Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
- Stewart Butterfield founded Slack in 2013 after selling his first startup, Flickr, to Yahoo for more than $20 million.
- Slack became one of the fastest-growing companies ever, achieving a $1 billion valuation less than a year after it officially launched.
- Butterfield, whose birth name was Dharma before he changed it at age 12, was born in British Columbia and majored in philosophy in college.
- He's currently engaged to a fellow tech founder: Jennifer Rubio, the cofounder of luggage startup Away.
Stewart Butterfield is on a roll.
In the early 2000s, Butterfield created Flickr, which sold to Yahoo for over $20 million. Now, his latest venture, Slack, one of the fastest-growing business apps ever, has been acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion.
The workplace messaging app, born out of a now-defunct gaming startup Tiny Speck, will help Salesforce compete with its chief rival, Microsoft, during a time when office communication technology is more essential than ever.
Read More: Analysts say that the $27.7 billion that Salesforce is paying for Slack is steep, but worth it for the chance to more aggressively take on Microsoft
Here's how Butterfield, 47, got his start and built a wildly successful, multibillion-dollar startup.
This is an update to a story by Maya Kosoff first published in 2015.