and stuff like that but to you in that moment they're just a potential pain in the ass that might take the middle seat next to you and that that's pervasive and when you're really trying to accomplish something it can be very tempting to see people either as instruments or obstacles amazing.

我认为这可能听起来有些奇怪，但是生活中要拥有一颗开放的心，不要把别人看作是可以利用的工具或是阻碍你想做的事情的障碍，这是与你不亲密的任何人的默认判断。比如你坐在西南航空的航班上，周围的人还在不断地登机，但中间的座位还没人坐，你就在心里默默祈祷“希望这个座位不要被人坐”“不要坐在我旁边”，但这个人也有他自己的人生、抱负和梦想，但在那一刻，对你来说，他们只是潜在的烦恼，可能会坐在你旁边。这种思想是普遍存在的，当你真正想完成某些事情时，很容易把人看作是可以利用的工具或是阻碍你的障碍，这是很危险的。

So we're going to go to the audience for we probably have a time for about two questions so hi Stewart I really appreciate your comments on diversity so it makes me feel better about my Stanford Slack addiction my question is what were some of the key and best things you did on the product and design front in the early days of Slack so for example how much of Slack success do you attribute to your personal eye for design versus hiring the best designers versus feature prioritization or even just the inside about having a personality curious what advice you'd share there for aspiring entrepreneurs yeah so I'm much sure I want to like slice it up by who gets more credit but I think the fundamental approach was how much easier can we make people's lives and when I look at other products it's really the I'm trying to think of like the shortest version of this I can it can be an amazing app and if the password reset thing doesn't work and I'm need to reset my password use it then I'm just locked out.

所以我们将接受观众的提问，因为我们可能只有时间回答两个问题。嗨，Stewart，我非常感谢您在多元化方面的评论，因为这让我感觉我的对Slack的瘾可以得到缓解。我想问一下，在Slack的早期阶段，您在产品和设计方面做了哪些关键和最好的事情，比如，您把Slack的成功归因于你个人的设计眼光、雇佣最好的设计师、特性优先级或仅仅是拥有个性的内部因素？我很好奇您在这方面的建议，以帮助那些渴望成为企业家的人。我不确定是否要将功劳分配得更精确一些，不过我认为核心方法是：我们能否让人们的生活更轻松。当我看其他产品时，如果密码重置功能无法使用，我需要重置密码，这个优秀的应用程序也没用了。

So there's like there's very basic fundamental things that you can you have to get right and which aren't the interesting ones fact someone tweeted something the other day which I liked that kind of illustrates this from a different perspective and it's someone asking Ray Crok the kind of founder and for CEO of McDonald's why was McDonald so successful and he says because we have clean bathrooms and they say that's easy you know that's so simple I don't that doesn't explain it and Ray Crok said are your bathrooms clean and it actually is like a challenge so there's some some real fundamentals but the things that we did that were most successful were those things which made life more convenient for people and one of those was for example typing your password on your phone is a pain so. we'll send you a magic link that logs you in or because for complex reasons most people wanted to have notifications or every message and Slack when they first signed up so they felt comfortable and knew how it worked but we didn't think that was a good way for them to set their preferences long-term after you know a few notifications we would interject and say would you like to switch to our preferred settings and that kind of thoughtfulness or consideration that kind of being thinking of yourself as a host and the customer as your guests I think is the the secret as it were to a good design

有一些非常基本的、必须正确掌握的事情，它们并不是有趣的因素。事实上，最近有人发推特说一句话，我很喜欢，它从另一个角度说明了这一点。这个人问麦当劳的创始人和首席执行官雷·克罗克，为什么麦当劳如此成功，他回答说，因为我们有干净的洗手间。他们说，这很容易，这样简单的解释不足为信。雷·克罗克说，那你们的洗手间干净吗？这实际上是在挑战我们。所以有一些真正的基础，但我们取得最大成功的是那些使人们的生活更方便的事情。例如，在手机上输入密码非常麻烦，因此我们会给你发送一条魔法链接，帮助你登录。此外，由于各种复杂的原因，大多数人在第一次使用Slack时希望收到所有消息通知，这让他们感到舒适，并知道它的工作方式。但我们不认为这是他们长期设置偏好的好方法。在几个通知之后，我们会插话说，你想切换到我们推荐的设置吗？这种思考，或者像把自己视为主人，把客户视为客人的考虑，我认为是良好设计的秘诀。

and we have time for one more question can you hear me yeah thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today so in your answer is it was really clear that like what you've been interested in is kind of facilitating communication through different mediums whether it be video games photography you know now Slack was that understanding clear to you through your journey and if not was there like an aha moment that you realized this is what the issue you really wanted to work on was yeah I don't so the desire was there but I don't think I recognize that is as one single thing because Slack is also a massively multiplayer workplace software yeah that's the kind of the the principled distinction between Slack and pretty much every other tool and it is very much like the games that we wanted to play you take objects and you can manipulate them and distribute them and form groups and and all of that but I don't think I really recognize them as being fundamentally similar until much later the thing that I thought as being the common thread was just it's all software and software that groups of people use together to me is the most interesting challenges because it has all the regular challenges of scalability on the one hand and design and usability on the other but social dynamics because of the feedback loop where the output of the system can also be an input to the system are much more difficult to to design for and therefore much more interesting

我们还有时间再问一个问题，你能听到我吗？非常感谢你今天抽出时间和我们交流。从你的回答来看，你对于通过不同媒介促进交流非常感兴趣，例如视频游戏、摄影，现在是 Slack。在你的旅程中，这种理解是否清晰？如果没有，那么你是否有什么“恍然大悟”的时刻，意识到这是你真正想要工作的问题？ 我一直有这个愿望，但我不认为我把它看作一个单独的事情，因为Slack也是一个大型多人工作软件。这是Slack与几乎所有其他工具的原则区别，它非常像我们想玩的游戏，你可以拿起物品并操纵它们、分发它们、形成团队等等。但我不认为我真正意识到它们在根本上是相似的，直到后来。我认为作为共同线的东西就是它们都是软件，由人群体使用的软件对我来说是最有趣的挑战，因为既有可伸缩性的挑战，又有设计和易用性的挑战，但由于反馈环路，系统的输出也可以是系统的输入，因此社会动态的挑战更加困难，也更加有趣。

Amazing, thank you all for the questions. Um, Dharma, you have to pledge a chat with you. It's not often that we get time with a classically trained philosopher, so I have a new spin on our typical lightning round. I'm gonna ask you a few questions that keep me up at night. Is that okay? Cool.

太棒了，感谢大家提出的问题。嗯，达尔玛，我想和你聊聊。我们很少有机会和受过经典哲学训练的哲学家交流，所以我想给我们通常的闪电回合加入新的元素。我会问你一些让我夜不能寐的问题，可以吗？很酷。

So we'll start with an easy one. Is water wet? Yes. Okay. If soap hits the floor, is the floor clean or is it soap dirty? Soap dirty, yeah. Dirty soap. All right. I have to make sure I pronounce this one the right way. It's expecting the unexpected; make the unexpected expected? No, no, we're going to know. Okay.

我们从一个简单的问题开始。水是湿的吗？是的。好的。如果肥皂掉在地上，地板是干净的还是肥皂脏了？肥皂脏了，是的。脏肥皂。好的。我必须确保我以正确的方式发音这一个。预期不到的事情是可以预测的吗？不，不是，我们会知道的。好的。

Um, final one. You ready? One word or less, what is the meaning of life? Oh, I thought the question was one word or less. Uh, for those of you who read Thug a Sashdatter, familiar with history Buddhism, I'll say 'mu'.

最后一个问题，你准备好了吗？用一个词或更少的词来描述生命的意义是什么？哦，我以为问题只能用一个词回答。嗯，对于那些读过《托格·萨沙达特》并了解佛教历史的人来说，我会说‘无’。

Yeah, we have a minute and twenty seconds, right? So, I would love to hear more. It's funny, uh, there is like a like- when I said before, uh, that American philosophy is really um, boring on the one hand, and you take a while a subject matter, there are- there's an enormous um corpus of research and argument and even books written but certainly like thousands of papers on the question of do holes exist? Like h-o-l-e, like is there such a thing as a hole or is it the absence of something? Unless they swear that is a giant argument.

是的，我们有一分钟二十秒的时间，对吧？所以，我很希望听到更多。有趣的是，当我之前说过美国哲学真的是无聊的一方面时，你会发现在某些话题上，有着巨大的研究和论据甚至是成千上万的论文，比如关于孔洞是否存在的问题，像 h-o-l-e，孔洞是否存在或者它是某种物质的缺失？他们誓言这是一个巨大的争议。

So, I find it easier just to come down on the side of one or the other. The meaning of life? To love one another. Okay, I like that one. Ladies and gentlemen, Stuart Butterfield. Thank you.

因此，我觉得更容易站在其中一方的立场上。生命的意义？就是互相爱。好的，我很喜欢这个。女士们先生们，接下来是Stuart Butterfield。谢谢。