Stewart Butterfield

Co-Founder of Flickr

Everyone. Everywhere: Flickr and the Rise of Social Media

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Stewart Butterfield is the co-founder of Flickr, the popular photosharing website. Named by Time magazine as One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, Butterfield is a founding father of participatory media. Alongside the giants of social media -- Facebook, MySpace and YouTube -- Flickr has produced a seismic shift in the way people use technology in their everyday lives. Newsweek calls it "a poster child on how a well-executed Net effort can make big changes in people's habits."

Butterfield grew Flickr from a tiny Canadian operation to a worldwide phenomenon. As "The Eyes of the World," Flickr boasts over 50 million users a month, and is the largest repository of publicly available photographs, with over 3 billion pictures, and over 2.5 million new photos uploaded every day. In 2005, Butterfield sold Flickr to Yahoo!, where he continued to work, before leaving in 2008 to pursue new projects. Butterfield has been nominated for the Chrysler Design Award, and has been named a Best Leader by Business Week, and one of the Top 35 Innovators Under 35 by MIT. He also founded the 5k Awards, a competition highlighting the best use of simple design solutions.

Stewart Butterfield Speech Topics

Everyone. Everywhere: Flickr and the Rise of Social Media

With sumptuous visuals, and the Flickr story as backdrop, Stewart Butterfield looks at how social media and the participatory web continue to reinvent both business and culture. How have sites like Flickr changed the way we express ourselves, relate to others, and participate in our world? How can organizations utilize these sites -- and the ubiquity of the Internet in everyday life -- to change attitudes and perceptions and empower unprecedented numbers of people? With casually deployed insights, Butterfield also shows us what it takes to start a successful social media site with staying power.

Think Small: Flickr and Innovation

Named one of MIT's top young innovators, Stewart Butterfield draws on his work at Flickr -- and with the 5k Competition -- to look at practical innovation (For Butterfield, there is no other kind). Why is innovation crippled by its quest for the new? Why is play the highest form of human activity -- and how can you use it? Why is constraint so liberating? And why does all creativity -- at least the kind that changes the world -- stem from a mastery of what's possible, rather than what we think is possible?

How to Make a Fortune with Your Liberal Arts Degree

Though Stewart Butterfield grew an influential web company, he never studied business or computer science. (He has two degrees in Philosophy.) In this popular talk, he defends the undervalued -- and irreplaceable -- role of a liberal arts education. By training in the humanities, you learn how to become a great entrepreneur, as just one example. "You can always pick up how to figure out profit and loss, but it's harder to pick up the other stuff on the fly." Relatable, hilarious and, ultimately, very wise, this talk is deftly argued, even moving.

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Newsweek Cover Story

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"The New Wisdom of the Web" - Newsweek

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