Good morning, Broadsheet readers! AMD CEO Lisa Su is going head to head with Nvidia, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is voting against all-male corporate boards in Japan, and Slack CEO Lidiane Jones is working to better integrate the communications tool with its parent Salesforce. Happy Pride Month!
– Joining forces. Last year, Lidiane Jones was working for Salesforce as an exec overseeing experience cloud, commerce cloud, and marketing cloud products for the enterprise software giant from her home base of Boston. In late 2022, she learned that Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield, whose company Salesforce had acquired in 2021, was planning to exit—and she only found out because she was a candidate for his job.
With Butterfield’s departure, Jones became CEO of the well-known workplace communications tool that Salesforce had purchased for $27.7 billion, its most expensive acquisition ever. The integration of the two businesses hasn’t been smooth sailing, with reported tension between Butterfield and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
So Jones has been tasked with improving the integration of Salesforce and Slack—from their products to their cultures. It’s a mandate she’s prepared for; as a Microsoft exec, she oversaw the integrations of multiple startups into the tech giant. “There’s always patterns that are not too different,” Jones told me in an interview at Boston’s Salesforce tower for a new story in the May/June issue of Fortune. “The biggest one is just understanding each other’s language.”
Personally, she also knows what it’s like to feel like the odd one out and adapt to a new home. Jones was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and moved to the U.S. to attend the University of Michigan. She remembers her first year in the United States as the hardest transition of her life: “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, what am I doing here?’” she recalls.
She’s leaning on those experiences to help ease the integration of Slack into Salesforce. Product-wise, that means helping each platform take on the best qualities of the other. She wants Salesforce, known as a critical but clunky enterprise tool, to adopt Slack’s user-friendly interface. And Slack can learn from Salesforce’s domination as a money-making enterprise platform.
Right now, Slack accounts for just 5% of Salesforce’s total sales. Jones’s vision is for the beloved product to be the ultimate “front door” for Salesforce customers, the first thing they check in the morning to figure out the rest of their day. Wall Street has been skeptical of the price Salesforce paid for Slack but is aligned on that long-term vision. “[Slack] hasn’t been the growth driver they expected it to be,” says Baird analyst Rob Oliver. “But I don’t think that says much about the long-term value of Slack.”
Read Jones’s full interview from the new issue of Fortune here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Kinsey Crowley. Subscribe here.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Ripple effect. This month, the Supreme Court is likely to strike down or restrict the use of race-based college admissions programs, causing ripple effects across the corporate DEI space. Such a decision could call into question the practices of using race as an identifier for hiring and ultimately diminish the number of candidates from marginalized communities in the talent pipeline. Fortune
- After the glass cliff. Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su took over the computer chip company in 2014 when analysts called it “uninvestable.” She turned the company around, increasing its share price 30-fold over the last 10 years by focusing on making great products, increasing consumer trust, and simplifying the business. Now, she wants to disrupt Nvidia’s dominance in A.I. chips, expanding R&D and pursuing acquisitions in the space. Forbes
- Overturned. Oklahoma's Supreme Court yesterday struck down two new abortion laws for exceptions that were too narrow, but left in place a 1910 law that outlaws most abortions in the state. The new laws allowed abortions in instances of "medical emergencies," but the justices ruled that a mother can end a pregnancy to save her own life, without having to demonstrate an "emergency." New York Times
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Julia Brau Donnelly will be the new CFO at Pinterest. Collective Health has appointed HungChing Chan to chief data and analytics officer. Monday.com has appointed Shiran Nawi as its new chief people and legal officer. Data analytics platform Starburst has named Megan Maslanka as its first chief people officer.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Pay up. ESPN's rights to air women's college sports and the WNBA are set to expire in coming years, and Disney, the broadcaster's parent, will have to shell out to keep them, given the surge in viewership. When Disney bought the broadcasting rights in 2011, it cost the company $34 million a year to air 20 women's NCAA sports. Bloomberg
- Vote no. Norway's sovereign wealth fund said it will vote against the nomination of all-male boards at Japanese companies. Japanese firms represented nearly 5% of the fund's stockholdings in 2022. More than 300 Japanese companies had no female directors last year. Japan Times
- Queer at work. As state legislatures consider hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills, workers say they aren't comfortable coming out at work. An Indeed survey showed that only 31% of LGBTQ workers are out to all of their colleagues. For those who aren't out, 43% said it is because they fear discrimination. Transgender employees were also 63% more likely to report discrimination during job interviews. Fast Company
ON MY RADAR
The zen wisdom of Sarah Silverman The New Yorker
Nobody gets SZA like SZA Elle
The DEI industry needs to check its privilege The Atlantic
How Arsema Thomas brought young Lady Danbury to lifeHarper's Bazaar
PARTING WORDS
"If you think about how many women have been incredibly successful in their careers, it's often coming out of strife or unconventional opportunities, where people just jumped in. I encourage everyone to be a bit more risk-seeking in their own career."
—Reformation CEO Hali Borenstein
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