New Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones has hired at least three high-level employees from Slack, where she had been chief executive for about a year until joining the dating app company in January.
Three former Slack employees started new roles at Bumble in February, Jones said in a LinkedIn post. chief product officer Ali Rayl, chief people officer David Ard, and vice president of global communications Gabrielle Ferree.
Rayl, who until recently served as Slack’s senior vice president of product, had been at the workplace messaging app for over 11 years. Ard and Ferree both joined Slack in 2022. Ard had served as its senior vice president of employee success, while Ferree was its senior communications director.
Jones’s new hires at Bumble are the latest leaders to leave Slack in the year following the departure of Stewart Butterfield, the company’s cofounder and CEO, in January 2023. Slack’s former chief product officer Tamar Yehoshua and marketing senior vice president Jonathan Prince left shortly after Butterfield.
Jones, then an executive vice president at Slack parent Salesforce, replaced Butterfield as CEO of Slack in January 2023. In November, she announced her plans to succeed Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, who was ready to step down from day-to-day operations. Jones was replaced by Denise Dresser, another Salesforce executive who served as president of accelerated industries.
Cal Henderson, Slack’s longtime CTO, left the company in January, Fortune first reported. He was succeeded by Salesforce cofounder and CTO Parker Harris.
Salesforce declined to comment. Bumble did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021 for $27.7 billion. The deal later became fodder for activist investors, including major hedge funds Elliott Management and Starboard Value, which in late 2022 began pushing Salesforce to prioritize profit over revenue growth. Activist investors also suggested Salesforce had failed to properly integrate its pricey acquisitions, including Slack, MuleSoft, and Tableau, into its core cloud software products.
Since then, Salesforce laid off at least 10% of its workforce, including some Slack employees.
Along with the new hires from Slack, Antoine Leblond, who Jones worked with at Sonos and Microsoft, joined Bumble this month as CTO, and the company’s chief brand officer Selby Drummond was promoted to chief marketing officer, Jones said.
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