Slate co-CEO Stewart Butterfield steps down after deal worth $28 billion

Stewart Butterfield, Slack's CEO, announced on Monday that he plans to step down from the chat software developer company a little over a year after Salesforce acquired it for $28 billion. In Salesforce's cloud divisions, Butterfield will be replaced by Lidiane Jone.

The news came less than a week after Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor announced he was stepping down from his position at the end of January. Butterfield, who could have become a successor to Taylor, said he planned to leave for months, and that his departure is just weird timing. In the last few days, five top executives have left Salesforce including Bret Taylor co-CEO Mark Nelson CEO, Tableau Stewart Butterfield CEO, Slack Tamar Yehoshua CPO, Slack and Jonathan Prince SVP, Marketing Comms. In the past few years, the SaaS giant has struggled to increase profits. Revenue growth of 8% to 10% would be the slowest year-over-year increase since it went public in 2004.

Slack was founded in 2009 by Stewart Butterfield, Cal Henderson, Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov. Slack is a popular workplace chat app that allows teams and businesses of all sizes to communicate effectively. Global Fortune 100 companies use the slack software platform.

In December 2020, Salesforce acquired Slack for an enterprise value of $27.7 billion. The deal makes it Salesforce's largest acquisition since its $15.3 billion purchase of Tableau last year and the $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft in 2018 a combination of stock and cash.

Two years ago, Salesforce acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion, the company's biggest deal at the time, to help connect cloud applications. The following year, it spent more than twice that amount on Tableau, acquiring the data visualization company for $15.3 billion. Below are Salesforce's top ten acquisitions.

The acquisition of Slack would be one of the biggest software deals for the tech industry. It would rank among Microsoft's $27 billion purchase of LinkedIn in 2016 and Facebook's $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014.