Slack, the business-oriented chat service he owns San Francisco Technique The sales giant, the company, is reported to be making layoffs a day after its parent company announced it would shed its staff in the coming weeks.
The San Francisco corporate communications company is said to be laying off about 10% of its staff as part of Salesforce’s layoffs announced Wednesday, According to Business Insider, who was the first to report the news. At the time, it wasn’t clear if the Salesforce layoffs involved any of its subsidiaries, such as Slack and Tableau.
Salesforce bought Slack in July 2021 in a historic deal worth more than $27 billion — a move that put Slack within Salesforce’s broader suite of customer relationship management (CRM) products. It also means that Slack will get some support from the industry giant as it has faced a pandemic-era push from Microsoft and its Teams products.
The alleged round of layoffs has not been officially confirmed, but Slack CEO Stuart Butterfield has Wed alluded to in the letters Fortune opined that Slack’s layoffs would have been riskier as an independent company.
“The market shifts we’re going through now are in terms of generational magnitude and today’s economic conditions put us in the same position if we were still an independent company,” Butterfield said, according to Fortune. He added that the severance pay is “relatively generous” under Salesforce.
If true, this round of layoffs wasn’t entirely unexpected, after a month of instability at Slack and the parent company’s C-wing. Butterfield announced his departure from the company In December along with the exits of Tamar Yehoshua, Salesforce chief product officer, and senior vice president of marketing and communications Jonathan Prince. That news came at the same time that Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor and Seattle-based Tableau CEO Mark Nelson departed.
Puget Sound Business Journal, too confirmed that TableauInc., which was bought by Salesforce in 2019 for $15 billion, laid off workers this week.
A representative for Slack did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and a Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment on the layoffs on Wednesday, referring to a letter Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff sent to employees who were included in recent SEC filings.
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