Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Salesforce-owned chat service Slack, is stepping down days after Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor announced his resignation. Butterfield announced the news in a Slack message channel calling the timing with Taylor’s departure a weird coincidence. He said; “This has nothing to do with Bret’s departure…Planning has been in the works for several months! Just weird timing.”
Lidiane Jones to Take over Slack as a New CEO
The executive VP & GM of digital experiences clouds, Lidiane Jones, will be taking over Stewart Butterfield as the new CEO of Slack. Salesforce spokesperson Cheyenne King, said; “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.”
King further said that 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,” he added. Apart from Butterfield, the chief marketing officer Tamar Yehoshua and the senior vice president in charge of marketing, brand, and communications Jonathan Prince, are also leaving the company next month.
The Entrepreneurial Journey of Slack’s CEO
In 2004, Butterfield helped found the photo-sharing site, but a year later, he sold the company to Yahoo. He later found a game called Glitch, and from there, the company’s internal communication platform would later become Slack, which was given a name in 2013. The company went public in 2019 before Salesforce bought it in late 2020 for $27.7bn (£20bn) in what was called one of the biggest tech mergers in recent years. Marc Benioff, boss of the business software giant, called the deal a “match made in heaven.”
