Salesforce’s outgoing CFO has made an “extremely rare” leadership move

Good morning. Longtime Salesforce executive Amy Weaver is stepping down as president and CFO after three and a half years in the role. Her tenure as CFO coincided with a period of growth for the company and came after Weaver undertook a highly unusual C-suite shakeup — one that involved trading in the role of top legal officer for top financial officer.

In a LinkedIn post on Aug. 28, Weaver said she decided to step down “after nearly 11 wonderful years at Salesforce” and was “excited about my next chapter and the new opportunities ahead.” Weaver also highlighted a key career move he made at the company.

“My time at Salesforce has been an incredible experience — from joining as general counsel to leading the legal and corporate affairs teams to taking the truly unprecedented step of becoming CFO,” he wrote Weaver. She also noted Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s “expanded view” of her career.

Weaver joined cloud-based software giant Salesforce in 2013 as SVP and general counsel. In January 2020, he became President and Chief Legal Officer. The company announced on December 1, 2020 that Weaver would become president and CFO in February 2021, succeeding retiring CFO Mark Hawkins. On the same day in 2020 that Salesforce announced the CFO transition, it also reported that it would acquire workplace messaging app Slack for $27.7 billion.

Prior to joining Salesforce, Weaver was EVP and General Counsel of Univar Solutions Inc., SVP and Deputy General Counsel at Expedia, Inc. and practiced law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Perkins Coie. Prior to entering private practice, she served as a legislative assistant for the Hong Kong Legislative Council and as a clerk at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

We asked Scott W. Simmons, co-managing partner of Crist Kolder Associates, a senior executive search firm, what he’s seen of general counsel moving into CFO roles. “It’s not common at all,” Simmons told me. The legal path to CFO “doesn’t even register as a path” in the company’s most recent Volatility Report, he said.

The company’s report is based on data from 671 Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies through August 1. Research shows that three-quarters of CFOs come directly from a number two finance position, such as corporate finance director, controller and chief accounting officer. officer.

Simmons also conducted an S&P Capital IQ search of 1,478 publicly traded U.S. companies that have revenues of more than $1 billion. Less than 3% of CFOs in that data set have a JD degree. Even allowing for a margin of error in that data, “it shows that it’s extremely rare for CFOs to also be lawyers,” he said.

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However, Simmons noted that the most important trait for any CFO position is strong leadership.

“Amy has been an incredible executive at Salesforce, leading many of the company’s most important strategic and operational initiatives over the past decade,” Benioff said in a statement announcing the announcement. “And, she’s been an amazing partner for me personally.”

Since Weaver began his tenure as CFO in 2021, Salesforce has climbed 14 spots on the Fortune 500. The company’s annual revenue for fiscal 2023 was $31.4 billion, up 18% year-over-year per year. On Aug. 28, Salesforce reported revenue of $9.33 billion for the quarter ended July 31, up 8 percent from last year. “Operating margins closed at record highs, with a GAAP operating margin of 19.1%, up 190 basis points year-over-year, and a non-GAAP operating margin of 33.7%, up 210 basis points year over year,” Weaver said in a statement.

A successor for Weaver has not yet been named. “I’ll be at the company while we conduct an internal and external search, so don’t say goodbye just yet,” she wrote on LinkedIn.

Sheryl Estrada
[email protected]

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com