Slack’s new CEO hopes to bring stability after turbulent times

Not often You see an established company go through three CEOs in less than a year. But due to circumstances beyond its control, that’s what happened to Slack, the company Salesforce acquired in 2020 for $28 billion. In November, Slack introduced Denise Dresser as its newest candidate to fill the corner office.

Dresser admits it wasn’t easy stepping into the role under these circumstances, but she’s adapting. “You know, like anything, it’s always difficult to go into any new company and do it in a graceful way, but I think the team gave me a lot of guidance and we really saw the vision together,” Delay said. Se told TechCrunch.

She grew up in the Boston suburbs, was educated at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she studied accounting, and has held various management roles at Salesforce for more than a decade.

Her predecessor, Lidiane Jones, announced her resignation as CEO of Bumble after just 10 months on the job because she was tempted by the temptation of running an independent public company. When company co-founder Stewart Butterfield announced he would be leaving at the end of 2022, Jones himself succeeded him.

Replacing a founder and CEO, as Jones did, is difficult. Arjun Bhatia, a William Blair analyst who follows Salesforce, said it may be more challenging to get his successor to take over in 10 months but expects it to happen in the years after the acquisition Some senior executive changes. “Of course you need a stable leadership team, and you need people who are focused on it, but the CEO turnover that we’re seeing is not concerning right now,” Bhatia told TechCrunch. “That view could certainly change if this becomes more frequent, but I think it’s a natural step for a company like Slack to find its place in the Salesforce ecosystem after making an acquisition like this.” the process of.”

Dresser said she’s simply building on her predecessor’s work while bringing her own personality to the job. “I asked a lot of questions, I’m an accountant at heart,” she said. “So I like being organized and I’ll continue to do that, but it’s not a big draw. I think the foundation is there and it’s a very well-run organization.”

How does Slack fare in Big CRM?

When you look at the price Salesforce paid to acquire Slack, it still feels within reach, even with some room for 2020 stock prices and excessive exuberance during this period. The belief at the time was that Slack could become the communications layer on top of all the business software Salesforce sold. Indeed, that’s still hope, but Slack’s revenue growth has slowed significantly since the acquisition.

We don’t have exact revenue figures because Salesforce stopped reporting them last spring, but it did share last year’s growth percentage. Growth has slowed sharply from 46% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2023 to 16% in the fourth quarter of 2024. For the most part, that trend has declined—and Dresser must reverse it.

Image Source: sales force

Slack can change that trend by finding new business opportunities and keeping existing customers happy without being so closely tied to Salesforce that it loses customers who aren’t Salesforce-centric.

Brent Leary, principal analyst at CRM Essentials, said Dresser could be caught between these seemingly conflicting requirements. He has also been following Salesforce since its inception. “She has to be able to figure out the right balance between continuing to attract non-Salesforce customers with Slack as a standalone brand, while allowing Salesforce customers to use Slack wherever they need to collaborate within the platform,” Leary said.

But Dresser doesn’t think it’s that complicated. “I don’t know if I think it’s difficult. I think that was the original vision when the two companies merged,” she said. “I think people are really recognizing that there’s something very special here that we want to nurture and continue. I think that’s been a very consistent theme from the beginning.”

The potential of generative artificial intelligence

One of the big changes she needs to deal with is the development of generative artificial intelligence in software, Slack and the Salesforce family of products. Dresser said AI is a perfect fit for Slack because as a communication platform that embeds large amounts of knowledge, it will help users leverage, understand and discover nuggets of knowledge in large amounts of information.

“When you think about it from a high-level perspective, a lot of conversations in the Slack world happen in unstructured data,” she said. “Then you think about Salesforce having this incredible set of customer data, some of the most valuable data in the world. The opportunity to bring structured and unstructured data into Slack and integrate it really creates this powerful future for the future. platform.”

Of course, it all comes down to execution: you can’t just sprinkle AI fairy dust on a product and hope it works. But Dresser claims that AI helped her adapt to the new position faster than she would have been without access to long product thread summaries. Summarizing is a big selling point of generative AI, and using it to save time understanding long conversation threads could be a big use case. But again, it depends on the quality of the summary.

Forrester Research analyst JP Gownder said another big issue facing Dresser is how to compete with Microsoft, which combines Teams with Office 365, Dynamics 365 and AI and rolls it out across the entire platform in the form of Microsoft Copilot. “It would be logical for Slack to try to grow its user base by integrating more closely with Salesforce, but it must be careful not to alienate existing customers because they are very loyal to what they currently offer. At the same time, Microsoft Teams is A behemoth, it has the opportunity to get more time with Copilot,” Gownder told TechCrunch.

But Bhatia noted that Microsoft still operates best within the Microsoft ecosystem, and Slack may have an advantage there. “Microsoft doesn’t have that much interoperability. So far, their advantage is distribution. Slack’s two biggest advantages in the market are interoperability and ease of use,” he said.

Another difficulty for Dresser is that remaining Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson left in early March, and was replaced by none other than Salesforce co-founder and CTO Parker Harris. Although Harris has a long history of building Salesforce, Slack is losing someone with a deep understanding of Slack’s technical foundations.

Dresser certainly understands that she faces these challenges ahead, and that she will need to win over employees and customers and find a way to keep Slack growing and viable within the vast Salesforce ecosystem. But she says her role is really about building relationships and the rest will take care of itself.

“I try to help people understand that I’m here because I’m passionate about what we can do for the world, for our users, for our employees, and for Slack and broader Salesforce, and I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t here , right here.”