Daniel Stewart Butterfield is an entrepreneur credited to have founded the popular photo sharing website Flickr. He is also the founder of Slack, an instant message communication tool.
Unlike other tech-wizards, Butterfield had no formal education in computer science or technology. After schooling, he graduated from the University of Victoria in philosophy, and went on to take a master’s degree in the same subject at the University of Cambridge.
In 2002, Butterfield, and his future wife Caterina Fake, along with Jason Classon, co-founded Ludicorp, a company that developed a multiplayer online role-playing game called ‘Game Never-ending’. This however, did not turn out well, and the firm, in February 2004, started the famous ‘Flickr’ photo sharing service. The following year, it was acquired by Yahoo! Flickr became a massive hit among Internet users across the world.
As of March 2013, Flickr had about 87 million registered users, and more than 3.5 million images uploaded daily.
Butterfield worked with Yahoo! till 2008, before moving to found his new venture called Tiny Speck, a company that launched the game ‘Glitch’.
In 2014, Butterfield released ‘Slack’, a message-based communication tool.