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Salesforce: Book "Behind The Cloud" offers an interesting look into its backstory
$CRM is reporting its quarterly earnings this evening. I have been long Salesforce for a while now, part of it stemmed from my original investment in $WORK, which was acquired with a mix of cash and stock back in 2021. Feels like it happened a longer time ago...
Marc Benioff, founder and CEO, published "Behind The Cloud" back in 2009 and it is a pretty good read for anyone who is invested in SaaS companies.
Some notable highlights (and fun facts) include:
- Benioff invested $6mn of his own money to seed Salesforce. His former mentor and boss Larry Ellison of $ORCL put in $2mn, which if still maintained, would be worth billions today
- Early marketing tactics to gain press attention included hiring actors to stage mock protests against traditional on-premise software. The "No Software" logo was their thing back then. That antic did not go as planned when they repeated it in Singapore, where any form of protest is illegal!
- Benioff is a pretty spiritual person and practices yoga + meditation
- For top sales performers, they would be rewarded with trips to Hawaii, plus sponsored shopping sprees at Tiffany's (!). The latter sounds a bit over the top. Wondering if Salesforce has phased that out with recent cost-cutting measures
- On aggressive sales and marketing spend, Benioff writes in his book: "Years ago, we received criticism for spending too much on marketing for a $250mn company, but when we were a $250mn company, we weren't thinking like a $250mn company. We were trying to build a bigger company, and the only way to do that was to act like one"
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