Stewart Butterfield Quotes

In high school, I started my first company, called M Cubed Software. We named it that because it was me and two other guys named Mike.

Distributed workforces are most likely to succeed if their culture is one that values and prioritizes face-to-face communications.

Our users are trapeze artists, high school football coaches - I got cornered by a couple of theoretical physicists who said Dropbox lets them collaborate across the world and share their experiments' results. They were raving about how it's driving their research.

130 of Automattic's 150 employees work outside of our San Francisco headquarters. Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?

Huge open source organizations like Red Hat and Mozilla manage the collaboration of hundreds of people who don't know one another and have spent no time hanging around the water cooler.

A company like Adobe, there are dozens of different teams that are using Slack. Each of those elected to use Slack independently.

Surely in a world of email, video conferencing and virtual assistants, isn't being expected to show up at the office extremely anachronistic? Yet to date it seems that where one works does matter. That creativity and innovation do feed off physical interactions between people.

I remember working with a guy named Andrew Braccia at Yahoo, and Yahoo was the company that bought Flickr. Everyone on his team was hard working and reliable, did what they said they were going to do, on top of everything, and seemed to be operating at this level of productivity and effectiveness that I found difficult to manage to.

At Cisco, we are moving to collaboration teams, groups coming together that represent sales, engineering, finance, legal, etc. And we're training leaders to think across silos.

We built Zoom for the business customers.

In New York, they kind of rode with me from day one: they understand who I am.

For the first two years of Eventbrite, all the work was done by just the three founders: me, my husband, Kevin, and our chief technology officer, Renaud Visage.

People think, 'Well, because you're at Google, you can work from anywhere.' Yes, you can work from anywhere, but many just commute to offices... Working from the office is really important.

For entrepreneurs, choosing your co-founders is like a professional marriage. You're going to go through tough times, and you need to remember that ideas can change, but business partners can't.

Xavier has been the ultimate role model. No matter how far away we are geographically, working together is something we feed off of.

Broadcasting is a team effort and two, or three, individuals not functioning as a team cannot be as effective as they can if they set aside their own agendas and focus on what they see on their TV monitors and embellish the TV personas of the talents involved. I've been blessed to have had many outstanding partners.

The surprising question we get is, 'How many people telecommute at Google?' And our answer is, 'As few as possible.'

I also have an amazing codesigner and an amazing partnership with New York & Co. The exciting part of growing together and having this kind of long-term relationship is that they can anticipate where I'm going with something. So our relationship is very defined, it's a true partnership so I'm not doing it all by myself.

The work is different in the sense that I haven't had to travel round the world raising money, or work from the genesis of the project. But the collaboration feels clear always, it's sort of my drug, I'm in it for the conversation. The conversation's the most important part of it.

I rarely do anything on the show by myself. I dont want it to be about me. Squatting in the sewer in San Francisco, its really hot, were up to our knees in a river of crap. Rats and cockroaches are all over. I would never, ever walk into that environment, except for the fact that the guy who does it every day is squatting next to me.

I actually met one of my business partners [Neal Dodson] at the Governor's School summer program, so we've known each other since we were 15 and 16 years old, and we both ended up at Carnegie Mellon together. He started working for a producer out of school after a few years, and then we started the company together.

I think that most people really do need the sort of community you find in an office. Most people are always going to go into an office. If you are a member of a working group and you are not there physically, decisions are made without you.

It's true that I don't think I'd be a good director. If I were a director, I'd try to hire the best people I could and then leave them alone. I don't know much about cameras or lighting, so I'd make sure that I had a really good cameraman who understood lenses and lighting, and I say to him, "This is the scene we have to shoot and this is what I think it should be, you go do it." Same with actors. But really, very good directors who know everything do basically the same thing. They hire you and then they leave you alone.

Having colleagues nearby, whether at the beach or in a crypt, means the ideas are always flowing

I love being in the business I'm in-I do love being a part of a group of people that work well together. I love it when there's a connection.