♪ emily: this is what happened last time we interviewed stewart butterfield. hello, everybody. actor,red lehto, the with our chat with stuart, the silicon valley on-chip door, but butterfield's story is anything but. in fact, he founded the company's by accident. 2004, and today,

flat, the workplace collaboration app, is worth more than $7 billion and is now battling facebook. joining me is the slack ceo and cofounder, stewart butterfield. thank you so much for being here. 3 you had an unconventional childhood. your parents were hippies and chose to raise you off of the great in british columbia? what was that like? >> it was, in many ways, and idyllic childhood. no running water until i was three, no electricity until i was a few are. my father was from new york, and my mother was for montréal, and they really had no idea what to do. when i was five, we moved to the city so i could go to school.

emily: your first name is actually darma, which means "the way." stewart: yes, a comp located concept, but central to buddhism. emily: what is that? i was very curious. my mother tells the story. a son who was maybe six months younger than me, and his name was no up. so it turned out that i -- noah to beone a child, and i had never been anywhere where there were so many people around. and i was going, "noah, noah, abnd noah," and i did not realize there were other children, so that was a little weird.

did you see a computer for the first time? stewart: by 1980, we had an a2e, and i was super into it. basic, you could do some basic graphics. you could make this little square this color, make this little square this color, so i made this interactive kind of multimedia sank, but only the super easy ones, like with france and russia. , big, horizontal, like brazil or mexico or any of the fancy flags. emily: your philosophy, you wanted to be an academic. i kind of lost interest. it was not until i went to the 1992, so this is a

little bit before things started taking off, and then back into computers because of the networks, and because of the internet, i could make webpages, and by the time i finished my masters degree, i had no idea what i was going to do. the big five philosophy firms are always hiring. the dot com and and ias in the upswing, had some very marketable skills. emily: so you started. stewart: it was too long of a story, so couple of weeks before the crash, it was driving me crazy. $10 million in equity, and i ended up getting bought out, which was more than anybody else

made if you stuck around, and the person i sat next to my first day at the job, i that it was kind of a hobby and we should start it up as a business, so we did. emily: and you made something. stewart: i made something, and that was pretty fast, but now, it is 2001 thousand one, and did,trough and did -- and , and that trough ended. nasdaq was down, not a lot of optimism about the internet, but there was self-expression, and blogging, from the late 1990's until the early 2000's, there was just such an active innovative,o were but there were relationships. what i wasto do

doing 10 years prior, and that was the whole career. so we started a company to build a web-based career game. emily: a never-ending game, literally called a game that was never-ending. this was 2002, and people were investing at that time, and definitely, there was an audience for that, a pretty small audience. we put our own money into it, and we got to a point where the only person who got paid was the one person who had kids, and we just could not do it, and we whichup making flickr was, obviously, like a big turn. emily: so in the wreckage of the bust, you started flickr. what made you do that? stewart: desperation.

this was instead of inventory in the game world. a shoebox, and it was really cool. i did not know you could do that in a browser. you had to be online at the same time as the other person in order to share with them. emily: but the concept was very new. it sounds very familiar now. stewart: 1992, game never-ending, flickr is really of using technology to facilitate human interaction, and sometimes i am agnostic about with the purpose of that is. it could be foreplay or creative inspiration or for work -- it or creative play inspiration or for work. things that people will do with it. part of the reason to have a career is right now, -- when i

grew up, you and me are in the last generation of life before and after the internet, the spike the fact that there are --e negative consequences, despite the fact that there are some negative consequences. it is a huge plus. i think as a species, we should be grateful we have the internet. flickr was so hot that the year after you launched, you sold it. yahoo! bought it. you move to yahoo!, and you became like a dot com star. stewart: it was the first thing that was like a phenomenon since crash, and me and my cofounder, an issue came out.

and i get through security, and grabbedthe gate, and i a stack and put them on the scanning the first one and the second one, and she says, "honey, these are all the said, "no, that is ok," and she looks at it and looks at me, and she is so excited. i do not remember exactly what it said, but to have flickr and myspace changing -- , and she was emily: you talked about how one of the strengths of flickr was katerinare and how would welcome every single new user. a would welcome every single user. do you worry about cate? you're willing to tolerate. not everyone tolerates the worst

behavior on twitter, but collectively as a society, as a , weness, as a culture tolerate it in a sense that it has not been eradicated. to whats the boundaries is acceptable in a way that kind of encourages more bad behavior, and i think it probably has a negative impact. on the other hand, i think the net impact is usually positive. like it can next people in a way that they could not connect before. i think twitter, in particular, and hasot of criticism been outstanding and amplify the voices of people who would not otherwise be heard. they are also amplify negative voices, and should they be doing more to stop that? they probably should. it is not like an obvious, terrible thing, because there were people who said terrible, nasty things in the don of radio radio and also for

political movements that were super damaging later on. it takes a while to figure out how to use technology, and sometimes it takes generations. we have to figure out the consequences. 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it was long before we got to the stage. ♪ studioer: "bloomberg 1.0" is brought to you by -- ♪

emily: you left yahoo!. stewart: yes. broke you and caterina up. but history repeated itself. you started another game and another company by accident. andart: yes, it was me three other people from the flickr team who all worked at yahoo!.

there were people online, and hardware is 90% cheaper than it used to be, and the internet is faster, and we are all more experienced. so a more ambitious project, and we were able to raise more money. emily: this was glitch. stewart: this was glitch. messaging,instant based upon what they call channels. and usegive it a name thehash symbol to did note channel, which is where twitter got the hash tags from. evidence to us, we are developing this in the background. it was so irritating to have a problem, and then we would address it in a number of minutes, and we let that kind of cook. so when did you realize that slack was a thing, and

glitch was not? moment: there was a later at night, and i had not been able to sleep well. there was always like one more thing we could try that could make a difference, and a little bit too weird, a little bit too esoteric, and i do not believe they can work anymore, so the next morning, i told the board and the cofounders that we had to shut it down. while that was happening, what do we want to do next? and we all said we would not work with the system without this one that we had developed inside the company. maybe that is something other people would want. emily: slack as 3 million paid , 65% fortune 100 companies. stewart: yes. it is not what i expected. the potential seems unlimited.

what are they that you outpace your own expectations? i think we are unbounded in terms of opportunity and resources, and the market is just way bigger than we thought. if it were china, there would be 200 million people in the world who would inevitably be on slack or something like slack. the advantages are just so big. there is 100,000 plus people using slack everyday, but there are also firms and dental offices and small tax preparers. small police departments, and a norwegian department of welfare uses it. francisco, berkeley, stanford uses it. the federal government. was waye of utility greater than the thought when we first got started. raised hundreds of

millions of dollars, and in the past, you said was easy money, you did not need it. is it easy to raise now, or have economic conditions changed? stewart: certainly for us, what has happened is there has been a separation. sometimes there is a leader in the category and everybody else. i worked through the dot com crash, and i personally held shares of lehman brothers the weekend they went on to. i am conscious of the cycle. emily: you're holding it for a rainy day. stewart: it is a great hedge force of the changes in the market. as a productoft they just launched. is that a slack killer? is that cutting into your share at all? stewart: no. in actual usage of customers

yet, no, but where it does show up is sales. what is interesting, people talk about new microsoft versus old microsoft. were i think that will make a difference in is how it affects customers. and then the product side. emily: you are not worried about it. ok. you said you're getting the company ready to go public but you're not necessarily going. stewart: we kind of in the same position. it is difficult to contemplate. .here are not many outcomes i do not have a timeline. we are not in a rush to achieve that. task, because 10 years ago or 20 years ago, we would have been on it long before we got to the stage. hundreds of millions in revenue, and we are still private. would you consider

selling? we have chased speculation if there is a buyer out there at this valuation. stewart: it doesn't work that way with private companies. it is a much kind of circumstance conversation. howrested in talking about companies can work more closely together, we would be interested in that or something like that. if we do not respond positively to that, likely do not say, "yes, it sounds good," he is a check, do you want me to sign it? -- here is a check, do you want me to sign it? we are so optimistic. it does that make sense to sell it. say unbounded we were able to execute in the way i hope we can.

figure something out, suddenly, we are 50% bigger, and that doesn't work anymore. "bloomberg's studio 1.0" is brought to you by -- ♪

emily: you have not shied away againstaking out president trump or candidate trunk. you realized it was not getting better. what do you think about the world today? stewart: dramatic. about this in terms of policies at this point, and there are all kinds of policies where i think it is worth vigorous opposition for different reasons. immigration laws, for example. and just understanding of what has made this country great historically. the trade policy is something that could do really significant damage on the economy and the world economy. i still think we're going to and 10,e repair to do

20, 50, 100 years from now, i hope we will be in better shape. you have come out in support of planned parenthood. you spoke out against the travel ban. when you take these political stands, how do you decide to do that? the personal things, and you have a company. individuals, where absolutely free to make our choices, and i have tried to more separate my activities as an individual person from those of the company. emily: i know you're nervous about being held up as a model for diversity, but the truth is your numbers are far above the industry average when it comes to diversity, and you personally decided very early on in the slack life to make it a priority. what was the spark that brought you to that realization? first of all, it was

not just a company level decision. lie, this is looking less like any other tech company. it is just a conversation that what we can do to make a difference. there is more to building an whereive culture, one critically you're less likely to fall out of the industry, because underrepresented group or technologies stays in, the more success she has in her career, the greater the chances that people from her network -- he will be a mentor and a role model. is wee have seen happen have made some positive moves and have taken experimental approach to try to increase both asersity and inclusion, and a result of that, we have attracted a lot of people, and success begets success. you have more female

workers. you have more female workers. your numbers are better across the board. facebook and google, meantime, just released their diversity reports, and the numbers have barely moved. how can the rest of the industry do this in a substantial way, and what is your advice to young entrepreneurs who are starting at the beginning question mark as early asrt possible, which i guess answers the first part of the question also. it is hard to move into empty spaces. and to have unrealistically high expectations that what kind of change we can see in the short-term, but in the long term, i see a bigger change than anyone realizes. emily: slack is changing the world. in many creases -- cases, it increases flexibility, but we are also connected to work all of the time. do you think about the irony of that? are cultural there problems, slack can make it worse.

for high-level trust, slack can make it even better. the functional roles today versus decades ago, they are more powerful, but where we have not seen as dramatic improvement , it ends up being a limiting performance is how difficult it is to gain the kind of alignment you need. the difference between the best and worst performing teams is far greater than the best and worst performing individuals. the individual worker productivity and time management skills and to-do lists, getting things done, things like that. on what is probably the more important thing to transparency,s clarity around goals, trust, respect, alignment.

an order of magnitude or several of magnitudes greater. emily: what about the next five to 20 years? you say you want to keep doing it? i am behindeel where we should be because we are growing so fast. out, andsomething sadly, we are 50% bigger, and that doesn't work anymore. if you had asked me two years ago what my job was as a ceo, inside my own head, my job is to be the smartest person in the company in the room and to make all of the really important decisions, and that is itinitely not the job, but is to fundamentally increase the performance of the organization as a whole. i have no limit on the opportunity or resources available. it is just a matter of thinking -- figuring out how to amp it up, how to work more quickly, how to make customers happier, how to do all of that better,

but to continue learning and improving for the whole organization will be the driver of our success. emily: five years. stewart butterfield, thank you. great to have you. ♪ studioer: "bloomberg 1.0" is brought to you by -- ♪ retail.

under pressure like never before. and it's connected technology that's moving companies forward fast. e-commerce. real time inventory. virtual changing rooms. that's why retailers rely on comcast business to deliver consistent network speed across multiple locations. every corporate office, warehouse and store near or far covered. leaving every competitor, threat and challenge outmaneuvered. comcast business outmaneuver.

>> stocks across the asia-pacific paring early gains. the benchmark may struggle to make its nine gains in the last 10. trade is the main driver across markets right now. washington is headed for late-night talks amid optimism canada will hopefully agree to a deal before the weekend. we are back to emerging markets, clouds gather over argentina. appealntry's finances for crack -- credit. i'm in hong kong. haidi: i'm haidi stroud. chinese airlines are in focus amid indications earnings are under pressure.

they may have to rein in expansion. this is "bloomberg markets: asia ." credit start to hear a little growling from the bears in this market ride. we had record highs in the u.s., the nasdaq and s&p 500 closing above 2900 for the first time but in asia, we are seeing the sentiment turn. just can't hang on to any sustained recovery rally. stephen: yeah, it was a two-minute story, wasn't it? the open, 120 seconds and here we are. session lows in hong kong. close to session lows on the chinese. it seems during the rallies, sentiment is still shaken.