However, he said Slack’s business performance has surpassed Salesforce’s own expectations, growing more than 40% year over year in the company's latest fiscal quarter. Wong notes that because Butterfield and Taylor were driving the vision of a combined Slack and Salesforce, their departures could cause some turbulence as new executives shape their own strategies. Slack’s popularity eventually led to the messaging platform going public in 2019 before being purchased by Salesforce. Nine years earlier, he had founded photo sharing site Flickr, before selling it to Yahoo in 2005.

“Lidiane is well respected and further brings Slack closer to Salesforce in terms of integration into various product areas,” said Jason Wong, an nalyst at Gartner, adding that it’s clear that Salesforce is taking Slack is a direction that is more aligned to extending and enabling its Customer 360 Platform, rather than promoting Slack as a general productivity platform.įounded in 2013, Slack was not Butterfield’s first entrepreneurial endeavour.

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