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Symantec’s Sheila Jordan named to Slack’s board of directors
Workplace collaboration software business Slack (NYSE: WORK) has added Sheila Jordan, a senior vice president and chief information officer of Symantec, as an independent member of its board of directors. The hiring comes three months after the business completed a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
Jordan, responsible for driving information technology strategy and operations for Symantec, brings significant cybersecurity expertise to Slack’s board. Prior to joining Symantec in 2014, Jordan was a senior vice president of IT at Cisco and an executive at Disney Destination for nearly 15 years.
With the new appointment, Slack appears to be doubling down on security. In addition to the board announcement, Slack recently published a blog post outlining the company’s latest security strategy in what was likely part of a greater attempt to sway potential customers — particularly those in highly regulated industries — wary of the company’s security processes. The post introduced new features, including the ability to allow teams to work remotely while maintaining compliance to industry and company-specific requirements.
Jordan joins Slack co-founder and chief executive officer Stewart Butterfield, former Goldman Sachs executive Edith Cooper, Accel general partner Andrew Braccia, Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, Andreessen Horowitz general partner John O’Farrell, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya and former Salesforce chief financial officer Graham Smith on Slack’s board of directors.
“I believe there is nothing more critical than driving organizational alignment and agility within enterprises today,” Jordan said in a statement. “Slack has developed a new category of enterprise software to help unlock this potential and I’m thrilled to now be a part of their story.”
Slack closed up nearly 50% on its first day of trading in June but has since stumbled amid reports of increased competition from Microsoft, which operates a Slack-like product called Teams.
Slack co-founder and chief technology officer Cal Henderson will join us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco next week to discuss the company’s founding, road to the public markets and path forward. Buy tickets here.
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TechCrunch Disrupt offers plenty of options for attendees with an eye on the enterprise
We might have just completed a full-day program devoted completely to enterprise at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise last week, but it doesn’t mean we plan to sell that subject short at TechCrunch Disrupt next month in San Francisco. In fact, we have something for everyone from startups to established public companies and everything in between along with investors and industry luminaries to discuss all-things enterprise.
SaaS companies have played a major role in enterprise software over the last decade, and we are offering a full line-up of SaaS company executives to provide you with the benefit of their wisdom. How about Salesforce chairman, co-CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff for starters? Benioff will be offering advice on how to build a socially responsible, successful startup.
If you’re interested in how to take your startup public, we’ll have Box CEO Aaron Levie, who led his company to IPO in 2015 and Jennifer Tejada, CEO at PagerDuty, who did the same just this year. The two executives will discuss the trials and tribulations of the IPO process and what happens after you finally go public.
Meanwhile, Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson, another SaaS company that recently IPOed, will be discussing how to build great products with Megan Quinn from Spark Capital, a Slack investor.
Speaking of investors, Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures joins us on a panel with Whitney Bouck, COO at HelloSign and Jyoti Bansal, CEO and founder of Harness (as well as former CEO and co-founder at AppDynamics, which was acquired by Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion just before it was supposed to IPO). They will be chatting about what it takes to build a billion dollar SaaS business.
Not enough SaaS for you? How about Diya Jolly, Chief Product Officer at Okta discussing how to iterate your product?
If you’re interested in security, we have Dug Song from Duo, whose company was sold to Cisco in 2018 for $2.35 billion, explaining how to develop a secure startup. We will also welcome Nadav Zafrir from Israeli security incubator Team 8 to talk about the intriguing subject of when spies meet security on our main stage.
You probably want to hear from some enterprise company executives too. That’s why we are bringing Frederic Moll, chief development officer for the digital surgery group at Johnson & Johnson to talk about robots, Marillyn A. Hewson, chairman, president and CEO at Lockheed Martin discussing the space industry and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg going over the opportunity around 5G.
We’ll also have seasoned enterprise investors, Mamoon Hamid from Kleiner Perkins and Michelle McCarthy from Verizon Ventures, acting as judges at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition.
If that’s not enough for you, there will also be enterprise startups involved in the Battlefield and Startup Alley. If you love the enterprise, there’s something for everyone. We hope you can make it.
Still need tickets? You can pick those up right here.
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Slack co-founder Cal Henderson and Spark Capital’s Megan Quinn are coming to Disrupt SF
If there is one company at the top of everyone’s mind this year, it is Slack.
The now-ubiquitous workplace messaging tool began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in June after taking an unusual route to the public markets, known as a direct listing. Slack bypassed the typical IPO process in favor of putting its current stock on the NYSE without doing an additional raise or bringing on underwriter banking partners.
Slack co-founder and chief technology officer Cal Henderson and Slack investor and Spark Capital general partner Megan Quinn will join us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF to give a behind the scenes look at Slack’s banner year, the company’s origin story and what convinced Quinn to participate in the business’s funding round years ago.
Early in his career, Henderson was the technical director of Special Web Projects at Emap, a U.K. media company. Later, he became the head of engineering for Flickr, the photo-sharing tool co-founded by Slack chief Stewart Butterfield. In April 2009, he was reported to be starting a new stealth social gaming company with Butterfield, a project that would ultimately become Slack.
Quinn, for her part, invested in Slack before joining Spark Capital (Updated: 8/16/19 at 3:25 p.m.). Spark became an investor in Slack in 2015, participating in the company’s $160 million Series E at a valuation of $2.8 billion. No small startup at the time, Slack already had 750,000 daily users and backing from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, GV and Kleiner Perkins.
Quinn is a seasoned investor, known for striking deals with Coinbase, Glossier, Rover and Wealthfront, among others. She first entered the venture capital scene in 2012 as an investment partner at Kleiner Perkins (where she first invested in Slack and other early to mid-stage consumer tech startups). Quinn joined Spark Capital in 2015 to make growth-stage investments in companies across the board.
Before trying her hand at VC, she spent seven years in product management and strategic partnership development at Google and one year as the head of product at payments company Square.
Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.
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