As Slack Prepares to Go Public, Its C.E.O. Is Holding His Tongue

Now Mr. Butterfield fills his home with useful, beautiful things, Ms. Rubio said. Those include a leather-wrapped console table from the luxury Americana furniture brand BDDW and a set of Japanese kitchen knives selected for craftsmanship and the quality of the steel.

He approached Slack’s software interface in a similar way, thinking philosophically about each feature. Slack’s ability to “snooze” messages received outside of work hours, for example, reflects Mr. Butterfield’s empathy for users, said Bradley Horowitz, an investor in the company.

Slack’s success has also made it an acquisition target; it previously rebuffed interest from Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Some of those giants have since directly taken on Slack.

In 2016, Microsoft released Teams, a chat and collaboration app that integrates with its Office software. In response, Mr. Butterfield bought a full-page newspaper ad in The New York Times that read, “Dear Microsoft, Wow. Big news!” A letter accompanying the ad praised the virtue of “thoughtfulness and craftsmanship,” implying that Slack’s software contained intangible elements that a behemoth like Microsoft could not replicate.

Microsoft Teams is now used by more than 500,000 organizations, compared with Slack’s more than 600,000. Microsoft said Teams has seen “incredible adoption.” It did not have a comment on Slack.

Throughout, Mr. Butterfield has rarely held back his thoughts. When Mr. De Niro cursed at him at an awards event in 2015, Mr. Butterfield was delighted and tweeted, “#Lifegoals.” That same year, when The Times asked if he thought Slack was worth its steep valuation, he said, “It is, because people say it is.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/technology/slack-stewart-butterfield.html?emc=rss&partner=rss