Stewart Butterfield - Profile and Q&A

Vancouverite Stewart Butterfield will the first speaker at CreativeMornings/Vancouver on September 2, 2011. Best known as the co-founder of the popular photo-sharing website Flickr (85 million users and growing!), Butterfield will share thoughts and opinions about creativity and how he applies it in his life and career.

Flickr’s early success is an Internet legend, with the company being sold to Yahoo in 2005 for more than $30 million, landing Butterfield on the cover of Newsweek, and being chosen as one of Business Weeks Best Leaders, and named One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time magazine.

But the infamously forthright Butterfield has admitted publicly that he’s never really understood the secret behind Flickr’s popularity. And although he and his team worked diligently in the years after the Yahoo takeover to continue Flickr’s growth, he shocked (and entertained) many with his bizarre tinsmitthing-themed resignation letter to Yahoo in 2008.

Besides being a successful entrepreneur and businessman, Butterfield spent the early part of his career as a designer, programmer, and gamer, and it was his love of gaming that led his first startup Ludicorp to develop Game Neverending. Flickr was actually a tool developed for the game evolved to be its own entity, outliving the game itself.

These days Butterfield is back to his roots in some respects as he leads another growing startup, Tiny Speck, and their massively multiplayer online game Glitch.

We at CMV wanted to ask Stewart about creativity and gain some further insights into his views on creativity before his talk. In anticipation of his presentation in Sept, we bring you a few thoughts from Stewart:

CMV: How do you define creativity and apply it in your career?

SB: I don’t have a single definition of creativity — the process of, say, UI design is very different from the act of making improvisational music. But they do have something in common: in both cases the creator needs to understand the constraints at work.

That understanding may be intellectual or intuitive, but if you don’t get the meter, the tempo, the key or the harmonic structure in music or the space, the balance, the user’s mental model or the software’s capability in UI design you are unlikely to make something good or beautiful.

As for the application to my career: I try to understand the constraints as best as I can and apply them in the right order!

CMV: What did you learn from your most memorable creative failure?

SB: I fail so often that it is hard to remember one over the others. But, it is same learning every time: keep practicing!

CMV: Where do you find your best creative inspiration?

SB: Music, nature, film, furniture design, cooking, eating, good TV, theatre, costume design traditional crafts, engineering, talking to people, going for walks and smoking pot.

CMV: What’s your one guilty creative indulgence?

SB: I don’t understand the question! You mean like watching bad TV? I wach some pretty boring procedural legal shows (Law & Order, etc.) sometimes.

CMV: What’s the one creative advice or tip you wish you’d known as a young person?

SB: I wish I could go back and say “Don’t be so sanctimonious! Designers are exasperating to deal with already!!”

CMV: What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?

SB: Starting companies. The first time you can put it down to naïvety, but after that it’s just crazy.

CMV: Who would you like to hear speak at CreativeMornings?

SB: Steve Jobs! But, failing that, people from the Vancouver planning department who do such an amazing job making this city and its spaces live up to the vibrancy of the watercolors included in the proposals.

Stewart Butterfield will be speaking at CreativeMornings/Vancouver on September 2, 2011 at W2 Media Café. Regardless of what profession or industry you’re in, if you use creativity in your life and career, join us for breakfast and conversation as we learn and share ideas on creativity. Find out more and secure your free ticket at: www.creativemornings.com.