Slack, the fast-growing workplace collaboration startup, has snagged a new engineering chief from Pinterest.
Michael Lopp left the social bookmarking site earlier this month to become Slack’s vice president of engineering, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Lopp is a Silicon Valley veteran with experience at companies including Apple and Netscape. Prior to Pinterest, he was a director at Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto firm focused on using big data analysis for business and government applications.
“We’d like to thank Lopp for his contributions to Pinterest and wish him well. We’re fortunate to have strong technical leaders throughout the engineering team as we look ahead to growing the company and the product,” Pinterest said in a statement.
It’s unclear why Lopp left Pinterest but he’s been an avid Slack user in the past. In a December blog post titled “Why I Slack,” he said he oversees two Slack teams — one focused on the video game “Destiny,” and another aimed at letting people discuss leadership.
In an interview with TechCrunch last year, Lopp said one of his principles was to delegate work to other people even if he might be better suited to the task himself.
“That’s one of my principles, to get myself out of the way,” he said. “Ideally there’s some morning where I get up and have my coffee and there’s absolutely nothing to do, everything else has been delegated.”
He’s known outside his professional work as the author of the blog “Rands in Repose” and a co-creator of the webcomic Jerkcity. He’s also the author of two books, “Managing Humans” and “Being Geek.”