The Story
Stewart Butterfield was building a quirky massively multiplayer online game called Glitch — a colorful world where players cooperated on creative tasks rather than killing each other. It had charm. It had a devoted niche following. It did not have enough players to survive. Glitch launched, was pulled back into beta, relaunched, and finally shut down in late 2012. Twice-failed game studio. Rough look.
But while building Glitch, the team — spread across the US and Canada — had cobbled together an internal chat tool to coordinate their work. They’d outgrown IRC and found every existing messaging product inadequate, so they just… built their own. Over time, they added file sharing, search, channels, integrations. It became the nervous system of the company.
When Glitch died, Butterfield looked at the communication tool and thought: we’d never work without this. Nobody would. He pitched the investors on pivoting the remaining money into the chat tool. They said yes. Salesforce bought it eight years later for $27.7 billion. The failed video game produced one of the most valuable enterprise tools ever created. And this wasn’t even Butterfield’s first pivot — his previous failed game, Game Neverending, had spun off a little photo-sharing tool called Flickr.