Salesforce
A seismic week or so at Salesforce saw significant departures from the C-Suite and other areas. First Bret Taylor (co-CEO) surprised everyone after a meteoric 6 years, then over the next few days Tableau CEO Mark Nelson and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield were also confirmed leavers. In the midst of this you could be forgiven for missing Steven Tamm’s tweet announcing his own departure - something that hits us devs square in the feels.
Add to this Gavin Patterson’s planned departure in early 2023 and it’s clear the next exec retreat will have a very different look to it.
So what to make of this? In Stewart Butterfield’s case (and there are a few others from Slack going at the same time) this marks two years since the acquisition, which is pretty standard for an earn out period and he’s a billionaire. I’m inclined not to read anything more than a group of people who are in a position to do what they want from now on, and good luck to them. I’m not particularly au-fait on the Tableau side, but the fact that Salesforce haven’t named a successor suggests that it’s going to be more folded in to the mothership so maybe that’s what instigated it.
The puzzler is Bret Taylor, especially as he’s reportedly leaving a bunch of money on the table from the Quip acquisition. All Bret has said is that he’s returning to his entrepreneurial roots - based on zero knowledge of the situation I think this means one or more of the following:
Selling Twitter to Elon scarred him so much he’s going to hand make furniture and sell it at craft fairs. This is a joke, but remember Byron Sebastian.
He wanted to be sole CEO sooner than Marc Benioff wanted to cede control. This seems least likely as it had only been a year as co-CEO and if he was in that much of a hurry would he have stuck around for the preceding 5 years?
He’s received an offer/seen an opportunity that he can’t refuse. Maybe to create something world-changing, maybe to make the three commas club.
He wants to build something from scratch and it’s too hard to do that at Salesforce. This is pretty common as companies grow - they focus very much on their current business model rather than innovation, new products arrive through acquisition and the existing team work on evolution not revolution.
A great conspiracy theory is that Bret Taylor and Stewart Butterfield (who seemed to have quite the bromance during the Slack acquisition) have left at the same time to build the next big thing together. This is being denied everywhere, but they would say that wouldn’t they? I can’t see this myself as it’s hard to understand why both of them would be needed for something new.
Salesforce has a pretty deep bench so this is likely to be a short term blip, but Marc Benioff did seem upset when talking about Bret’s departure, so it does look like this has derailed the succession plan.
Salesforce is reportedly ordering some employees back to the office, a bit of an about face given Marc Benioff said in June that they won’t work, and Brent Hyder agreed in September. Maybe they’ve watched Elon Musk end remote work at Twitter and decided it makes sense after all? Or does it tie in with the job cuts that were seen in early November and reflect a feeling that some teams need to be in the office to connect effectively with customers? Activist investor Starboard applying pressure to get better returns on the real estate investments made over the years? Or the city of San Francisco asking for the good times to return to downtown.
Whatever the reason(s), I can imagine that going forward, anyone pitching the Slack Digital HQ, Work from Anywhere message can expect get a few more questions about why it will work for customers but not for Salesforce itself.
Other
In other seismic exec news, Bob Iger is returning to Disney to replace ousted CEO Bob Chapek. Losing money hand over fist on streaming and upsetting your Creative Directors appears to be the wrong approach to keeping your job.
OpenAI GPT-3 is making headlines all over the place. Very cool, very lucid, and often wildly wrong. It’s also very resistant to siding with Hitler - is it just me that thinks this is a downgrade from Asimov’s first law? It feels like we’ve switched from “never injure a human being” to “don’t support murderous dictators” pretty quickly.
Given how well this particular AI is currently thought of, I decided to let it have a crack at the burning question. I’m not sure how much stock to put in the reply.
Me
A few posts on the technical blog this month.
Flow Tests - a step in the right direction, but much still to do.
And a few changes for the Org Documentor
Happy Holidays
That’s it for now, and possibly for this year. Happy Holidays everyone and see you all in 2023!