Just days after co-CEO toptechtrends.com/2022/11/30/bret-taylor-steps-down-as-co-chair-and-ceo-of-salesforce/”>Bret Taylor announced his resignation, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield announced that he will be stepping down in January. Business Insider first reported the news. Salesforce has confirmed the news with Salesforce by email.
The company also announced that Lidiane Jones, who has been the executive VP & GM for digital experiences clouds at Salesforce, would be taking over for Butterfield, leaving a succession plan that had apparently been lacking when toptechtrends.com/2022/12/01/no-one-seemed-to-see-bret-taylor-stepping-away-from-salesforce-even-marc-benioff/”>Taylor surprised everyone by stepping down last week.
“Stewart is an incredible leader who created an amazing, beloved company in Slack. He has helped lead the successful integration of Slack into Salesforce and today Slack is woven into the Salesforce Customer 360 platform,” the company said in a statement.
He went on to discuss the succession plan: “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 at Slack.”
Butterfield came to Salesforce when the company bought Slack for $27 billion at the end of 2020. This comes on top of the news on Thursday, that Tableau CEO Mark Nelson would be stepping down. It makes you wonder, what is going on in the C-Suite at Salesforce.
Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, who has been watching Salesforce since its earliest days, says this could explain why Benioff looked so upset at last week’s earnings’ call, even beyond the initial shock of Taylor’s announcement. “My first is thought was that things like this usually happen in threes — first was Bret, the next day the Tableau CEO, Mark Nelson, and now this. But with the Bret being the architect of the $27B Slack acquisition and now the founder/CEO announcing his departure within days of each other, you kind of feel like this was the other shoe to drop. And this news must’ve been another reason why Marc was so visibly shaken last week when he announced Bret was stepping down,” Leary told TechCrunch.
Butterfield began is entrepreneurial journey when he helped found the photo sharing site, Flickr in 2004. He toptechtrends.com/2014/08/23/flickrs-acquisition-9-years-later/”>sold that company to Yahoo a year later (the current version of Yahoo owns this publication). He would later found a game called Glitch. The toptechtrends.com/2019/05/30/the-slack-origin-story/”>game didn’t go anywhere, but the company’s internal communication platform would later become Slack, the company he named in around 2013. It quickly grew in popularity and toptechtrends.com/2019/06/20/slacks-value-rockets-as-stock-closes-up-48-5-in-public-debut/”>eventually went public in 2019 before Salesforce bought it in late 2020.
Salesforce stock is down over 4% this morning.
toptechtrends.com/2022/12/05/report-slack-ceo-stewart-butterfield-stepping-down-in-january/”>Confirmed: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield stepping down in January by toptechtrends.com/author/ron-miller/”>Ron Miller originally published on toptechtrends.com/”>TechCrunch
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