Slack chief Stewart Butterfield slams email

Stewart Butterfield, founder of messaging app Slack, says email will be the “cockroach of the internet”.

Slack chief executive Stewart Butterfield.

Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack, the messaging app favoured by Malcolm Turnbull, says email will be the “cockroach of the internet”. Speaking at the Web Summit conference in Dublin, he said “we’ve got another 30 or 40 decades of email left”.

“It’s the lowest common denominator as a form of communication,” he said. “But it’s a terrible way to manage internal communications, and there are two reasons for that. One is no matter who you are in the organisation, you only have a very narrow slice of communications and everything else is opaque to you. The second thing is it goes into your inbox and it’s locked up from everyone else. People using Slack have a lot more lateral transparency across the organisation.”

Mr Butterfield also spoke about the company’s growth plans for the coming years. “We have a lot of features we want to add, and we added several last week, but the more interesting developments will be around the platform,” he said.

“Slack is a great way of distributing messages … not just from people but from machines. Say if someone tweeted at you, or logs a help ticket, every time you deploy code, add a task etc. If you extend Slack to be a portal for all the other applications you use then there’s a huge amount of value.”

Commenting on the sale of Flickr a little over a decade ago, Mr Butterfield said it was important to view the transaction in the context of what was happening in the tech industry at the time.

“(The crash) was a pretty dismal time in the public markets in general and a very dismal time in technology,” he said.

“No one was investing in consumer-based technology companies, so the prospect of selling the company for $25 million sounded like a lot of money. Now, the thing that sounds preposterous to me is that $25m isn’t an insane amount of money … I think the technology industry has gotten crazily out of control.”

The serial entrepreneur says success does not eliminate doubt, even when you are chief executive of a company with a $US2.8 billion ($3.8bn) price tag. “Now that we’re on this crazy success trajectory, the degree of stress and the degree of doubt and the degree of second-guessing decisions hasn’t been reduced at all,” he said.

“In many respects, it’s actually worse now because there’s more at stake, there’s more attention and promise and potential.

“I think I wake up every day and look in the mirror and say, ‘We’ve almost certainly f. ked this up completely’. It’s only by about three in the afternoon that we get back to ‘OK’.”