Stewart Butterfield speaks on November 08, 2019 in San Francisco, California.
Phillip Faraone | Getty Photos
Salesforce stated Monday that Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield is leaving the corporate. He’ll be succeeded by Lidiane Jones, an govt vice chairman at Salesforce who joined in 2019.
Butterfield’s introduced departure comes days after Salesforce stated co-CEO Bret Taylor was stepping down only a 12 months after being promoted to share the highest job with Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s co-founder.
Benioff knowledgeable workers on a name on Monday that Butterfield was leaving, in keeping with folks acquainted with the matter who requested to not be named as a result of they weren’t licensed to talk on the file. Salesforce acquired Slack for about $27 billion final 12 months, its largest buy ever. The deal was introduced in late 2020.
“Stewart is an unbelievable chief who created an incredible, beloved firm in Slack,” an organization spokesperson advised CNBC in an announcement. “He has helped lead the profitable integration of Slack into Salesforce and in the present day Slack is woven into the Salesforce Buyer 360 platform. Stewart additionally was instrumental in selecting Lidiane Jones as the following Slack CEO to steer it into its subsequent chapter. Lidiane has a robust background in buyer and enterprise tech and has been amongst Salesforce’s management for over three years. We’re grateful for Stewart and excited for Lidiane as she takes over the reins of Slack.”
Tamar Yehoshua, Slack’s product chief, may also depart, together with Jonathan Prince, senior vice chairman answerable for advertising, model and communications, the folks acquainted stated. Noah Weiss, senior vice chairman of product at Slack, will succeed Yehoshua, Butterfield stated in a Slack message to all Salesforce workers that CNBC seen.
Jones spent greater than 12 years at Microsoft, earlier than leaving to hitch Sonos in 2015. She’s been at Salesforce since 2019 and is presently govt vice chairman and normal supervisor of digital expertise clouds.
Butterfield initially labored with the opposite co-founder of Slack, Cal Henderson, at photo-sharing web site Flickr, which Yahoo acquired in 2005. In 2009 the 2 males based Tiny Speck as they sought to construct a web-based online game named Glitch. The sport didn’t change into a world-beating hit and Tiny Speck shut it down. Tiny Speck had developed software program workers had used to construct Glitch, and the startup made the software program obtainable to the general public as Slack in 2014.
It grew rapidly, mobilizing Microsoft. When Microsoft launched Groups in 2016, Slack took out an advert in The New York Instances to welcome Microsoft to the market.
“I am not going to do something entrepreneurial,” Butterfield wrote within the Slack message. “As I stated in my announcement to Slack crew, lately my fantasies are about gardening. As hackneyed as it’d sound, I actually am going to spend extra time with my household (in addition to work on some private initiatives, give attention to well being and usually put time into these issues which [are] tougher to do when one is main a big group).”
In March 2020 Butterfield met with Taylor and advised him Slack needed to accumulate Quip, the productiveness app Taylor bought to Salesforce in 2016, from Salesforce. Months later, Taylor advised Butterfield that whereas Salesforce wasn’t concerned about promoting Quip to Slack, Salesforce was concerned about shopping for Slack.
Butterfield stated that the management modifications at Slack weren’t associated to the announcement of Taylor’s resignation from final week. “We have been planning this for some time,” Butterfield wrote.
WATCH: Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff on Bret Taylor’s departure from the corporate
