Stewart Butterfield

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.

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?

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.