Stewart Butterfield

In 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. His family lived on a commune in remote Canada after his father fled the US to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War. His family moved to Victoria when Butterfield was five years old. As a child, Butterfield taught himself how to code, and changed his name to Stewart when he was 12.

Butterfield was educated at St. Michaels University School in Victoria, British Columbia, and made money in university designing websites. He received a B.A. degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria in 1996 and went on to earn a Master of Philosophy from Clare College, Cambridge, in 1998. His thesis was on scientific thinkers of the 19th century.

In 2000, Butterfield worked with Jason Classon to build a startup called Gradfinder.com. Following Gradfinder.com's acquisition, he worked as a freelance web designer. Butterfield also created a contest called the 5K competition, centered on people with the ability to design websites under 5 kilobytes.

Ludicorp and Flickr

In the summer of 2002, he co-founded Ludicorp with Caterina Fake and Jason Classon in Vancouver. Ludicorp initially developed a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Game Neverending. After the game failed to launch, the company started a photo-sharing website called Flickr. In March 2005, Ludicorp was acquired by Yahoo!, where Butterfield continued as the General Manager of Flickr until he left Yahoo! on July 12, 2008.

Tiny Speck

In 2009, Butterfield co-founded a new company called Tiny Speck. Tiny Speck launched its first project, the massively multiplayer game Glitch, on September 27, 2011. Glitch was later closed due to its failure to attract a sufficiently large audience. The game world closed down on December 9, 2012, but the website remained online. In January 2013, the company announced that it would make the most of the game's art available under a Creative Commons license. On December 9, 2014, a fan project to relaunch Glitch under the name Eleven began alpha testing.

Butterfield was married to Caterina Fake, his Flickr co-founder, from 2001 to 2007. They have one child together, who was born on July 11, 2007. In May 2019 he became engaged to Jennifer Rubio, co-founder of Away Luggage. They married the next year and have a son and a daughter together. On April 21, 2024, it was thought that Butterfield's 16-year-old child had run away from home, but she was found alive on April 29, and a 26-year-old man was arrested for abduction. On August 5, 2026, Rubio and Stewart posted a collaboration post on Instagram stating they were separating.