It’s always inspiring to hear rags to riches stories. They tend to bring hope to those who are struggling with their lives now, and those who simply feel like they don’t know what to do and where they are headed. Some of the most famous people who were known to have started from the bottom are Walt Disney, who brought us some of the biggest animated films and characters of all time.
He was actually brought up in a farm and was a cartoonist from a newspaper. Steve Jobs who also started from the bottom by dropping out of college and returning Coke bottle for money, has proved that it doesn’t matter where you start or where you are from, what matter is where you’re headed.
It is always nice to look back and reflect but the goal of success is right before you. This is one of the reason why the British Broadcasting Company or the BBC started the new series known as The Boss, wherein they basically feature the lives of the world’s business leaders and how they basically made it into the top of the ladder. One of them is Canadian entrepreneur and founder of Flickr Stewart Butterfield.
Flickr gets acquired by Yahoo for $25 million
Flickr Billionaire
Who would have thought that the founder of one of the biggest photo sharing websites in the world lived the first couple of years of his life without running water and electricity? Stewart Butterfield, who is known to be the founder of Flickr, was actually born and raised in Canada. He lived in a remote area in Canada with his parents wherein they lived in a log cabin.
Butterfield said that his parents were totally hippies since they basically just want to live somewhere quiet. After five years of living there, his family realized that it is actually pretty difficult and so they just decided to live in the city. This is where the young Butterfield got his very first computer, he was just seven at that time and this is when he basically taught himself to code and program a computer. It definitely is fascinating and inspiring at the same time, but since then he had been very into technology.
It was in 2002 when Butterfield co-founded the photo-sharing website Flickr alongside Caterina Fake, who later on became his wife. However, in 2005, the said photo-sharing website was acquired by Yahoo. He became the General Manager for it in a while but eventually left and started the instant-messaging service known as Slack. He announced it in 2013 and it was publicly released in 2014.
So far, it has actually been doing great that in fact just a year after it’s released, it had managed to raise $340 million in its venture capital with over 2 million active users who go online every single day. Because of this, Butterfield is now known to have an estimated fortune of $650 million.
Butterfield spent his childhood without electricity and water supply
Slack CEO Is Frugal?
Since he grew up not exactly being used to having tons of money laying around, the Silicon Valley heavyweight admitted that he feels guilty spending money on things he doesn’t actually need. He revealed that one of the reasons why he thought of the idea of photo-sharing with Flickr is that the first few camera phones have been making its way into the world of technology, so it is only fitting that when people get their hands on these camera phones, they would obviously want to share it with others.
Flickr is one of the very first websites to actually let people not just upload and share their photos, but also tag people and leave comments on it. After selling Flickr to Yahoo, he moved on to Slack wherein employees could work and communicate with one another with the use of groups messaging.
I was a little slow to tweet that @SlackHQ's first developer conference is May 22 — https://t.co/Zvg6L6bedH — and now it is pretty much sold out. So, turns out I am not really needed for that!
— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) April 11, 2018
Slack has now has a value of $5.1 billion and the success surprised many. According to the technology analyst Chris Green who is from Bright Bee, it is rare for entrepreneurs to have a failed projects or have projects brought from them, and then be successful with a new one. He even described Butterfield as someone who is simply working in the shadows, trying to find a way to make a comeback that would not just change his life but the industry as well. Although there is of course competition in the likes of Microsoft’s Office 365, it is still going great for the company.