Allen Shim named Slack’s CFO

Slack turns four years old next week. We’ve come a long way since 2014! From a small, scrappy outfit serving a few thousand beta testers to a globally distributed team of more than 1,000 employees delivering critical infrastructure to millions of professionals around the world. This past year alone we unveiled our Enterprise Grid product, launched Shared Channels, localized into Spanish, French, German, and Japanese, created partnerships with some of the most trusted names in enterprise software, topped more than 1000 apps in our app directory, and saw the adoption of Slack by more than hundreds of thousands of developers. It may still be early days for this enormous revolution in communications, but we’re proud of these important milestones.

Today, I’m excited to announce another milestone: Allen Shim has been appointed Chief Financial Officer for Slack. This is a new position for us and a promotion for Allen, who has been my right hand from the earliest days. Allen is a trusted advisor to the executive leadership team and our Board, having helped build Slack from a small-but-ambitious startup to the high-growth global enterprise software company it is today. Slack is emerging as a different kind of SaaS company, and he knows our business better than anyone. Allen is guiding us toward the next phase of our growth, and I can’t think of a leader better suited to the opportunity at hand.

We’ve been fortunate on many levels with our success to this point. But we’ve also been deliberate. The growth of our exec team and our board — including last year’s addition of Sarah Friar as our first independent board member — has accelerated our ability to deliver, and introducing the role of CFO is a natural evolution that levels up our capabilities and positions us for scalable, long term success. These changes show in our results and our readiness to take advantage of the opportunity ahead. We want to continue building a business that will serve our growing global user base for the long-term, and elevating Allen to CFO is a notable part of making that happen. We’re all thrilled to see what’s ahead.

— Stewart Butterfield