What Glitch Left Behind

Tiny Speck, the studio Stewart Butterfield co-founded in 2009, spent roughly three years building Glitch — a browser-based multiplayer game set inside the imaginations of eleven giants. Glitch shut down in November 2012, and Butterfield published a shutdown memo that was candid enough to circulate widely: the game had not found a large enough audience, the studio was wrong about what casual players wanted, and the project was over.

What Tiny Speck kept was the internal messaging tool the team had built to coordinate across offices in Vancouver and San Francisco. That tool became Slack.

Butterfield announced the pivot in a memo dated August 2013, framing the product as a searchable, persistent communication layer for teams — a description precise enough to distinguish it from the chat clients that already existed. The memo is frequently cited in business-press accounts of the pivot as a model of clear corporate communication, though the document's lasting significance is less rhetorical than structural: it shows a team deploying infrastructure built for one purpose and finding that the infrastructure was the valuable thing all along.

Slack launched publicly in August 2013 and reached one million daily active users by early 2015. The company raised a Series A in 2014 led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, and subsequent rounds pushed its valuation well above $1 billion — placing it firmly in the unicorn category that Aileen Lee had defined in November 2013, just months after the product launched. By 2019 Slack had more than ten million daily active users, according to figures the company released directly.

Slack went public in June 2019 via a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange — bypassing underwriters and issuing no new shares, a structure that Spotify had used on the same exchange in April 2018. The reference price was $26 a share; Slack opened above $38.

Salesforce announced its acquisition of Slack in December 2020. The deal closed in July 2021 at approximately $27.7 billion in cash and stock, according to Salesforce's own filings — at the time the largest acquisition in the company's history. Salesforce disclosed in its fiscal-year 2022 filings that Slack contributed approximately $1.5 billion in revenue in the twelve months following the close.

The Glitch shutdown is sometimes described as a pivot, and technically it was: a deliberate structural change to the product and business model in response to evidence that the original approach was not working. What made the case unusual was the direction of the change. Butterfield did not redesign the game. He discarded the game and shipped what the team had built in order to make the game possible.