One of the most interesting tech mergers just happened.
Marc Benioff, 56, and Stewart Butterfield, 47, are 9 years apart in age, not so much, right? And both of these CEOs regarded as “over the hill” in the minds of some young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
They just combined forces with the acquisition of Slack by Salesforce for about $27 billion. This is a major win for both. The absorption of Slack will be different for Salesforce than other recent acquisitions like Tableau, bigger, especially psychologically.
Their companies were started 14 years apart; Salesforce in 1999 and Slack in 2013. That’s a long, long, long time in the Silicon Valley/web/Internet timeline. Eons. Hopefully, Slack will modernize Salesforce and bring it back into the spotlight. A very smart purchase by Marc Benioff and Co.
Benioff has built a very substantial icon in the tech world. Salesforce pioneered many things –– cloud, SaaS, San Francisco as a headquarters and the Silicon Valley unicorn. But it basically just modernized an existing technology –– the CRM, by putting it on the cloud. Benioff pioneered SaaS and coined the term “Platform as a Service” but these were all enhancements to existing thought processes.
Salesforce also built the tallest building in San Francisco, a major symbolics statement reminiscent of corporate titans of the 20th century like Carnegie, Sears, Pan-Am, and even Oracle.
Salesforce’s great execution and positive culture made them one of the largest players in California for a long time, they stole the spotlight from former employer Oracle, challenged Microsoft for attention, were developer friendly.
But then they have been eclipsed by a dozen more interesting players, the “Top 5” in valuation –– Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Also, smaller companies like Twitter, Tesla, Uber, Stripe and Square (and yes, Slack) are getting more relevance.
With the acquisition of Slack, Salesforce can grab back the spotlight and build a bigger footprint in many ways. It all depends on how well these two leaders go forward and leverage each other. How will the personalities of these Benioff and Butterfield mesh? Can they set their egos aside just a bit to optimise their chances?
Both are fiercely independent, hanging on to the leadership of their respective companies throughout their history. Butterfield has always been a startup guy, while Benioff was a starter as a teenager then switched over to the corporate world (Apple and Oracle). Both have won numerous awards for their leadership and business growth accomplishments.
#slack
Butterfield accidentally created a brand new category in 2013 with Slack, rocketing him into the spotlight just as Salesforce was fading a bit. Using Slack became instantly cool, “developery”, favoured by startups. Their path for the past 7 years has been a bit rocky, and some people don’t understand their exact purpose, but they’ve held off competitors like Asana and Microsoft.
As I said, the road has been bumpy for Slack. Butterfield controversially skipped the traditional IPO process with Wall Street brokers to do a direct offering in 2019. The stock has suffered since, mostly below the opening price. Microsoft introduced a competing product, Teams, in 2016 and has deployed many of it’s unlimited resources to killing off Slack.
So now will Salesforce take on Microsoft? IBM? Oracle? Will Benioff mentor Butterfield into a future leader of Salesforce? Let’s hope so; it could be fun to watch.