Irish woman making waves in Silicon Valley
Northern Ireland born Sarah Friar has been appointed the first independent board member at Slack, the business communications platform. Friar is currently the CFO of payments company Square and is also considered a prime candidate for the CEO job if Jack Dorsey ever decided to only lead Twitter, where he is also CEO.
Friar will also become Slack’s first female director. The company, which is creating 100 new jobs in Dublin, is revolutionising how businesses work and communicate, taking the social tools young workers have become accustomed to and right-sizing them for the workplace in a fun and engaging way.
Friar came to Square from Salesforce, where she held a top job in finance and strategy. Before that she worked at Goldman Sachs for a decade and was also an exec at McKinsey in London and South Africa. She has a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University and an MBA from Stanford University and is also on the board of New Relic. She was also named Financial Woman of the Year in 2014.
Slack was founded by Canadian Stewart Butterfield. The platform emerged from a project management tool for Glitch, a gaming company that Butterfield shuttered in 2012. Butterfield also co-founded image-sharing site Flickr in 2002 with Caterina Fake and Jason Classon, originally as a video games business. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 and Butterfield stayed on as product manager for three years. Last year Slack raised $200m in a massive funding round that valued the company at $3.8bn.
