Failure rarely looks like the beginning of a billion-dollar success story. But that is exactly what happened when Stewart Butterfield’s online game Glitch collapsed in 2012. While the game failed to take off, the team behind it discovered that the internal messaging tool they had built for themselves solved a much bigger problem — workplace communication. That unexpected pivot eventually gave birth to Slack, now one of the world’s most popular office collaboration platforms.
What makes Slack’s rise remarkable is that its creation was never part of the original plan. The platform emerged accidentally while Butterfield and his colleagues were building Glitch. According to Slack’s corporate history, the internal messaging system was originally designed simply to help team members communicate while working on the game. However, as Glitch encountered increasing challenges, the usefulness of the communication tool became more obvious.
