Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest today is Stewart Butterfield, founder, and CEO of Slack. Stewart's 2014 essay, Why We Don't Sell Saddles Here, had a massive impact on my own business journey, which made this discussion extra special. During our conversation, we discuss the concept of owner's delusion, how to frame the boundaries between product and market, and the challenge of changing people's mental models and behavior when introducing innovative products. I hope you enjoy this great conversation with Stewart Butterfield.
We Don't Sell Saddles Here
Patrick
I found an interesting place to begin our discussion because of something that happened to me in 2017, so I took over our asset management business back then, and probably like any new CEO, I was a little bit floundering trying to figure out what I was going to do, what direction to take the business. There was a couple pieces of content that really influenced my direction. One was Positioning, a book about marketing. Another was this amazing video called Inventing on Principle by a programmer named Bret Victor, and a third was an essay that you wrote in 2014 called, We Don't Sell Saddles Here. I have to begin our discussion with that essay. Could you give us the background of why you wrote it and sort of what the main message was? And I'll have probably several questions about it because it was so influential on me personally.