When Stewart Butterfield’s first game company wasn’t going all that well, he and his team decided to focus on one of the game’s features that enabled players to share images. Before long, Flickr had taken over the web, and in some ways, launched a new era of social media. So Stewart went back to his original passion. And his next game flopped. So he focused on an internal communication tool his team had built to better work on the game. That became a new product called Slack. And Slack could be huge. In Wired, Mat Honan does an excellent job tracing the career of Stewart Butterfield, and in doing so, paints a very accurate portrait of the evolution of the start-up world: The most fascinating profile you’ll ever read about a guy and his boring startup.

+ Maybe everyone doesn’t hate tech companies after all. Kevin Roose examines the numbers and finds that the Silicon Valley backlash has been greatly exaggerated. Either that, or people in NY and the Bay Area are just early adopters.