Traction Conf to feature fireside chat with Slack's Stewart Butterfield and Mamoon Hamid

Vancouver’s Traction conference, taking place June 22 and 23, has added e-mail killer and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield to its lineup. Butterfield and Slack’s investor and board member Mamoon Hamid from Social Capital will share insights on startup growth and revenue.
Traction is a two-day conference that brings founders and growth experts from some of the world’s fastest growing tech companies to share insights on how to get, keep and grow customers and drive growth to scale up revenue.
The Traction speaker lineup also includes Domo Chief Marketing Officer Heather Zynczak, The Honest Company co-founder Christopher Gavigan, MongoDB CMO Meagen Eisenberg, AppDirect CEO Daniel Saks, Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta, Intercom co-founder Des Traynor, Twitch.tv co-founder and Y-Combinator partner Justin Kan, HubSpot CRO Mark Roberge, and many more.
Slack, of course, is one of the hottest tech companies in the San Francisco Bay area, valued at over $4 billion, a figure which Stewart Butterfield candidly describes as “arbitrary”, for developing a workplace collaboration tool with more than 2.7 million daily active users, 800,000 of which are paid users, including the U.S. State Department, Salesforce.com, Harvard University and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Having raised $540 million in venture capital from Social Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google Ventures, Slack is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Vancouver and Melbourne, Australia, and now has 430 employees.
Slack began life as a workplace communication tool developed by Stewart Butterfield’s previous company Tiny Speck, creators of the failed but much-loved online game Glitch.
Previous to that Butterfield sold the photo sharing platform Flickr to Yahoo in 2005, going on to work unhappily for that company for three years before submitting a legendary resignation letter.
Butterfield has deep roots in British Columbia, having been raised by hippie parents in the sleepy community of Lund, surrounded by descendants of Swedish immigrants and Salish First Nations, after which he studied philosophy at the University of Victoria, focusing on Baruch Spinoza, with a side interest in ’90s jam band Phish, becoming an participating in the rec.music.phish online community.
Presented by Boast Capital, with over 20 years experience helping North American companies successfully claim and maximize R&D tax credits, and pre-accelerator program the Launch Academy, Traction Conf promises to share insights from founders and growth experts that can help entrepreneurs build a brand around their product, figure out the right marketing strategy, convert visitors into paying customers and sources of recurring revenue, scales a sales department, drive revenue through cultivating resellers and partnerships, and leverage customer insights to cross-sell and up-sell additional services.
Attendees will have opportunities to network with representatives from more than 30 high-profile tech companies, including Domo, Hubspot, Twitch, Foursquare, TaskRabbit, Hootsuite, Betterworks, MongoDB, SendGrid, Y-Combinator, Social Capital and 500 Startups.
If you want to see Mr. Butterfield in person, best to act fast. With a little more than a month to go, Traction claims that there are fewer than 60 tickets left.