flickr
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Don MacAskill and the rival worth keeping
He built SmugMug by charging for photographs when free was fashionable. Then he bought Flickr, a competitor he had been defending for years, and took on the harder business of keeping a community alive.
Allie Janoch
Allie Janoch is the CEO and co-founder of Mapistry, a Berkeley-born software company that turns the soul-crushing paperwork of environmental compliance into maps, mobile inspections and automated alerts for industrial and manufacturing companies. A computer-vision engineer by training - MIT Lincoln Labs, IQ Engines, Yahoo's Flickr - she walked out of a comfortable Silicon Valley job in 2013 to build software for stormwater permits, of all things, alongside her husband and environmental-engineer co-founder Ryan Janoch. The bet: regulations don't have to be the enemy of either the economy or clean water.
Kakul Srivastava
Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, the cloud-based music creation platform powering millions of producers worldwide with sample libraries, plugins, and AI-powered tools. A mechanical engineer turned product visionary, she grew Flickr from 37,000 to 60 million users, led product at GitHub and Adobe's Creative Cloud, and co-founded the enterprise app studio Tomfoolery. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025 and Billboard's Women in Music Executives list three years running, she champions a philosophy that technology should empower artists — not replace them.
Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield is a Canadian technology entrepreneur and angel investor who co-founded Flickr (2004) and Slack (2013) — two landmark products that emerged as accidental pivots from failed multiplayer games. A self-taught coder with a Cambridge philosophy degree, Butterfield sold Flickr to Yahoo for ~$25 million in 2005 and Slack to Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021. His 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' memo became a canonical document in Silicon Valley product thinking. Since departing Slack in January 2023, he has been active as an angel investor with 32+ portfolio companies.