Don't want to troll you guys here, but if you're a video game company why are you spending so much time building a Slack clone?
I was expecting some short of explanation in your blog post like "we did this because this serves as a core piece of our company for X reason and Slack didn't fit our use case for Y reason".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_Technologies#Initial_fun...
His first company, Ludicorp, tried to build an MMORPG called Game Neverending, which never launched, and they pivoted to create Flickr, apparently based on the same platform (which is why ".gne" URLs proliferated Flickr originally).
With Tiny Speck, he created Glitch, another MMORPG, which closed a little more than a year after launch. Tiny Speck then pivoted to launch Slack, based on a chat app they had built internally while developing their game.
I'm impressed that Stewart Butterfield is able to look at these systems and recognize which ones could be a viable (and successful!) stand-alone product.
I think a better perspective is that this is a tool they needed/wanted and built it - it's really no different than a map editor. Also some companies like Google have a X% time to work on a "personal" project during work hours - and this could be the result of that.
They have this crazy idea called "crunch time" which seems to be the same thing as "all the time". Also, because so many people go into CS programs because they want to make games, game companies aren't forced to pay very high salaries.
In my mind Flickr is up there with the Instagrams and the Ubers of the world because it was a fucking amazing experience at the time. I never even considered the valuation, but Flickr was definitely unique in the UX it brought to the table. I think people forget what the landscape looked like then. Or maybe they just can't get past a knee-jerk reaction to hot-button terminology.
Either way, I think it's fascinating that not one but two companies from the founder of Slack were pivots from game companies, and that's exactly what the GP is complaining about in the clone. Anyone care to comment on that?
Absolutely. They stagnated for a while, but when Flickr came out all the other popular photo sites would shrink your image down to a tiny low quality version, ads everywhere. Out of desperation I used to host my photos on a PHP-based gallery app I dropped as soon as I got a Flickr account.
I was just musing on the fact that (yes, I don't like the term, but also) "unicorn" was originally a label for startups with huge valuations, generally > $1B. It has mutated since then, but the idea that it would apply to Flickr seemed funny.
2005 is probably a bit beyond the "post bubble fallout" - nevertheless the previous year Yahoo spent $579M on Kelkoo and in 2003 (which is most definitely "post bubble fallout" era) they bought Overture Services for $1.6B[1].
Creating something that fetches $20M is certainly a success, but let's not pretend this is some amazing acquisition story on par with YouTube.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...!
You guessed it, Mattermost is the 3rd version of what started as a portal/community site for our players (first version was forum-like, the second was Facebook-like, Mattermost is now HipChat/Slack-like).