Mint Butterfield is the child of Stewart Butterfield, left, and Caterina Fake, right.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, Marin County Sheriff’s Office, Andrew Toth/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Mint Butterfield, the teen child of two tech founders, has gone missing in California.Butterfield, 16, is believed to have run away, local authorities say — perhaps to San FranciscoAuthorities are appealing for help finding Butterfield.
Mint Butterfield, the teen child of tech founders who set up Slack and Flickr, went missing over the weekend.
The 16-year-old was last seen on Sunday evening in Bolinas, California, north of San Francisco.
The local sheriff’s office put out a missing-juvenile alert on Tuesday seeking information about them.
The alert, described in a Nextdoor post by K. Walther, a deputy in the Marin County Sheriff’s Office, said Butterfield was last seen Sunday at 10 p.m.
The following morning, Walther said, Butterfield was gone. She asked for anybody with information to contact the sheriff’s office.
The San Francisco Standard wrote that Butterfield was reported missing Monday by their mother, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake.
Their father is Stewart Butterfield, who cofounded Flickr with Fake and went on to cofound the workplace messaging service Slack.
Representatives for Marin County Sheriff’s Office, Stewart Butterfield, and Fake did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Walther’s Nextdoor post said Butterfield likely took a suitcase, and may have headed for San Francisco itself.
In the past, Butterfield often visited San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, an area known for homelessness, crime, and drugs, officials told The Standard.
DailyMail.com reported that Butterfield may be somewhere else, though, citing a social-media post by a family friend.
The friend, per the report, said Butterfield was seen in Larkspur Landing, north of San Francisco and around a 50-minute drive from Bolinas.
Business Insider was unable to verify the report.
Marin County Sheriff’s Office described Butterfield as being five feet tall with “brown/reddish curly hair” and pierced eyebrows. They were last seen wearing a black sweatshirt, flannel pajama pants, and black boots.
Butterfield’s parents, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, cofounded the photo service Flickr together in 2004.
They were married from 2001 until 2007, reported the New York Post, and sold Flickr to Yahoo! for an estimated $30 million in 2005.
Their divorce was finalized in 2007, the same year Mint Butterfield was born, according to the Post.
Stewart Butterfield cofounded Slack in 2013 with Cal Henderson. He left the company in December 2022, Business Insider reported.
He is worth $1.6 billion, according to an estimate by Forbes.
