How Slack Onboarded the World

The Ghost in the Machine

It was 2012, and the game was dying. Not with a bang, but a slow, quiet bleed-out in the server logs. At Tiny Speck, the company he’d co-founded, Stewart Butterfield watched the vital signs of *Glitch*—a whimsical, massive multiplayer online game—flatline. They had built a beautiful, strange world full of imagination, a game where you could climb inside the minds of giants and cooperate to grow trees that sang opera. They had also raised millions of dollars from very serious people. But the players weren’t coming. Or rather, they weren’t staying. The failure was a familiar ghost for Butterfield. A decade earlier, he’d been working on a different game that also failed to launch. But from its ashes, a single feature—a photo-sharing tool—had been salvaged and spun out. It was called Flickr. Now, history was rhyming. The mood at Tiny Speck was funereal. The team was scattered across Vancouver, San Francisco, and New York, a distributed workforce trying to build a collective dream. To hold themselves together, to bridge the distance, they had built something on the side. It was a simple tool, born of necessity. An internal chat application based on the old Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol, but polished, tweaked, and refined over years of constant use. It was their digital office, their water cooler, their project management hub. It had channels for #design, #bug-hunting, and #bad-jokes. It had a searchable history, so no idea was ever truly lost. It was, for the people building a failed game, the only part of their work that was unequivocally working. One day, looking at the two creations, Butterfield saw the truth. *Glitch* was the elaborate, fantastical thing they *wanted* people to want. The chat tool was the simple, powerful thing they themselves *couldn’t live without*. The decision, when it came, felt less like a pivot and more like a confession. They would shut down the game. They would let go of the beautiful, strange world. And they would try to sell the ghost in their machine. They decided to call it Slack. An acronym, someone clever pointed out, for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. But the name also carried the quiet humility of its origin: a bit of breathing room, a space between the frantic work. It was the tool they built when they should have been building the game.