Stewart Butterfield, the brilliant mind behind the instant messaging app Slack, is resigning as CEO. Lidiane Jones, an executive vice president who joined Salesforce in 2019, will take over as his successor. Butterfield’s departure came just days after Salesforce announced that co-CEO Bret Taylor would step down after only a year in the same position as Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff.
Employees at Slack praise Butterfield for being such a great leader. He oversaw Slack’s seamless integration into the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. He also played a key role in selecting Lidiane Jones as his successor. He claims Lidiane has a long history in Salesforce’s leadership and has a solid foundation in both enterprise and customer technology. Her leadership undoubtedly bodes well for Slack’s future.
In a meeting with Taylor in March 2020, Butterfield informed him that Slack was interested in buying Quip, the productivity tool Taylor had sold to Salesforce in 2016. Taylor informed Butterfield some months later that, while Salesforce was not interested in selling Quip to Slack, it was interested in acquiring Slack. Last year, Salesforce made its largest acquisition to date when it purchased Slack for around $27 billion.
Besides Butterfield, Jonathan Prince, senior vice president in charge of marketing, branding, and communications, and Tamar Yehoshua, Slack’s product leader, will both leave. According to Butterfield, Yehoshua will be succeeded by Noah Weiss, senior vice president of product at Slack. He clarified, however, that Taylor’s departure from last week is unrelated to the changes in leadership. Instead, he said that this had been planned for some time.
Butterfield is not preparing anything entrepreneurial after leaving Slack. He instead has gardening fantasies and wants to spend more time with his family. Even if it seems strange, this is the course of action he is willing to follow. He will, however, work on personal projects in addition to focusing on his health and other issues that come up when one is the head of a business.
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