Yammer’s David Sacks Departs Microsoft After Two-Year Tenure

Today Yammer’s founder and former CEO David Sacks announced that he will depart Microsoft, the software company that purchased his social enterprise startup for $1.2 billion.

His exit, which comes two years after the June 2012 acquisition of Yammer, follows standard timing. When companies are purchased, existing employees are often given two-year contracts, sometimes with earnouts attached. Sacks did his time, in other words.

One year after it purchased Yammer, Microsoft announced that the service had seen 55% account growth following the deal’s closing, to more than 8 million. Paid networks were up 100%.

Yammer didn’t warrant a mention in Microsoft’s most recent earnings report.

Microsoft has worked to move Yammer into its Office 365 lineup. If you visit the Yammer pricing page, you can purchase the service for $3 per user per month, but Microsoft lists two separate Office 365 options that both include Yammer.

In a statement concerning Sacks’ departure, Microsoft commented that Yammer is now used by “more than 500,000 organizations.”

Yammer was recently tossed into more Office 365 SKUs, making it available for no extra charge to new groups of people. As such, it seems that Microsoft is content to make Yammer component to Office 365, and use it as a lever to ratchet up subscribers of the latter service.

As a fun aside, if you haven’t seen the clip of Sacks trying to explain why innovation is dead to Michael Arrington at Disrupt SF 2012, you haven’t lived: