Slack C.E.O. to Step Down in January

SAN FRANCISCO — Stewart Butterfield, the chief executive of Slack, a workplace communication platform owned by Salesforce, said on Monday that he would leave his position in January.

Mr. Butterfield, who helped found Slack, announced his departure less than a week after Bret Taylor, Salesforce’s co-chief executive, resigned from his post. Mr. Taylor, who is also leaving the company in January, helped engineer the deal to buy Slack for $27.7 billion in 2020.

Marc Benioff, a founder of Salesforce, will remain the company’s chief executive. Lidiane Jones, a Salesforce cloud executive, will succeed Mr. Butterfield as Slack’s chief executive. Slack’s chief product officer, Tamar Yehoshua, will be leaving Salesforce.

“Stewart is an incredible leader who created an amazing, beloved company in Slack. He has helped lead the successful integration of Slack into Salesforce,” a Salesforce spokeswoman said in a statement.

Mr. Butterfield’s departure was reported earlier by Insider.

Slack, which was founded in 2010, grew quickly and went public in 2019. Companies use Slack so workers can communicate with one another quickly and often in groups. Its purchase by Salesforce underscored how the coronavirus pandemic had cemented remote work and fundamentally changed the workplace.

The acquisition of Slack cost nearly double Salesforce’s next largest acquisition. In 2019, Salesforce bought the data visualization software company Tableau for $15.3 billion. Tableau’s chief executive, Mark Nelson, resigned from Salesforce last Thursday.