These tweets are real, and they're the stuff of founders’ dreams. But have you visited its Twitter Wall of Love? And you may have read how the internal-communication platform - now just two years old - is already used by more than 30,000 teams and valued at over $1 billion. You’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth. The word on the street has been that it’s some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they’ll say on the site is ‘we are working on something huge and fun and we need help.“HELL YEAH WE'RE USING AT WORK I. “So what is Tiny Speck all about?” Siegler wrote.

Siegler wrote one of the first stories on Butterfield’s mysterious startup plans. In mid-2009, former TechCrunch reporter-turned-venture-capitalist M.G. Slack, born from the ashes of his fantastical game, would lead a shift toward online productivity tools that fundamentally change the way people work. Years later, Butterfield would pull off a pivot more massive than his last.

Together, they would build Tiny Speck, the company behind an artful, non-combat massively multiplayer online game. To make his dreams a reality, he joined forces with Flickr’s original chief software architect Cal Henderson, as well as former Flickr employees Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, who like himself, had served some time at Yahoo after the acquisition. This time, Butterfield would make it work.

Flickr had been a failed attempt at a game called Game Neverending followed by a big pivot. Stewart Butterfield, known already for his part in building Flickr, a photo-sharing service acquired by Yahoo in 2005, decided to try his hand - again - at building a game.

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