Stewart ButterfieldDaniel Stewart Butterfield (born Dharma Jeremy Butterfield on March 21, 1973) is a Canadian billionaire businessman, best known for co-founding the photo-sharing website Flickr and the team-messaging application Slack. Early life and educationIn 1973, Butterfield was born in Lund, British Columbia. For the first five years of his life he grew up in a log cabin without running water or electricity.
Slack TechnologiesSlack Technologies, LLC is an American software company founded in 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, known for its proprietary communication platform Slack. Outside its headquarters in San Francisco, California, Slack also operates offices in New York City, Denver, Toronto, London, Paris, Tokyo, Dublin, Vancouver, Pune, and Melbourne. On June 20, 2019, Slack Technologies went public on the New York Stock Exchange via a direct stock listing.
SalesforceAmerican software companySalesforce, Inc. is an American enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It is best known for customer relationship management software and related applications, which the corporation delivers through a software as a service subscription business model. It also provides software for sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, data analytics, artificial intelligence, agentic AI, and application development.
GitHubSoftware development collaboration platformGitHub ( ) is a proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control, and GitHub itself provides access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. GitHub, headquartered in San Francisco, is operated by Github, Inc., a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
OpenAIUS artificial intelligence companyOpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation (PBC) headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops proprietarygenerative AI models, particularly its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) series of large language models. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing the AI boom; as of September 2026, ChatGPT is the fifth-most-visited website globally.
IRCIRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages and chat and data transfer, including file sharing. IRC is an application layer protocol that works on a client–server model.
AnthropicAnthropic, PBC is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its flagship product is Claude, a series of proprietary large language models (LLMs). Anthropic was founded in 2021 with the goal of promoting AI safety by former members of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, who are president and CEO, respectively.
FreemiumFreemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium", is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services and virtual (online) or physical (offline) goods that expand the functionality of the free version of the software. This business model has been used in the software industry since the 1980s and is closely related to tiered services.
Business-to-businessBusiness-to-business (B2B, BtoB or B4B) refers to trade and commercial activity where a business sees other businesses as its customer base.
Cloud computingCloud computing is defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on demand". It is commonly referred to as "the cloud". CharacteristicsIn 2011, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) identified five "essential characteristics" for cloud systems.
Claude (AI)Large language model and AI chatbot by AnthropicClaude is a series of large language models (LLMs) developed by American software company Anthropic. Claude was released as an AI-based chatbot in March 2023. It is also used in AI-assisted software development. Anthropic sells Claude-based agentic tools including Claude Code, a terminal coding agent, and Claude Cowork, a similar tool for non-programmers.*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.