it is not frequent You see an established company burn three CEOs in less than a year. But due to circumstances beyond its control, that is what has happened at Slack, the company that Salesforce acquired in 2020 for $28 billion. In November, Slack introduced Denise Dresser as the latest person to occupy the corner office.
Dresser acknowledges that it was not easy to take on the role under these circumstances, but he is adapting. “You know, like anything, it's always difficult to come into a new company and do it in a graceful way, but I think the team gave me a lot of advice and we really saw the vision together,” Dresser told TechCrunch.
He grew up in the suburbs outside Boston, was educated at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied accounting and worked at salesforce for the last twelve years in various executive positions.
Her predecessor, Lidiane Jones, had been on the job for just 10 months when she announced she was stepping down as Bumble CEO, driven by the allure of running an independent public company. Jones herself had replaced the company's co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, when he announced that he would leave at the end of 2022.
It's difficult to replace a founder and CEO like Jones did. It could be even more difficult to take over just 10 months later for his successor, but some executive turnover is expected in the years after an acquisition, says Arjun Bhatia, an analyst at William Blair who follows Salesforce. “You want a stable leadership team, of course, and you want someone who is focused on that, but the CEO turnover we've seen is not concerning right now,” Bhatia told TechCrunch. “If that becomes more recurring, certainly that view could change, but I think it's a natural course after an acquisition like this for a company like Slack to find its place within the Salesforce ecosystem.”
Dresser says she's simply building on what her predecessors did before she got there, while also bringing her own personality to the work. “I ask a lot of questions and I'm definitely an accountant at heart,” she said. “So I like to be organized and I will continue that way, but it's not like it's a big attraction. “I think the foundation already exists and is an incredibly well-run organization.”
How has Slack fared in Big CRM?
When you look at the price Salesforce paid to own Slack, even allowing some room for 2020 stock prices and the excessive exuberance of the period, it still feels like a reach. At the time it was believed that Slack could be the communication layer on top of all the enterprise software that Salesforce sells. Indeed, it remains a hope, but revenue growth has slowed dramatically at Slack since its acquisition.
We don't have exact revenue numbers because Salesforce stopped reporting them last spring, but it does share the percentage growth from the previous year. Growth has slowed significantly from 46% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2023 to just 16% in the fourth quarter of 2024. For the most part, the trend has been downward and it is up to Dresser to turn that around.
Image credits: Sales force
Slack could change this trend by finding new business opportunities and keeping existing customers happy while not being so closely tied to Salesforce that it loses customers who aren't focused on Salesforce.
Dresser can get caught between these seemingly contradictory requirements, says Brent Leary, principal analyst at CRM Essentials. He has also been following Salesforce since its inception. “You have to be able to figure out what the right balance is between Slack as an independent brand that continues to attract non-Salesforce customers while also allowing Salesforce customers to use Slack everywhere within the platform they need to collaborate,” Leary said.
But Dresser doesn't think it's that complicated. “I don't know if I think it's that difficult. I think that was the original vision when the two companies came together,” he said. “I think there is a real recognition that there is something very special here that we want to foster and continue. And I think that's been a pretty constant theme from the beginning.”
The potential of generative ai
A big change that needs to be managed has been the development of generative ai in software, in Slack, and across the entire Salesforce family of products. Dresser says ai is a natural fit for Slack because, as a communications platform with a wealth of knowledge built into it, it will help users harness, understand and find insights in the mass of information.
“When you think about it from a higher-level perspective, Slack has a lot of the world's conversations around unstructured data,” he said. “And 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 platform for the future.”
That all depends, of course, on execution: you can't just sprinkle ai fairy dust on a product and expect it to work. But Dresser says ai helped her get up to speed in her new role much faster than would have been possible without being able to access summaries of long product threads. Summarization is a big selling point for generative ai, and using it to save time understanding long conversation threads could be a great use case. But again, it depends on the quality of the summaries.
Another big problem Dresser faces is how to compete with Microsoft, which brings to the table Teams combined with Office 365, Dynamics 365 and ai in the form of Microsoft Copilot implemented across the platform, says JP Gownder, an analyst at Forrester Research. “It makes sense for Slack to try to expand its user base by integrating Salesforce more closely, but it must be careful not to alienate existing customers, who are fiercely loyal to what's offered today. Meanwhile, Microsoft Teams is a giant that has the opportunity to gain even more minutes through Copilot,” Gownder told TechCrunch.
But Bhatia points out that Microsoft still works best within the Microsoft ecosystem and Slack may have an advantage in that regard. “Microsoft does not have as much interoperability capacity. Its advantage, by far, is distribution. And two big advantages that Slack has in its market are interoperability and ease of use,” he stated.
Adding difficulty for Dresser is that Slack's remaining co-founder, CTO Cal Henderson, left in the early March, replaced by none other than Salesforce co-founder and CTO Parker Harris. While Harris brings a long history of building Salesforce, Slack is losing a person who has a deep understanding of Slack's technical foundations.
Dresser certainly understands that he faces these challenges ahead, that he needs to win over employees and customers and find a way to keep Slack growing and vital within the vast Salesforce ecosystem. But she says her role is really about making human connections and the rest will take care of itself.
“I try to help people understand that I am here because I am deeply passionate about what we can do for the world, for our users and our employees, as well as at Slack and at Salesforce in general, and I wouldn't do that. “I would be here if I wasn’t.”
