"This is 2014. That was the year that Slack actually launched. I was interviewed by MIT Technology Review and asked if we were working to improve Slack. I said, I feel like what we have right now is ju..."

"Slack was famous for being one of the early consumerized B2B SAS products >> at more than one company all hands. I made everyone in the company [music] repeat this as a chant. In the long run, the mea..."

"thing. It it became an assumption that you should always be trying to remove friction when the challenge is really comprehension. If your software kind of stops me and asks me to make a decision and I..."

"having to think in order to use my software? >> You started two companies both famously pivoted. I imagine many people come to you for advice on pivoting. The decision is about like have you exhausted..."

"Today my guest is Stuart Butterfield, a founder and product legend who rarely does podcasts. Stuart founded Flickr and then Slack, which he sold to Salesforce in one of the biggest acquisitions in tec..."

"Noah Weiss, Chris Cordal, Ally Rail, and Johnny Rogers for suggesting [music] topics and questions for this conversation. This is a really special one and I really hope to have Stuart back to delve ev..."

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"companies in the world like OpenAI and Anthropic run their billing on Metronome. Visit metronome.com to learn more. That's metronome.com. >> Stuart, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the..."

"appreciate or come back to those things often enough. And then there's this category of like really essential parts of the app again like account creation, sign up, forgot password, you know, things l..."

"uh taste. I heard at a talk you gave of a really unique that you gave a talk on taste and you have a really unique perspective on just what taste is what product taste looks like. Can you share that? ..."

"advantage for yourself, for your product, for your company um by leaning into it because most people don't have good taste and don't invest. And so you're probably familiar with the again Jeff Bezos l..."

"advantage and I think that there's many reasons why stock was successful at the moment it was successful and and I think we had a bunch of really wonderful tailwinds and and all of that stuff but it w..."

"so someone else came up with this idea and I'm I'm trying to remember who it was. um by let's see maybe Andre Torres, maybe Ben Brown, something like that. We was like, "Hey, why did we ask people for..."

"standard. There is another one which we you know we're really puzzled about in the very early days where people have a long history of using messaging apps from like AOL instant messenger to SMS to um..."

"that investment to get people over the hub. A much more uh well, here's I'll give one one more simple one and then one kind of more complex one. people would just like the I can't remember if it's cal..."

"difficult for everyone and so try to shape the communication culture inside the organization to take best advantage on it. >> That feature still exists. I see that rooster all it or no I don't see it ..."

"and conflict and and stuff like that. >> Those are amazing examples. I very much appreciate that do not disturb feature when you guys launched that. I still remember that coming out. I'm sure a lot of..."

"always be trying to remove friction. And uh in in some cases that's true. You know, we would talk about in Slack like it was hard to market. It was hard to explain what it was if you had never used it..."

"people recognize that. They're like, I want to get people who come to my web page to the sign up form as quickly as possible. But if they don't know what they're signing up for and they don't know wha..."

"step because like people if they do ever open the preferences tab and look at all the options rarely have an idea. And if you can't teach them, you know, or or make it possible for them to discover wh..."

"that are are more important to display. And I could go on and on and on and on and people just don't recognize that. So, like the I want to see if this still true. I'm just going to open my iPhone. Um..."

"have. Um those examples are just to me all over the place. And the the reason I don't use most software where there was an actual choice point or the reason I don't use most features where there was a..."

"like you know cognitive cost of all these things but also there's an emotional aspect which is if you if your software kind of stops me a second and asks me to make a decision and I don't really under..."

"thousands and thousands of pages, right? And obviously that's terrible. So why do people think that a little bit of that is good? And you know, here's an example. Like you open a menu, there's 14 thin..."

"really struck me that like, you know, Patrick could have asked for anything. It could have been any talk. It could have been a partnership. It was like it was so irritating to him um that it worked li..."

"really tried to push people to what is the thing that people or what is the two things or what is a maybe three things that people could want to do here and then put everything behind other. And then ..."

"other products work with your products. And I think that's core like Patrick is a good example of Stripe. I feel like that's a recurring theme with very successful product leaders, just constantly uns..."

"company or you shouldn't you know um almost nothing you know again you could reduce it down to a tiny feature is anywhere close to to perfect and if a that's acknowledged freely inside the organizatio..."

"Lovable. Not only are they the fastest growing company in history, I use it regularly and I could not recommend it more highly. If you've ever had an idea for an app, but didn't know where to start, L..."

"This makes me think about a let's call it a rant that you have about how it takes a lot of work to make anything work at all. that just the default state is not working. You just share share what you ..."

"your jobs or, uh, lazy freeloaders are sucking off the government and causing us all have to pay more taxes or something like that. The reality is like almost nothing works. It's actually another coli..."

"biological um it's hard for us to understand the world except by anthropomorphizing it. And so it like if it didn't rain this year, it's because a god is mad and probably because we didn't sacrifice e..."

"little bit subtle. of like um one of the things I found since I don't have a job is there's much less time pressure and and that maximum like uh if you want something done give it to a busy person the..."

"bounds of of certainty that they could have had, but the real thing was, oh my god. So you guys put flags into the product. You AB tested it. You did the instrumentation. You created tables in the in ..."

"new versions of the product, to put the instrumentation in, to have it all the API calls, to record every action that people take, to to do all the analytics, to create the dashboard, to put that, you..."

"And so that's like everyone's going to work in the morning. like right on and like I have 10 things to do and every single one of them is like something I know how to do and it's like definitely going..."

"don't have sufficient supply of product marketing work to do, they're just going to do other stuff. Again, very important. Not because they're stupid, not because they're evil, but because they're lik..."

"valuable work to do um and there almost always is but you know it's creating the clarity around that creating the alignment making sure everyone understands that that's what they're supposed to be doi..."

"it might appear. >> Okay. Uh before we run out of time I want to touch on two other topics. One is when people think of Stuart Butterfield I think a lot of people think of we don't sell saddles here. ..."

"I did not change a word of what I said inside the company. What I think we were still eight people maybe, you know, at most 10, but I think it was eight people. >> It was before Slack launched even. >..."

"They're really kind of one and the same. The reason I wanted to touch on it is I think still people continue to not listen to this advice and can continue to overinvest in more features, more more pro..."

">> Yeah, the nail. Anyway, >> yeah. What is that one? [laughter] There's the Well, there's the one I think about is instead of trying to convince men to build a ship, instill a yearning for the sea. >..."

"commercially successful. Um and so decided to um to abandon it. But you know the default advice for anyone in anything is persevere is like you know a kitten hanging off the branch and a poster says h..."

"It's like it's wrenching. It has a bad impact. You know, like there's when we shut down Glitch, there's a lot of people who loved it and would spend all of their free time and couldn't wait to get hom..."

"podcast. Uh they went through a hundred investors rejected her before somebody finally decided to invest and she just kept pushing. >> Yeah. But I think that's a slightly different example, right? Bec..."

"do. Someone else shared that you paid 100% of employees health insurance to give them just fewer things to think about. uh when you went public you did a you basically created the best possible situat..."

"the prisoners dilemma. Um the you know acts of generosity to me are a way of demonstrating that I am going to cooperate as we iterate in this game. >> Um and if you do that then people will also coope..."

"You have to actually make their lives better. Um, and you can put effort into like pointing it out to them and and demonstrating that you have created this value and stuff like that, but there's no su..."

"Um and so uh we we definitely changed the terms of service after that because being a public company is a little bit different but you know in every other respect I think you know there were all reall..."

">> Yeah. What was that mantra again that you uh had the company chant? I think this is a really nice way to end it. >> In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value we create..."

"in in a movie, a novel, TV show, whatever, there's only the loser Stewart and the [ __ ] Stewart. It's it's like it's obviously in the collective consciousness a terrible name and I shouldn't have cho..."