Less than two years since he ascended to the role, Tableau Chief Executive Officer Mark Nelson is leaving the Salesforce-owned data visualization company without a long exit ramp. Nelson plans to take a long trip to the Patagonia region of South America before making his next move. His position won’t be directly filled, as his team is integrated into the broader Salesforce ecosystem of products and engineers.
In 2018, Nelson joined the Seattle-based Tableau as executive vice president of product development, taking on the CEO position in 2021 with the departure of Adam Selipsky, who took over the role of CEO at Amazon Web Services. The Chicago-native executive previously served in engineer leadership roles at Oracle and Concur, also in the Seattle area. He joined the company shortly before it was purchased by the CRM giant Salesforce for more than $15 billion.
Nelson’s departure comes mere weeks after the unexpected departure of Salesforce’s co-CEO Bret Taylor, who left the company shortly after losing his position as board chairman at Twitter in the Elon Musk takeover.