2026-11-04
Global PM Ranking #50 Stewart Butterfield: Twice Bankrupted Making Video Games, Twice Salvaged the Internal Tool for $27.7 Billion
【The 100 PMs Who Changed the World · #50】No founder in Silicon Valley history has lived a wilder Groundhog Day loop than Stewart Butterfield (87 OVR). Armed with a Cambridge philosophy degree, he tried twice to build an online multiplayer game (Game Neverending in 2002 and Glitch in 2009). Both games failed—and both times, he pulled the internal tool his team built from the ashes, creating Flickr and the $27.7 billion enterprise juggernaut Slack.
