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Stewart (the studio founder) told Ben Horowitz he had $6 million left and three…

2026-08-07 · 01:15 UTC ·@a16z ·1 min read

Brief

A Vancouver video game studio nearly ran out of cash; with $6 million left, Stewart called Ben Horowitz in 2016 and described three options — finish the game, return the funds, or productize an internal engineering chat tool. Horowitz was skeptical about moving to enterprise software but told him "$6 million is not gonna make any difference" and to go ahead.

Why it matters

Stewart (the studio founder) told Ben Horowitz he had $6 million left and three choices: pray and finish the game, shut down and return the $6M, or productize the engineering team's internal chat tool — the latter became Slack.

Key details

  • Ben Horowitz (UC Berkeley, 2016) was skeptical about switching from consumer to enterprise software but told Stewart "$6 million is not gonna make any difference" and to proceed if he believed it; a16z posted photos from the Vancouver studio.
Source evidence

Photos from a Vancouver video game studio before they developed their internal chat tool, "Slack"

a16z (@a16z)

.@bhorowitz on how a game studio turned it's last $6 million into Slack:

"Stewart calls me. He says, 'Ben, I've got $6 million left. I have no way to raise money because I've made really no progress. So I've got three choices. I can pray for rain and try and finish it, I can shut down the company and give you your $6 million back, or we built this tool that we use in our engineering team to communicate with each other, and I could just put that out as a product.'"

"I'm like, 'What? You just built some tool to talk to each other and you want to put that out as a product? And you're a consumer guy, and you want to become an enterprise software guy?'"

"$6 million is not gonna make any difference in my life. If you really think it's a good idea, go ahead."

Ben Horowitz Talks Honesty, Failure, and Secrets at UC Berkeley (2016)

Video

— https://nitter.net/a16z/status/2085518489700421954#m