Slack founder Stewart Butterfield on how to avoid shiny object syndrome

There's definitely something to be said when things are above some threshold of good to sticking with the same idea. Not so much because that idea is the best one, but because the wild and erratic chasing of the next idea, when you have something that has a little bit of traction, can be really dangerous. So Slack is a good example of that. We conceived of Slack as a tool for business. We developed it that way, we priced it that way. It was successful. But there's also this huge amount of social usage. Now, maybe a third of the Slack teams that get created are for some kind of social usage. And a lot of people had the idea that we should pursue that, like, we should make Slack for groups or even just pivot to being a consumer company, like kind of a private version of Twitter or something like that. And we've been pretty steadfast in not doing that, because you can only do so many things well. And there's a lot of shiny objects like that that are very distracted.

Are you the one that says no, most of those new ideas, or have you had to build that into the company? Like, when something's going as well as Slack, there's so many new ideas.

I'm Chief no Sayer, but there's definitely a whole bunch of people who are equally committed to no great.