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Comment by obayesshelton | Hacker News Reader

Slack is a great story.

Basically a tool they built in-house, the company were going bust and they realised that the "tool" had some value and out popped Slack

https://review.firstround.com/From-0-to-1B-Slacks-Founder-Sh...

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Funny thing is this was the second time Stewart Butterfield tried to build a massively multiplayer game and pivoted the company. The first one was Flickr!

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

The man just wants to make MMOs but accidentally keeps creating billion dollar companies!

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”

― Norman Vincent Peale

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll be acquired by Yahoo!.”

or SalesForce in the case of Slack

Or, you know, come crashing back to earth at terminal velocity.

That beats drifting out into deep space, alive but unable to do anything other than watch your life support system slowly but inevitably fail.

Reminds me of my brother, who wanted to have a little toy car consolation price at the christmas fair, but kept winning the main prices. Parents were chatting with another couple, he came asked for a buck to play, dumped the main price into my fathers arms, this went on six-times, he was almost crying by the point my father said "enough" the arm full of Dresden stollen. Sometimes your glorious victory is the defeat of others. Good times.

In fact the gaming company had already failed. They shut down the product and laid off employees, and offered to return the remaining money to their investors. The investors instead said keep it and try building something else.

It wasn't a random pivot either. Real-time multiplayer gaming and real-time group chat share a lot of the same characteristics. Discord has the exact same origin story.

> Real-time multiplayer gaming and real-time group chat share a lot of the same characteristics

i mean... yes we have n=2 data but does that claim pass the sniff test? group chat is a lot easier graphics and physics and latency wise

I liked Slack's story too. Here is the podcast from Guy Raz (How I built this) with Stewart Butterfield - https://podcasts.apple.com/bs/podcast/slack-flickr-stewart-b...

This is what first came to mind for me - which is unfortunate because Glitch was fun and very chill. Too bad fun doesn't necessarily mean successful for MMOs.

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