Stewart Butterfield spent the first five years of his life living on a commune | Hacker News Reader

Stewart Butterfield spent the first five years of his life living on a commune

bbc.com

54 pointssamwillis11 comments

The contents of the article is a bit of a letdown from the clickbaity title. Tuns out his father was a conscious objector and fled the draft in an off the grid commune, but otherwise Stewart had the privileged upbringing typical of Silicon valley, with not necessarily afluent but educated parents that provided him early access to a computer and instilled in him intellectual values from an early age.

That is nothing to be ashamed of, but it would be interesting and inspiring to learn of real underprivileged youths that rose from ghetto to fortune without strong family support.

Stewart is one of the few tech titans to acknowledge the role of luck in his success. The press loves a good “rags to riches” story even if they have to make it up. But the truth is, Stewart went to an elite boarding school and did not finish off his childhood without electricity.

I'm nowhere near Stewart's level of success, but I've done well enough in tech to own a home in SF, and I grew up in the 70's/80's quite poor in rural North Carolina with an alcoholic ne'er-do-well father and mother who worked a paper route. We were poor enough that for a year or two we lived without electricity and indoor plumbing. I did homework by oil lamp. Our house was little more than a shack, for a long time the interior walls were cardboard staple gunned to the 2x4 studs.

By the time I reached high school we had electricity though, and I managed to scrounge together enough to get a commodore 64 and learn to code, so what I lacked in luck in childhood economic and parenting circumstances got more than balanced out with luck of timing of computer access and obsession.

But the main contributor to my rags-to-(feels-like)-riches story was government loans that largely put me through college leading to a job at IBM. The relatively inexpensive public university tuition costs were a factor as well.

Seems to polarise opinion somewhat, but Lord Sugar [1] in the UK grew up on a Council Estate (social housing), started off selling odd electricals door-to-door, founded Amstrad [2] (which at one point traded on the FTSE100), and is currently worth ~£1bn. Perhaps not the most deprived of upbringings, but certainly not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/biographyandmemoir...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad

Title is also misleading, FTA:

Fast-forward to today and 46-year-old Stewart Butterfield - who founded both photo-sharing website Flickr, and business messaging service Slack - has an estimated personal fortune of $650m (£500m).

The $5bn figure comes from Slack's valuation and is as accurate as saying that Steve Jobs was a $300bn tech boss at the time of his death when he was worth $10.2bn.

There’s a great looking documentary about the commune in Lund, BC...

https://www.lundtheendoftheroad.com

Should be https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44550312

Missing link? Curious why this got 12 points.

That a broken link made it to my front-page certainly indicates that what we see on the front-page hasn't necessarily got there by merit.

I agree, but just as a counter point, sometimes I upvote articles I've already read just based on the heading.

It looks like some people upvote without even bothering to click, let alone read.

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