Ever since Slack became Salesforce’s biggest acquisition to date, all eyes have been trained on what the innovative business messaging app would do next. It was announced yesterday that Lidiane Jones would be stepping down as Slack CEO and moving to a new position: the Chief Executive of popular dating app, Bumble. This comes just a year after Jones took her CEO position at Slack, replacing current founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield.
Salesforce and its entourage of products have taken on a number of hits this year, and Jones’ departure only brings the magnifying glass closer over an already delicate situation for the company.
What Does This Mean for Salesforce?
Ditching business for dating is definitely an interesting call, but Jones seems to be a good fit for the role. With three years of experience at Salesforce (including being the Head of Product for Commerce Cloud) as well as 13 years at Microsoft, she’s comfortably solidified herself as a knowledgeable and experienced lead for Bumble.
It comes at the perfect time for her too, as Whitney Wolfe Herd (founder) had recently alluded that she wanted to take the business forward in a more AI-focused direction, potentially using AI to find more compatible matches. As we all know, Salesforce and Slack have been embracing the AI movement for quite some time, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Jones were to build upon Wolfe Herd’s ambitions.
When Stewart Butterfield stepped down as Slack’s CEO in December 2022, it’s fair to say that it sent shock waves throughout the ecosystem. Coming less than a week after Bret Taylor’s resignation as Co-Chief Executive, it started to create a growing sense of worry. After all, Salesforce had acquired Slack just two years previously, and suddenly, people were jumping ship.
By the tail-end of 2022, Mark Nelson, the CEO of Tableau at the time, had formed part of the “big three” that left Salesforce in such a short space of time. However, earlier this year, Reuters reported that Salesforce have shaken up their executive team, to help bolster their C-suite for the next stage of growth.
Miguel Milano, who was the President of EMEA, APAC, and LACA for over 10 years, came back after working at Celonis. Ariel Kelman, who also helped Salesforce grow as VP of Product Marketing back in 2005-2011, returned to Salesforce as CMO after spending some time at Oracle.
However, Lidiane Jones’ departure does pose some questions and reignite some concerns. Was this opportunity just too good to give up, or are Salesforce struggling to integrate their biggest acquisition into their product suite?
It’s difficult to tell, but despite their shiny revenue growth, the company has faced its issues this year. Perhaps most notably, this reached a peak in May, when a coalition of more than 90 organizations staged a protest outside of Slack offices in San Francisco and Denver. Voicing their concerns about the lack of encryption for chat messages, the protesters, dressed in “Slack isn’t safe” slogan t-shirts, made it clear that Slack’s claims that the platform was safe enough didn’t resonate with them. Slack has now introduced encryption options.
The protest is highly unlikely to be related to Jones’ stepping down, but it might have added to the mounting pressure of the role and Slack’s scrutinized decisions surrounding integrating into the wider tech stack. Whatever’s happening at the top of Slack seems to remain a secret, but background sources did confirm that Jones’ replacement would be announced next week. No other concrete information has been released just yet.
Summary
Lidiane Jones’ departure from Slack is hopefully a fruitful venture for both her and Bumble, but it does shine a light on a potentially delicate situation. With investors already peering intently at the magnifying glass, Slack and their business choices will be closely observed as they wait for what Salesforce’s biggest acquisition will do next.
Until then, we will have to see who steps up to be Slack’s next CEO…
