Stewart Butterfield speaks on November 08, 2019 in San Francisco, California.
Phillip Faraone | Getty Images
Salesforce mentioned 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 mentioned co-CEO Bret Taylor was stepping down only a yr 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 accordance with folks accustomed to the matter who requested to not be named as a result of they weren’t licensed to talk on the report. Salesforce acquired Slack for about $27 billion final yr, its largest buy ever. The deal was introduced in late 2020.
“Stewart is an incredible leader who created an amazing, beloved company in Slack,” an organization spokesperson advised CNBC in a press release. “He has helped lead the successful integration of Slack into Salesforce and today Slack is woven into the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. Stewart also was instrumental in choosing Lidiane Jones as the next Slack CEO to lead it into its next chapter. Lidiane has a strong background in customer and enterprise tech and has been among Salesforce’s leadership 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, will even depart, together with Jonathan Prince, senior vice chairman accountable for advertising and marketing, model and communications, the folks acquainted mentioned. Noah Weiss, senior vice chairman of product at Slack, will succeed Yehoshua, Butterfield mentioned in a Slack message to all Salesforce workers that CNBC considered.
Jones spent greater than 12 years at Microsoft, earlier than leaving to affix Sonos in 2015. She’s been at Salesforce since 2019 and is at present govt vice chairman and common 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 an internet online game named Glitch. The recreation didn’t develop 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 accessible to the general public as Slack in 2014.
It grew shortly, mobilizing Microsoft. When Microsoft launched Teams in 2016, Slack took out an advert in The New York Times to welcome Microsoft to the market.
“I’m not going to do anything entrepreneurial,” Butterfield wrote within the Slack message. “As I said in my announcement to Slack team, these days my fantasies are about gardening. As hackneyed as it might sound, I really am going to spend more time with my family (as well as work on some personal projects, focus on health and generally put time into those things which [are] harder to do when one is leading a large organization).”
In March 2020 Butterfield met with Taylor and advised him Slack wished to accumulate Quip, the productiveness app Taylor offered to Salesforce in 2016, from Salesforce. Months later, Taylor advised Butterfield that whereas Salesforce wasn’t thinking about promoting Quip to Slack, Salesforce was thinking about shopping for Slack.
Butterfield mentioned that the management adjustments at Slack weren’t associated to the announcement of Taylor’s resignation from final week. “We’ve been planning this for a while,” Butterfield wrote.
WATCH: Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff on Bret Taylor’s departure from the corporate
