This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Stewart Butterfield: Not Quite Failing, Not Quite Succeeding" (created 2015-10-06). The excerpt is from an interview/talk in which Stewart Butterfield (co-founder of Slack) discusses startup resiliency, the need to tell believable stories to investors, employees and users, repeatedly revising that story as reality changes, and the emotional toll of being "not quite failing, not quite succeeding" while running low on cash (he references having $5 million left). A second speaker briefly interjects (labelled SPEAKER B) with a lighthearted comment. The clip focuses on the challenges of persistence, pivoting, and the psychological strain of near-miss outcomes.
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I actually wanted to go back to the resiliency thing because here's the part that you don't imagine when you start a company, or you probably don't. So one of the things you got to do is tell a story that people can believe in, whether that's the investors, whether that's co-founders, whether that's employees you're trying to bring on board, that's customers, that's potential users, that's like what the what the brand is, what the product is. Landlords? Landlords, everyone. Yeah, you've got to tell a— and maybe your significant other or your parents or whoever. And you really have to hope that that comes true. And then often, the way that you said it the first time doesn't happen. And so you alter the story. And then that also doesn't happen. And then you alter the story again, and that still doesn't happen. And at some point you think, am I stupid? Am I crazy? Am I lying about this? Is there something here, or am I just going to have to keep on changing the story as reality punches me in the face over and over again? So we had the experience, I think, with this company that ended up being a huge success, of it failing. And the feeling was not like, well, chin up, old fellow. We're going to try again. It'll all be OK in the end. It was like— Personally speaking, from the inside, fucking horrible. Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to swear here. Really—
You're Canadian. You can go with that.
Yeah, OK. So actually, I mean, I still remember this very, very well. We had tried all these things. We were working the new user experience. We were looking at monetization. We were building this model. We were saying, like, we could do this. We could do that. We had $5 million left in the bank. There was always one thing that was coming up that was going to be the thing that would make this work. And sometimes those things where we we pegged all our hopes on would actually move the needle a little bit, but not quite enough. And that's the hardest position to be in, not quite failing, not quite succeeding. Because we actually had very, very high average revenue per user. We had deep commitment. We had this community that was really into it, but just not enough.
