One would generally assume the CEO of San Francisco-based Slack, which has seen its value skyrocket to more than $1 billion since launching in February, would make his home close to company headquarters.
Vancouver’s Stewart Butterfield, however, doesn’t see much reason to leave B.C.
“I like it and it’s home,” he said during a phone call from the company’s Yaletown office, which is undergoing renovations to make room for more employees (13 people, about 25% of Slack’s global workforce, are currently squeezed into 800 square feet).
“I have this nice physical division between the two parts of my responsibilities.”
He spends about half his time in San Francisco networking with investors and going to board meetings – or “the business side” as he calls it. Meanwhile, Vancouver is where most of Slack’s design and front-end development – Butterfield’s forte – takes place.
Slack’s business-messaging app, which has about 70,000 paying users, grew out of an internal messaging tool at Butterfield’s Vancouver-based gaming startup, Tiny Speck.
But before Tiny Speck re-launched as Slack, Butterfield was best known as one of the co-founders of Flickr, the image-hosting site Yahoo (Nasdaq:YHOO) acquired for about US$25 million in 2005.
The CEO said there were a lot of challenges at Tiny Speck, but none he would pin on Vancouver specifically. While the city is experiencing a talent crunch in its tech sector, and San Francisco has a bigger talent pool, “the flip side is that there’s a lot less competition for really exceptionally talented people here [in Vancouver],” he said, adding that less expensive developers often give Vancouver a competitive edge compared to Silicon Valley.
Angel investor Boris Wertz, founder of Version One Ventures, said no matter what Butterfield’s reasons are for remaining in Vancouver while the company is undergoing massive growth, it’s clear he loves the city.
“It’s not fun doing the weekly commute between San Fran and Vancouver. I see Stewart a lot on the plane,” said Wertz, who also frequents the same Vancouver coffee shop and runs in the same local startup circles as the Slack CEO.
“He’s a really deep thinker and an incredibly good product guy, and I think that was the secret of Flickr. That’s the secret of Slack now.”
Ray Walia, executive director of Vancouver’s Launch Academy business incubator, said the next big secret for Butterfield to unlock is managing Slack’s growth.
“Trying to build a company at that type of velocity is a difficult challenge. And he just has access to greater resources that can act more quickly in a way than [you] can in Vancouver,” he told Business in Vancouver earlier this month. “It boils down to who are the people who have experience that can do this in a day as opposed to people who are learning it on the job.”
It’s simply in Slack’s best interest to remain headquartered in San Francisco, where investors and talent are much easier to come by, according to Walia.
“And it’s in our best interest to support that because Stewart is a citizen of Vancouver,” he said. “He loves Vancouver. He tries to help the [startup] ecosystem and community as much as he can.”
