From Game Over to $1 Billion How Slack Transformed Workplace Communication in Just 8 Months!

In 2011, Stewart Butterfield wasn’t trying to revolutionize workplace communication—he was trying to make a video game. Glitch, an ambitious multiplayer game created by his company, Tiny Speck, was supposed to be a hit. However, as fate would have it, the game struggled. What Butterfield and his team built to manage their internal communication, though, was working exceptionally well. That tool would become Slack, now one of the world’s leading collaboration platforms. “The game didn’t work, but our internal communication tool did,” Butterfield famously said, marking a pivotal moment. After Glitch shut down in 2012, Butterfield, alongside co-founders Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov, decided to pivot. Their internal chat system, initially created to streamlin