Slack turns four years old next week and they’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 they’ve unveiled their 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 their 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 they’re proud of these important milestones.
Today Allen Shim has been appointed Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for Slack. This is a new position for Slack and a promotion for Allen, who has been at Slack’s right hand from the earliest days. Allen is a trusted advisor to the executive leadership team and 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 the business better than anyone. Allen is guiding Slack toward the next phase of our growth.
Slack has been fortunate on many levels with their success to this point. But they’ve also been deliberate. The growth of the exec. team and board — including last year’s addition of Sarah Friar as the first independent board member — has accelerated Slack’s ability to deliver, and introducing the role of CFO is a natural evolution that levels up the capabilities and positions Slack for scalable, long term success. These changes show in the results and readiness to take advantage of the opportunity ahead. Slack want to continue building a business that will serve the growing global user base for the long-term, and elevating Allen to CFO is a notable part of making that happen.
