Yesterday Carl Bass announced he would be stepping down as CEO of Autodesk. The news came with the 9am Pacific press release, followed quickly by Carl’s email to employees (reproduced here).
I’m pretty sure that only a handful of people knew about this in advance: the rest of us were completely stunned. Autodesk has had “participation” from activist investors over the last year and a half or so – they were even mentioned in the press release talking about Carl’s departure – so clearly the concern was that Carl was in some way pressured into leaving. At least that was my personal concern.
To help employees process the news, there was one last “Carl Talk” at 10:30am Pacific – an All Hands meeting held in San Francisco that was broadcast live to employees everywhere. Carl was joined by our SVP of HR, Jan Becker, as well as the interim joint CEOs, Amar Hanspal and Andrew Anagnost.
It was quite surreal watching the live-stream along with thousands of colleagues…