Updated: Byron Sebastian, the former Heroku CEO who most recently served as executive vice president of platforms for parent company Salesforce.com, has left the company, a source close to the situation has confirmed. If Sebastian’s LinkedIn profile is an accurate indicator, he’s currently farming olives.
Sebastian joined popular platform-as-a-service startup Heroku as CEO in July 2009, leading it through a $ 212 million acquisition by Salesforce.com in December 2010 and over the 1.5-million-apps-hosted plateau as of May 2012. Once a Ruby-only platform for hosting web apps, Heroku has grown into a polyglot platform supporting numerous programming languages and even hosts its own PostgreSQL database service.
Before Heroku, Sebastian was CEO of SourceLabs and a vice president and general manager at BEA Systems.
Update: I have reached out to Sebastian for a comment on his reasons for leaving and his future plans, and will update as I hear more. Sebastian wrote in an email message to me, “It was an honor and a privilege to have been part of Heroku and then Salesforce, and I plan on staying close to the team and the growing ecosystem.”
Feature image by Pinar Ozger (pinar@pinarozger.com).
