Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield 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. Butterfield will be replaced by Lidiane Jone, who worked as VP in Salesforce's cloud divisions.
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 Taylor's successor, said he sounded like he was planning to leave for months, and that his departure is just weird timing. The departures of these executives came at a time when businesses are looking to reduce software-as-a-service spending, according to Bret Taylor co-CEO Mark Nelson CEO, Tableau Stewart Butterfield CEO, Slack Tamar Yehoshua CPO, Slack and Jonathan Prince SVP, Marketing Comms. The SaaS giant has struggled to increase profits in the past few years. 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, which includes a combination of stock and cash, 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.
Two years earlier, 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.