The last interview was with Stewart. He walked in with his laptop and pulled up my resume and saw that I was from Texas. He asked if I'd ever been to Marfa. He then asked if I'd ever been to El Paso. He then asked if I'd ever heard the song El Paso by Marty Robbins. We then sat there and listened to El Paso for the entire song. Then we made some more chit-chat and that was the end of my interview.
I didn't get the gig but I did find out my flight back to DFW was first class so that was nice.
That seems surreal. Maybe by that point Stewart figured that anyone passed through to him had the technical chops, and the rest was about personality & culture fit?
I appreciated it for giving a clearly articulated alternative to zero sum competitive games. It helped me think about the playfulness of cooperative creativity in a new more holistic way, as well as the idea that it’s worth doing things that you’ll never reach an end of.
I don’t doubt that if I read it again I’d share your criticisms though, it’s a thin volume with a very sweet idea at the core of it, at the end of the day.
He and Caterina (Fake, the other co-founder of Flickr) were working on a game, a so-called "Game Never Ending" when they realized that they needed to come up with a way for people to store screenshots and share them. Thus, Flickr was born (this is why some URLs in Flickr had ".gne" extensions).
Yahoo acquired Flicker in 2005, and a few years later, both Butterfield and Fake left.
Butterfield then went back to his game. In the process of developing the game, he realized that he needed a good, reliable chat system: and hence Slack was born.
I wonder if he's back working on the game, which, really seems like a "game never ending" for him...