What a great nugget:

> I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. I said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago. So this is the launch." When you can go from "Hey, I've got an idea" to "Let's launch this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works," that suggests that there's a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really quickly.

This was 2003, and Butterfield is still turning side tools from MMOs you never heard of into genre defining brands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield#Ludicorp_a...