With mussed hair and scruffy beard, Stewart Butterfield looks like he just rolled out of bed.

Given that until recently he was working seven days a week, 14 hours a day, he can be forgiven.

Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake are the wonderkids who, in 2004, launched Flickr, a lucrative photo-sharing website.

Butterfield, 35, is also a University of Victoria philosophy graduate who was back in town last week to speak to UVic students about what he learned from his meteoric rise in the Web 2.0 world.

Dressed in a nondescript black crewneck shirt and jeans, he looks like an ordinary guy out for a Saturday afternoon expresso, which he is. As a UVic student in the mid-1990s he was a regular at Harpo’s.

“I knew everyone that was there. I knew the band, 80 per cent of the audience from elementary, high school, UVic and every summer job I ever had. I realized I needed to get out of here (Victoria) for a while.”

Butterfield went to Vancouver and met marketing whiz and future wife Caterina. He had played with the web for years in UVic’s Clearihue building computer dungeons and it seemed a logical step to channel his interests into game design.

But one sleepless night he came up with another idea, a photo-sharing website.

“There was a good opportunity for letting people get more value out of their hardware,” Butterfield says about Flickr’s genesis.

He likens Flickr to having photos in an album on your coffee table, rather than stuck in a box.

“People pick it up and have a conversation about it. Similarly so for having them on Flickr and having the facility there for social interaction around the photos.”

By 2005, the site had three million registered users with 130 million posted photos.

Later that year the couple sold out to Yahoo for a reported $30 million. They stayed on as Flickr gurus until July of this year before throwing in the towel.

The man who recently escaped the corporate world intended to talk about the relationship between constraints and creativity.

“Most people think of them as opposite but they’re kind of necessary for one another,” he says.

“There is a lot of freedom in the tension that exists between the two. Design is really just successful applications of constraints,” he says, citing examples from architecture and poetry.

Also in town to visit his parents, who live in James Bay, Butterfield isn’t sure what’s next on his creative wish list. “One is totally wacky, it probably won’t happen. But I’d like to start a bank.”

He talks about how he’d like a bank that allows its clientele to be participatory members. “It could provide a lot better customer service for the same price.”

“It would let people have a say in how their deposits are used.”

Sounds weird, a participatory bank. But a participatory photo-sharing website might have sounded just as odd six years ago.

Butterfield Bank?

Kind of has a ring to it.

vmoreau@saanichnews.com