Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Yammer Poaches Another VP From Salesforce.com

Yammer, the popular social enterprise and collaboration platform, has just hired a second senior executive from Salesforce.com.

Sources tell me that Yammer will officially announce on Monday that Samantha Loveland (pictured), VP for customer success at Salesforce.com, has joined Yammer as vice president for worldwide customer engagement.

Loveland — who, according to her LinkedIn profile, goes by “Sam” — will report to David Obrand, another Salesforce alum who was hired by Yammer in October as vice president for global sales. Her job will be to run the team that consults with customers after a sale to make sure they get what they need out of the product.

Yammer is certainly on the move. It’s going to finish the year with a combined four million end users at 100,000 companies, and in September it closed a $17 million round of funding led by the Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya. Prior investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and US Venture Partners also participated, bringing the total capital raised to $57 million in four rounds.

Yammer is also something of a rival to Salesforce.com, and has been playing that fact up recently, gently jabbing at Salesforce as a “friend with benefits.” It also took advantage of Salesforce’s publicly available API to integrate Salesforce.com’s Chatter within its Yammer. It is fair to say that these companies have something of a history.

Anyhow, Loveland’s first day on the job at Yammer will be Monday.

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work