ILLUSTRATION: TONIA COWAN; PHOTO COURTESY OF SLACK DECEMBER/JANUARY 2017 BCBUSINESS 13
T
he enterprise software
phenomenon Slack has
been in its Hamilton
Street oces for almost a
year now. But with extensive
renovations just complete,
CEO
Stewart Butter•eld hosted a
media unveiling this September.
As only be•ts a seven-year-old
company valued mid-2016 at
$3.8 billion, the place makes
most oces look very ordinary
indeed. The Michael Leckie-
designed space features brick
walls and dark timbers, kitchen
and bar, lounge areas with
lots of throw pillows, gauzy
balloon-like light •xtures and a
six-metre wall at the top of the
main stairs that's covered in
bright green mummi•ed moss.
An evidently proud Butter-
•eld characterized the Vancou-
ver oce, now employing 82
people, as his favourite, noting:
"The San Francisco oce has
a great location. But it wasn't
entirely built out by us. So it's
much less us."
That Butter•eld would
champion his Vancouver oce
is perhaps to be expected. The
42-year-old founder of Flickr,
later sold to Yahoo, started life
on a commune in rural B.C.
with the original given name
Dharma. You could say he's
emphatically homegrown.
But his enthusiasm might also
T H E M O N T H LY I N F O R M E R
tmı
"Because they are so
separated from the real
world, their true personality
comes out" –p.14
D E C E M B E R / J A N U A R Y 2 0 17
A Revolutionary Thought
The arrival of Slack in Vancouver seems to indicate full steam ahead for B.C.'s
tech sector. If things change south of the border, however, all bets are off
INSIDE
Da Vinci's designs ... Playing Houdini ... B.C.'s top doc ... How to hire a foreign worker ... + more
THE EXPLAINER
by Timothy Taylor
BRICKS AND MOSS
More than 80 people work at
Slack's newly renovated and
fast-growing Yaletown ofce
