Slack
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield
Business Insider has confirmed that Anne Toth, the company's head of HR who was also the company's head of policy, has left.
In addition to running HR she was responsible for things like the company's security and privacy policies. Toth had been with Slack for about two years. We're told she left at the end of September, though her LinkedIn profile has not yet been changed to show her departure or her next gig.
Toth cut her teeth working on privacy policies for Yahoo, went on to do the same for Google, then went out on her own consulting before landing at Slack.
We've also learned that Creative Director Mark Lawson has left after about eight months on the job. He had been working with Giant Ant studios to create a series of animated promotional materials.
Lawson's LinkedIn profile, as we write this, also does not yet show that he left the company, but a Slack spokesperson confirmed both departures to Business Insider.
"Their departures are entirely unrelated. There are 700 people at Slack - occasionally some of them leave," a spokesperson told us.
These exits follow Bill Macaitis, a tech industry veteran and former Salesforce and Zendesk executive who also quietly left.
He was hired as Slack's first Chief Marketing Officer back in 2014 and stepped down a few months ago, moving to an advisory role at the compay, according to his LinkedIn page.
These changes come at a time when Slack, is facing increasing competition from both Microsoft and Facebook. It followed that with a potential marketing blunder, when it took out a full-page ad as a not-very-well-received grand gesture after Microsoft released a competition product earlier this month
Even in Silicon Valley's move-fast culture, Slack's meteoric rise has been amazing. It makes the incredibly popular chat app for work groups, and is led by an incredibly popular founder CEO Stewart Butterfield.
Although it appears that Slack's honeymoon period with the press and the Valley may be coming to an end, Slack's spokesperson says that the company is still hiring like crazy, telling us:
"We're hiring aggressively for multiple roles. In the last 45 days alone, Slack has grown more than 15%, and between open recs and accepted offers, there are more than 100 new hires right behind them."