
Stewart Butterfield spent the first five years of his life living on a commune - samwillis
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44550312
======
cornholio
The contents of the article is a bit of a letdown from the clickbaity title.
Tuns out his father was a conscious objector and fled the draft in an off the
grid commune, but otherwise Stewart had the privileged upbringing typical of
Silicon valley, with not necessarily afluent but educated parents that
provided him early access to a computer and instilled in him intellectual
values from an early age.

That is nothing to be ashamed of, but it would be interesting and inspiring to
learn of real underprivileged youths that rose from ghetto to fortune without
strong family support.

~~~
dav
I'm nowhere near Stewart's level of success, but I've done well enough in tech
to own a home in SF, and I grew up in the 70's/80's quite poor in rural North
Carolina with an alcoholic ne'er-do-well father and mother who worked a paper
route. We were poor enough that for a year or two we lived without electricity
and indoor plumbing. I did homework by oil lamp. Our house was little more
than a shack, for a long time the interior walls were cardboard staple gunned
to the 2x4 studs.

By the time I reached high school we had electricity though, and I managed to
scrounge together enough to get a commodore 64 and learn to code, so what I
lacked in luck in childhood economic and parenting circumstances got more than
balanced out with luck of timing of computer access and obsession.

But the main contributor to my rags-to-(feels-like)-riches story was
government loans that largely put me through college leading to a job at IBM.
The relatively inexpensive public university tuition costs were a factor as
well.

------
CamelCaseName
Title is also misleading, FTA:

Fast-forward to today and 46-year-old Stewart Butterfield - who founded both
photo-sharing website Flickr, and business messaging service Slack - has an
estimated personal fortune of $650m (£500m).

The $5bn figure comes from Slack's valuation and is as accurate as saying that
Steve Jobs was a $300bn tech boss at the time of his death when he was worth
$10.2bn.

------
jimpick
There’s a great looking documentary about the commune in Lund, BC...

[https://www.lundtheendoftheroad.com](https://www.lundtheendoftheroad.com)

------
phonon
Should be
[https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44550312](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44550312)

------
icebraining
Missing link? Curious why this got 12 points.

~~~
WorkLifeBalance
That a broken link made it to my front-page certainly indicates that what we
see on the front-page hasn't necessarily got there by merit.

~~~
filleokus
I agree, but just as a counter point, sometimes I upvote articles I've already
read just based on the heading.

