Confirmed: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield stepping down in January

Just days after co-CEO 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 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 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,” company co-founder, chairman and CEO Marc Benioff 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.”

Brent Leary, founder and principal

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.

Butterfield began is entrepreneurial journey when he helped found the photo sharing site, Flickr in 2004. He 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 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 eventually went public in 2019 before Salesforce bought it in late 2020.

 

 

This is a breaking story; more to come