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Hey everyone, so today we've got another one of my conversations from the how I built this summit that happened in San Francisco last October.

And you know, in the world of startups, one of the most difficult moves to pull off is a pivot to maneuver out of your first idea into something that might have more potential.

And Stuart Butterfield, he pulled this off not once, but twice. About 70 years ago, out of the ashes of a failed video game,

Stuart launched Slack, an office collaboration tool that now has 12 million daily users.

But before Slack, back in 2004, Stuart was struggling to get traction with another video game called Game Never Ending.

He wound up shedding that one down two, but out of that failure, he was able to launch a photo sharing site called Flickr, which he sold just a year later for around $20 million.

So when I sat down with Stuart on stage, I asked him about both of those pivots, starting with the first one from Game Never Ending to Flickr.

There was a point, and you talk about this in the podcast, where you had to decide whether to drop all of this work on this computer game.

Like more than a year, I think two years of work on this game and pivot to the photo sharing site. And there was a debate, an internal debate.

I wonder, how did you know that that was the right thing to do? Because our instinct would tell us to push forward and to keep going.

Like that's what we think we're supposed to do to just carry on and march forward.

Yeah, there's a lot of advice that's just persevere grit, resilience, gotta keep going in the face of adversity over and over.

But there is definitely a point where either you know it can't work or kind of like the reverse manifesting of, I don't believe any more that this could work, which makes it very unlikely.

If the person leading the project doesn't believe it can work, it would be a weird fluke for it to actually to work out.

But we were just out of money and it would have been a much more difficult complex project to complete the game.

It would have taken us a minimum of another year, but probably realistic and closer to two more years.

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