His family lived on a commune in remote Canada after his father fled the US to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War.

Butterfield also created a contest called the 5K competition, centered on people with the ability to design websites under 5 kilobytes.

[15] On December 9, 2014, a fan project to relaunch Glitch under the name Eleven began alpha testing.

[16][better source needed] In August 2013, Butterfield announced the release of Slack, an instant-message-based team communication tool, built by Tiny Speck while working on Glitch.

In early 2014, the data for Slack's first six-month usage period showed that nearly 16,000 users were registered without any advertising.

[22] In June 2019, the company announced its initial public offering with an opening price of $38.50 and a market capitalization of US$21.4 billion.

[25] In December 2022, Butterfield announced his departure as CEO of Slack and left Salesforce early in January 2023.

[33] In 2015, Stewart was named the Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovator for 2015,[34] awarded TechCrunch’s Founder of the Year Crunchie,[35] and included in Vanity Fair’s New Establishment,[36] Advertising Age’s Creative 50,[37] and Details’ Digital Mavericks lists.

[38] In May 2017, he was featured in Masters of Scale, a podcast series by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin, along with other successful businesspeople such as Mark Zuckerberg, John Elkann, and Brian Chesky.