/
.webp)
Generated by Master Biographer | Source for LinkedIn Content
December 9, 2012. Stewart Butterfield sat in front of his team at Tiny Speck and did something he had done once before, almost exactly a decade earlier: he shut down a game.
The first time, in 2002, the game was called Game Neverending. An online RPG that never found its audience. When it failed, a small photo-sharing feature buried inside it became Flickr — sold to Yahoo for roughly $25 million in 2005.
Now here he was again. Four years of work. Hundreds of thousands of players. A world built on the imaginations of eleven sleeping giants. Gone.
The internal tool his team had built to communicate while building Glitch — that thing was still running.
2002: Ludicorp and Game Neverending
Stewart Butterfield — born Dharma Jeremy Butterfield, in Lund, British Columbia, population about 300 — co-founded Ludicorp in Vancouver in 2002 alongside Caterina Fake and Jason Classon. Their goal was an online multiplayer RPG called Game Neverending. The game never found its commercial footing.
But inside the game, they had built a lightweight photo-sharing feature. Players were using it to share images with each other. That feature was more alive than the game itself.
The team killed the game. They rebuilt the photo tool as a standalone product. They called it Flickr.
Flickr launched February 10, 2004. Yahoo acquired Ludicorp in 2005.
2008: Tiny Speck and Glitch
After a frustrating stint inside Yahoo watching Flickr stagnate, Butterfield left. In 2008 he co-founded Tiny Speck — again with Cal Henderson (Flickr's lead engineer), Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. Their goal this time was a browser-based massively multiplayer online game called Glitch.
Not a shooter. Not a fantasy epic. Something stranger.
Glitch was a non-violent, collaborative, surreal side-scrolling world. The lore was this: eleven giants were sleeping, and the entire world existed inside their collective dream. Players were manifestations of those dreams — not heroes, not warriors. Tiny creatures who could meditate on butterflies, squeeze juice from trees, learn to cook, pet pigs, and cultivate crops. The visual aesthetic was hand-drawn and whimsical: pastel-colored, soft-lit, looking more like an illustrated children's book than a video game. The Japanese designer Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy, contributed to the game's aesthetic.
Glitch launched officially on September 27, 2011, after years of development.
The team had been working on Glitch for nearly four years. The game had accumulated a devoted community — players who loved it precisely because it was unlike anything else. Gentle. Odd. Cooperative rather than competitive.
But it could not grow beyond that community. The mass market did not follow.
The problem was structural: Glitch required players to understand a completely alien value system. There was no combat, no clear win condition, no status hierarchy most gamers recognized. The onboarding was demanding. New players churned. The game attracted and retained a passionate few but could not cross the chasm to become mainstream.
By late 2012, Tiny Speck was out of options. On November 30, 2012, the shutdown announcement went public. The game would close on December 9, 2012.
In an extraordinary gesture that reflected the team's values, Tiny Speck released nearly all of Glitch's art assets, code, and music into the public domain under a Creative Commons license. The community — bereft — later built spiritual successors including Children of Ur and Odd Giants using those assets.
The eleven giants went back to sleep.
Meanwhile, throughout all of this, the Tiny Speck team had been using an internal chat tool they had built themselves. It was better than IRC. It was searchable. It logged everything. It worked across devices. It was fast.
With the game gone and the team sitting on a pile of severance money and a working internal communication tool, Cal Henderson reportedly looked at what they had and said something to the effect of: the tool is the product.
Slack development began in earnest in late 2012, immediately after Glitch shut down.
The founding team was the same: Butterfield, Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, Serguei Mourachov. No new hires. No pivot announcement. Just four people who had just watched their game die, turning to a tool they had already built for themselves.
By August 2013, Slack entered private beta. The team ran a coordinated soft launch: they invited a handful of companies — including Cozy, Rdio, and others — to try the tool simultaneously and report back. On the first day of the invitation-only beta, 8,000 people signed up. The servers strained.
The public launch came in February 2014. On day one: approximately 15,000 daily active users.
By August 2014: 171,000 daily active users.
By November 2014: 285,000 daily active users.
By February 2015: over 500,000 daily active users.
That is 33x growth in exactly twelve months.
Slack reached a $1 billion valuation in approximately eight months — without a traditional advertising campaign, without a dedicated marketing officer.
The counterintuitive finding from the early growth: 70 to 80 percent of early Slack users were not switching from a competitor. They were switching from nothing. Companies had been using a fragmented chaos of email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, and tribal knowledge. Slack was not a better version of an existing tool. It was the first version of a new category.
The name
SLACK is an acronym: "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge." Almost nobody knows this. Whether this was the original intent or a retroactive backronym has never been conclusively confirmed by Butterfield in public reporting — but the phrase precisely describes the product's core value proposition. Every conversation, permanently indexed and retrievable. The name carried the product brief inside it.
The suitors
Slack had received eight to ten acquisition offers by mid-2015, according to reporting by TechCrunch. At the time, Slack was worth roughly $2-3 billion. It turned them all down.
In 2016, Microsoft approached Slack with an acquisition offer reported to be in the range of $8 billion. Slack declined. Microsoft then built Teams, which launched in November 2016 as a direct response. Teams is now bundled inside Microsoft 365 and reaches an estimated 280 million monthly active users — more than Slack on raw numbers, if significantly less beloved.
The acquisition
On December 1, 2020, Salesforce announced it would acquire Slack for $27.7 billion. The deal closed July 21, 2021.
The irony: Salesforce had been in Slack's orbit as a potential suitor years earlier, at a fraction of the price. The exact terms of any prior approach are not in the public record, but the deal as eventually executed made Slack the largest acquisition in Salesforce's history — larger than its acquisitions of MuleSoft ($6.5B) and Tableau ($15.7B).
Butterfield stepped down as CEO of Slack in January 2022, approximately six months after the acquisition closed.
The pattern, observed
Butterfield has been asked whether he knew what he was doing when Glitch failed — whether he recognized the Flickr-from-Game-Neverending template being repeated. His answers have been characteristically self-deprecating. The official story is "accidental genius." The actual record suggests something more: a founder who has now twice built the exact right product for himself and his team while trying to build something else, and who had the honesty and speed to recognize what he had built when it was time to pivot.
Two games. Two failures. Two companies that each became defining infrastructure of their era.
The eleven giants are still sleeping somewhere. And every message you send on Slack is searchable.
1. The name is an acronym.
SLACK = "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge." Almost no one who uses it daily knows this. The acronym encodes the product's entire value proposition.
2. This is the second time Butterfield did exactly this.
In 2002, he built an online game called Game Neverending. It failed. A photo-sharing feature inside it became Flickr. In 2008, he built an online game called Glitch. It failed. A communication tool inside it became Slack. Two games. Two pivots. Two eras of internet history.
3. Glitch was one of the strangest games ever made — and it was beloved.
Non-violent, collaborative, surreal. The world existed inside the dreams of eleven sleeping giants. The art style was illustrated and pastel. Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy, contributed to its aesthetic. Its community grieved its shutdown so deeply they built three open-source successors from its Creative Commons-licensed assets. The team released the entire codebase and art library to the public when it closed.
4. Microsoft tried to buy Slack for $8 billion and got rejected.
Then built Teams. Then watched Teams surpass Slack in raw user numbers through bundle distribution. Slack went from a $8 billion rejected offer in 2016 to a $27.7 billion acquisition by Salesforce in 2021. The rejection cost either side billions depending on how you count.
5. 70-80% of early Slack users switched from nothing.
Not from HipChat. Not from email. From nothing. There was no prior category leader Slack displaced. It built the category it then dominated. The first-day private beta sign-ups (8,000 in 24 hours) came before the product was publicly available. Word of mouth was the entire marketing strategy — and it worked because the product solved a problem people hadn't yet named.
