Slack’s Butterfield to Leave Salesforce in Exodus of Leaders

(Bloomberg) — Stewart Butterfield, chief executive officer of Salesforce Inc.’s Slack, is leaving the company, another blow to the software giant that has seen an exodus of executives recently.

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Two other veteran Slack executives also will depart, shaking up the division that Salesforce purchased a year ago for more than $27 billion in its largest acquisition.

Butterfield’s departure follows the announcement last week that Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor would leave the company at the end of next month. Butterfield, who was seen as a possible successor to Taylor, also will depart in January, the company said.

In a memo to staff, Butterfield said his departure is unrelated to Taylor’s. “Planning has been in the works for several months,” Butterfield wrote. “Weird timing!” Slack Chief Product Officer Tamar Yehoshua and Senior Vice President Jonathan Prince will also leave the company, Butterfield wrote.

Butterfield “is an incredible leader who created an amazing, beloved company in Slack,” a Salesforce spokesperson said. “He has helped lead the successful integration of Slack into Salesforce.” The company declined to comment on the departures of Yehoshua and Prince. Business Insider earlier reported Butterfield’s exit.

Lidiane Jones will succeed Butterfield as CEO at Slack, the spokesperson said. Jones most recently served as executive vice president of Salesforce’s experience cloud, commerce cloud and marketing cloud units and worked for Sonos Inc. and Microsoft Corp. before joining Salesforce in 2019. Butterfield was “instrumental in choosing” her as the next CEO, the spokesperson said.

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Butterfield’s exit “is a risk for the company, given other high-profile executive departures in the past few months,” Anurag Rana, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote in a note. “This could put additional pressure on CEO and founder Marc Benioff to assure investors that the company still has a deep bench of leaders that can revive organic growth, which has seen steady decline in the past few quarters.”

Salesforce is struggling with slowing growth and increasing pressure from investors to improve profit. The company last week projected revenue growth of 8% to 10% in the current period — which would would be the slowest year-over-year increase since Salesforce went public in 2004.

The company also has been working to further integrate other large acquisitions, Mulesoft and Tableau, into a cohesive platform of services. Tableau, which Salesforce bought in 2019 for $15 billion, has seen a similar thinning of executive ranks recently. On Friday, Mark Nelson, the CEO of the unit, announced he would leave the company, a little over a year after Adam Selipsky, who ran Tableau at the time of the Salesforce’s purchase, left to lead Amazon.com Inc’s cloud-computing division. Tableau Chief Marketing Officer Jackie Yeaney and and Chief Data Officer Wendy Turner-Williams also left in recent months.

(Updates with comments from Butterfield’s memo beginning in the fourth paragraph.)

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