Slack’s Stewart Butterfield on Managing Through Fear and Exponential Growth
“Everything I’d tried to accomplish as CEO over the past five years … just magically seemed to happen,” he says of the online collaboration app.
Stewart Butterfield, chief executive officer of Slack Technologies Inc., outside the New York Stock Exchange on June 20, 2019, the day of the company’s stock trading debut.
Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
For many companies struggling to adapt to the shelter-in-place era, Slack has been as indispensable as toilet paper and canned beans. The company’s workplace chatrooms were popular in some industries—media, especially—even before the Covid-19 pandemic, but they’ve been essential equipment as the coronavirus has spread.
Even so, Stewart Butterfield, chief executive officer of Slack Technologies Inc., hasn’t been celebrating much. In a recent tweetstorm, he opened up about the difficulty of managing a company remotely, even as Slack’s business grows. He spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek over video chat from his home office in San Francisco and expanded on the challenges of the pandemic as well as his hopes. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.