Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry
by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler · 19 Nov 2009 · 307pp · 17,123 words
. Benioff is the recipient of many awards for pioneering innovation, including the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2000, Benioff launched the Salesforce.com Foundation—now a multimillion-dollar global organization. He lives in San Francisco. “In Behind the Cloud, Marc Benioff takes us through the ups and
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think differently, align your organization—and transform your business and your life.” —Anthony Robbins, author, Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power Behind the Cloud “Salesforce.com and Google share a vision for how the cloud will revolutionize computing. Behind the Cloud gives us a rare glimpse at the development of
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Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish. Benioff shows how salesforce.com pioneered a simple idea (delivering business applications as a service over the Internet) to change the way all businesses use software applications and, ultimately
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, change the way the software industry works. With Marc Benioff ’s candid, unconventional advice and unusual call-out lessons from the Salesforce.com Playbook—including Benioff’s proprietary management tool, V2MOM— any business can go against the grain, rapidly change the game, and learn how to achieve
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may be marks of their respective holders. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benioff, Marc R., 1964Behind the cloud : the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company—and revolutionized an industry / Marc R. Benioff, Carlye Adler. –1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references
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247 249 252 255 Play #111: Make Everyone Successful 255 Notes Acknowledgments About the Authors Index 261 265 269 271 ix For Lynne and the salesforce.com employees, customers, and investors—without whose unconditional support we would not be successful Foreword In 2001, in the midst of our previous economic
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crystal ball (though that certainly would be convenient), but because there was a need for change in the software industry and an audience ripening for salesforce.com’s ‘‘End of Software’’ xi FOREWORD revolution. I had seen similar issues with affordability and accessibility plague the hardware industry when I started
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distinction as the first dot-com listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and today it generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue. Salesforce.com changed corporate xiii FOREWORD philanthropy by integrating giving into its business model—and sharing that model so that myriad companies have collectively flooded talent
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simple Web connection, anyone can build applications and deploy them to users everywhere. By igniting the SaaS industry and then offering its Platformas-a-Service, salesforce.com has spawned an ecosystem of countless new companies. It has offered large companies (such as Dell) and smaller companies just starting out valuable insights
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journalists already saw Siebel as the villain. At user conferences, Siebel irked reporters by separating them from everyone else and leading them around like sheep. Salesforce.com, in contrast, welcomed journalists, encouraged them to mix with customers at events, and eagerly introduced them to customers for interviews. ‘‘Talk to whomever
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an evangelical system to sales. We continued to encourage customers to speak out and share their stories. Rather than address an audience and preach about salesforce.com (prospective customers didn’t believe what we said; they believed what customers were experiencing), I began to call on someone from the audience
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on-premise software vendors are seeing. Leveraging that success has become a key part of our marketing plan. Play #29: Sell to the End User Salesforce.com customers are mostly sales, marketing, or customer support people, the people who use traditional enterprise software products. Yet traditional enterprise software companies had never
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existing customers, and our nascent sales team was landing new customers, and then something extraordinary happened that accelerated everything. In December 1999, an article titled ‘‘Salesforce.com Takes the Lead in Latest Software Revolution’’ appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The story was written by Don Clark, a journalist I had
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sites and intranets in the cloud. By enabling developers to create and deliver any kind of business application, entirely on-demand and without software, salesforce.com has catapulted beyond its CRM roots and expanded into a multicategory company. New 124 The Technology Playbook functionality has been built by our users
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like-minded people. The upshot of this exchange was an incredible customer base for the developers who uploaded their applications—and a fantastic opportunity for salesforce.com. We don’t collect any royalties when companies buy applications on AppExchange, but as customers adopt additional applications running on our service, they
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background had given her the skills necessary to bridge both the nonprofit and for-profit worlds. Suzanne officially joined as the executive director of the Salesforce Foundation in 2000. Over the next few months, we researched established corporate foundations and personally met with dozens of foundation directors, including those at
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stock to offer grants and monetary assistance to those in need, especially to support youth and technology programs • 1 percent time: finding meaningful activities for salesforce.com employees during their six paid days off a year devoted to volunteerism, and promoting a culture of caring • 1 percent product: facilitating the donation
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of salesforce.com subscriptions to nonprofits, helping them increase their operating effectiveness and focus more resources on their core mission The 1-1-1 Model in Action
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Business Value of Corporate Philanthropy,’’ May 2002. **2007 Deloitte Volunteer IMPACT Survey Play #69: Build a Great Program by Listening to the Constituents The first salesforce.com-sponsored technology centers aimed at bridging the digital divide were a great idea in theory, and the centers were welcome additions to communities, but
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and learning about finances, to manufacturing a product of their own creation (picture frames, clocks, potted plants), to marketing and selling their product using the salesforce.com application. Our third year into sponsoring the program, we changed the focus from selling a product to selling a service—something that dovetailed nicely
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The students were charged with selling ‘‘green consulting’’ services, and they were responsible for researching, analyzing, and offering suggestions on how to solve each of salesforce.com departments’ environmental challenges. It’s been incredible to witness how the students run their own businesses. During one of the recent programs, something extraordinary
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application and operating more efficiently. 157 BEHIND THE CLOUD It’s been amazing to see what these organizations have been able to achieve with the salesforce.com platform. The Children’s Aid Society Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program, which educates teens about the consequences of sexual activity, was able to convert
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from a paper-based environment to an electronic one through salesforce.com, which reduced turnaround times, improved data integrity, and helped save countless trees. The Google Foundation has used the application to track every facet
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and for us to harness the potential power of our entire ecosystem. It’s working. CRM Fusion, for example, built an application that allows salesforce.com to work with PayPal, which allowed organizations like Rainforest2Reef to receive donations automatically—eliminating the need to pay anyone to input any data manually
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. Theikos (now part of Astadia), one of salesforce.com’s implementation partners, got the system for the UN World Food Programme up and running, customized, and ready to service its operations across Asia
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information. They built a searchable database called the PeopleFinder project, purchased the URL katrinalist.net, and created a Web site that accessed the database. The salesforce.com employees conceived of the project on Friday, September 2, and the initial data entry was completed with more than ninety thousand entries by Tuesday
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step beyond and whose work builds an exceptional company. How to Build an Employee-Inspired Foundation Start from the Very Beginning All new hires at salesforce.com learn about the foundation—and participate in a volunteer activity—during their new-hire orientation. Canvass Employees About Their Interests We ask employees
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, please see www.sharethemodel.org. 165 BEHIND THE CLOUD Play #74: Have Your Foundation Mimic Your Business In areas all over the globe, the salesforce.com application and platform have affected how nonprofits, including Habitat for Humanity and Susan G. Komen for the Cure, run their organizations. The demand for
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I liked his passionate attitude. The right mind-set makes all the difference between succeeding and failing in an international market. Kitamura-san initially helped salesforce.com gain customer traction by relying on the personal relationships he had built over many years in the industry. In fact, some customers simply bought
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Research, and we leveraged that relationship and the success Mizuho had experienced with our service. After Japan Post completed an exhaustive and prudent research process, salesforce.com won the open bidding and secured a deal for five thousand subscriptions. (It later grew to more than seventy thousand subscriptions.) This was
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to board a plane as our first missionary in Australia, we received an ominous letter from the legal department of a large Australian company—called SalesForce. SalesForce Australia claimed we were infringing on its registered trademark, and it raised concerns about brand confusion and potential damages. The threatening letter demanded we cease
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operating under the salesforce name. This was a gigantic problem. Trademark infringement is a notoriously sticky subject in Australia—and one that can cost companies huge sums of money
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. Additionally, SalesForce Australia was an intimidating company to have as an adversary. It had been in the market running outsourced call centers since 1994 and had established
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this time, two companies were being hyped as being able to re-ignite the high-tech IPO market. One was Google; the other was salesforce.com. The salesforce.com IPO was viewed as a litmus test for a new business model, so everyone became interested in the deal. Both the NASDAQ and
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our platform technology, we gained increased opportunities to communicate with—and seek advice from—our employees. We now collaborate on the corporate V2MOM with all salesforce.com employees through IdeaExchange, a social networking tool that employees use to contribute their ideas as well as promote and comment on others’ ideas. Most
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as a meaningful place to work and made us more committed to the success of our employees and our customers. The final play from our salesforce.com playbook—#111—acknowledges that through making all our stakeholders successful, we ignited our own success. In all industries, especially the technology industry, people
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Schellhase, Graham Smith, Clarence So, Jim Steele, Susan St. Ledger, Polly Sumner, John Taschek, Eiji Uda, Frank van Veenendaal, Craig Weissman, and Kirsten Wolberg. Additionally, salesforce.com is fortunate to have an amazing board of directors: Craig Conway, Alan Hassenfeld, Craig Ramsey, Sanford Robertson, Stratton Sclavos, Larry Tomlinson, Maynard Webb, and
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Isabel Kelly, Charles Nikiel, Elizabeth Pinkham, Joseph Schmidt, Rich Sheridan, Julie Trell, and Mayuwa Yamakawa. I am most grateful to my extraordinary friends who supported salesforce.com and me from the very beginning and who continue to amaze me with their wise counsel and generous spirit: Adam Bosworth, Gigi Brisson, Katrina
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2005, overseeing the publishing of critical reports on health care information technology, cybersecurity, and computational sciences. 269 ABOUT THE AUTHORS In 2000, Benioff launched the Salesforce.com Foundation—now a multimillion-dollar global organization— establishing the ‘‘1-1-1 model,’’ whereby the company contributes one percent of profits, one percent of
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award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in BusinessWeek, Condé Nast Portfolio, Fast Company, Fortune, Time, Wired, and many other publications. She co-wrote, with salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, The Business of Changing the World: Twenty Great Leaders on Strategic Corporate Philanthropy. She has been twice named one
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148 Critical Metrics, 250 Criticism, 9–11 CRM (customer relationship management): developing international divisions for, 169–170, 173; Microsoft’s venture into, 42; origins of salesforce.com, 11–12; positioning End of Software mission, 24–25; potential sales via telephone, 77–78; potentials for SaaS online products, 6; scalability challenge for
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. Benioff is the recipient of many awards for pioneering innovation, including the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2000, Benioff launched the Salesforce.com Foundation—now a multimillion-dollar global organization. He lives in San Francisco. “In Behind the Cloud, Marc Benioff takes us through the ups and
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think differently, align your organization—and transform your business and your life.” —Anthony Robbins, author, Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power Behind the Cloud “Salesforce.com and Google share a vision for how the cloud will revolutionize computing. Behind the Cloud gives us a rare glimpse at the development of
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Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish. Benioff shows how salesforce.com pioneered a simple idea (delivering business applications as a service over the Internet) to change the way all businesses use software applications and, ultimately
…
, change the way the software industry works. With Marc Benioff ’s candid, unconventional advice and unusual call-out lessons from the Salesforce.com Playbook—including Benioff’s proprietary management tool, V2MOM— any business can go against the grain, rapidly change the game, and learn how to achieve
We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 13 Apr 2026 · 225pp · 76,418 words
your hand. We see the same disappearing act in the rise of “as a Service,” or aaS. The trend began in the early 2000s, when Salesforce launched Software as a Service. Soon after, Amazon and Microsoft turned cloud computing into Infrastructure as a Service. The 2010s added Platforms and Hardware as
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el Kaliouby wants to invert the paradigm and teach machines how to be nice to us. And nice is going to matter. In early 2025, Salesforce made headlines, announcing that the company wouldn’t be hiring new coders that year. Instead, they were using AI agents to make the coders they
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%20about%20Coursera. AI-tutoring systems like Squirrel AI: Jyothi Kasinath, “How Technology Helped BYJU’S Scale Up to 100 M Users,” Salesforce India Blog, Salesforce, August 26, 2021, https://www.salesforce.com/in/blog/how-technology-helped-byjus-scale-up-to-100-million-users-without-sacrificing-quality/; Russell Flannery, “Derek Li and Squirrel
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change how you use computers. And upend the software industry.” GatesNotes.com, November 9, 2023, https://www.gatesnotes.com/ai-agents. In early 2025, Salesforce made headlines: “Salesforce CEO Confirms AI Now Handles 30%–50% of Company’s Work, Drives Major Workforce and Productivity Shift,” MLQ.ai, June 30, 2025, https://mlq
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.ai/news/salesforce-ceo-confirms-ai-now-handles-30-50-of-companys-work-drives-major-workforce-and-productivity-shift/. In June 2025, OpenAI and Mattel: “Mattel and OpenAI
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff · 23 May 2011 · 344pp · 96,690 words
your company. In this chapter we see surprising customer collaboration stories from Del Monte Pet Products, the Canadian grocery retailer Loblaw, the sales application company salesforce.com, and the French bank Crédit Mutuel. Chapter 10: Tapping the Groundswell with Twitter explains how to turn the short-messaging service Twitter into a
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that SNS members can post on their own profiles and share with friends. Some companies with enthusiastic communities have created their own networks—for example, salesforce.com created its own social network so that customers can connect with people in similar industries or departments. Webkinz (a site from the plush toy
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asking questions in a survey, conducting an engineering study, or having executives review every suggestion. In this chapter we’ll look at three cases: how salesforce.com uses an innovation community to involve customers in the design of new products, how a French credit union made customer suggestions a part of
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products. In each case these companies are moving faster than they ever did before, which saves money and makes life difficult for competitors. CASE STUDY salesforce.com: embracing through an innovation community Speed is important to Steve Fisher. Steve is the VP in charge of the platform—basically, the foundation of
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the product and its development environment—at salesforce.com. Saleforce.com makes customer relationship management applications. If you’re a salesperson, you open up salesforce.com on your PC and use it to manage the opportunities and leads you’re working on
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. Salesforce.com also fills a similar role in service and marketing departments. But salesforce.com itself isn’t software. It’s an on-demand service
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, delivered through the Internet. That means salesforce.com can deliver updated and improved capabilities far more quickly. And
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that’s why speed is important to Steve. Salesforce.com evolves rapidly. The company used to put out three new releases per year. But the process had developed some frustrating snarls. Developers—the tech
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people often disagreed about what made sense to add next. The obvious answer was to see what the customers wanted. The problem wasn’t that salesforce.com wasn’t listening—it was the blizzard of requests. Ten thousand customer requests had piled up. Some of those were great ideas; others weren
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’t. The problem was telling which was which. In 2006, one of the product managers at salesforce.com came across an application called Crispy News and saw what could be a solution to the problem. Crispy News works much like Digg, allowing
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like.5 But unlike Digg, Crispy News was an application that any company could license. “We were looking at doing this ourselves,” said John Taschek, salesforce.com’s VP of strategy. “But Crispy had the technology to find out the kinds of things people wanted to know.” So
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launched a site with Crispy News (and, eventually, bought the company). In the fall of 2006, salesforce.com launched the salesforce.com IdeaExchange (ideas.salesforce.com) and invited customers to itemize their development priorities. Before this, customers’ ideas had fallen like snowflakes, enveloping the development process in an undifferentiated blanket
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of suggestions. Now the ideas were channeled and directed by the groundswell of Salesforce.com’s own customers. In one year, over five thousand ideas arrived; now the best ones bubbled to the top. The customers were organizing their
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priorities for salesforce.com. Not all of them were easy for Salesforce.com to swallow. One of the first and most popular suggestions addressed the “sawbanner,” a text ad that popped up every
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time a customer logged in to salesforce.com. The sawbanner was beloved in Salesforce.com’s marketing department, since it enabled the company to communicate directly with everyone using the software about new releases, conferences, and
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up and see if we can’t get some relief from these annoying banners that show up on our screens every time we log into Salesforce. … [If] you would like to try and remedy the issue please vote YES on [this] idea to stop the insanity! This was rapidly followed by
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over six thousand votes and hundreds of impassioned comments in favor of the idea of scrapping the sawbanners. And that caused a conflict at salesforce.com. On the one side were Steve and many of the developers, who wanted to maximize the application’s usability. On the other were
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salesforce.com’s marketers, who had grown dependent on the sawbanner to connect with their customers. Who won? The customers did. On this issue, both sides
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had compelling arguments. But in the end salesforce.com was trying to satisfy its customers, which added heft to Steve’s side of the discussion. In the nine months it took to settle
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’ other suggestions were excellent and had begun to integrate those suggestions into its products. So when the time finally came to tackle the sawbanner issue, salesforce.com decided to trust its customers. And as fifedog had requested, it was “begone” to the sawbanner. IdeaExchange has revolutionized the way
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salesforce.com develops products. Steve, who likes speed, got what he liked. In 2007, salesforce.com pumped out four new releases, in contrast to only two in 2006. New releases now include three hundred
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in a company that moves briskly, that’s worth a lot. idea exchanges work if you can engage your customers It’s interesting to compare salesforce.com’s experience embracing customers with Dell’s. Dell’s IdeaStorm (www.dellideastorm.com) uses the same system that
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, Dell has a high level of participation: seven thousand ideas and five hundred thousand votes cast by 2007. And like salesforce.com, Dell has taken advantage of the ideas coming from the community. As a company that sells to consumers, Dell naturally has a harder time
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connecting with customers in an idea exchange. Most of Dell’s customers aren’t interested enough in its products to contribute (in contrast to salesforce.com, which had convinced nearly 10 percent of its customers—in businesses—to join IdeaExchange). But even so, Dell has been able to get thousands
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and let people vote on them. And it’s already implemented many of these suggestions. If this sounds a lot like salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange, it is. But unlike salesforce.com’s customers, the bank’s aren’t likely to spend a lot of time coming back to a site whose only
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save a few bucks on ad production—but you won’t have to do the hard work of changing the way you interact with customers. Salesforce.com has permanently changed how it innovates. Del Monte thinks very differently about creating new products now. And Crédit Mutuel, if it keeps going in
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restaurant chain—you can ask for suggestions, like Crédit Mutuel, or set up a private community, like Del Monte. If you sell to businesses, as salesforce.com does, your customers may have suggestions on how to improve your processes, your pricing, your billing, or your services. The key is, you need
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of CEO. Michael wasted no time getting his executives lined up with the groundswell. He took an idea from his friend Mark Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com, to create IdeaStorm, the idea community described in chapter 9. He felt that the time was ripe to do this at Dell because of
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with a combination of urgent requests, irrelevant “cc’s” and offers of free kittens. If Dell can get its customers to support each other and salesforce.com can get its customers to prioritize feature suggestions, why can’t your employees work together in the same way? They can. Throughout corporations around
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created ID-ah!, which allows anyone in the company to submit an idea and then have the employees vote on it. (It’s similar to salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange, which we described in chapter 9.) In the first year and a half that ID-ah! was in place, employees submitted more
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the successful groundswell thinkers in this book—Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s Ellen Sonet with her research community, Procter & Gamble’s Bob Arnold with beinggirl.com, salesforce.com’s Steve Fisher with his IdeaExchange, and all the rest. These people took a different approach. They have all learned something, and they have
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set up as a destination site, not a platform. But since it’s not a platform, others are copying it for their own purposes. (The salesforce.com IdeaExchange and Dell IdeaStorm innovation communities we describe in chapter 9 use a mechanism much like digg.com, for example). A list of over
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the community and log in to see this information. chapter 9 Gala Amoroso left Del Monte for Giant Eagle. Salesforce.com acquired Crispy News and now sells the same service to others as Salesforce Ideas. Jim Osborne left Loblaw and is now at Home Depot. Sijetaisbanquier.com is no longer live for
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available at www.wikinomics.com. 5. Crispy News works much like Digg, allowing visitors to vote entries up or down based on what they like: Salesforce.com subsequently acquired Crispy News and will be selling the IdeaExchange application to other companies that want to deploy it. 6. Here’s what a
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customer known as “fifedog” posted on the IdeaExchange: You can see this post on salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange http://forr.com/gsw9-6. You’ll notice we’ve corrected the customer’s spelling, which is awful. 7. One was a
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons · 4 Apr 2016 · 284pp · 92,688 words
lost $241 million yet saw its market value climb to $160 billion. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, another old-guard business guy, expressed similar astonishment about Salesforce.com. “There’s no cash flow,” he said about that company in April 2015. “What are they worth right now? $35 billion?… It’s crazy
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, just crazy.” That was nothing. A few months later Salesforce.com was worth more than $50 billion. One consequence of not making profits is that companies don’t last as long. In 1960, the average
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billion. Amazon, the online retailer, is twenty-one years old and has never made huge profits, yet its founder, Jeff Bezos, is worth $60 billion. Salesforce.com, a software company, reported net losses totaling three-quarters of a billion dollars from 2011 through 2014, yet its founder, Marc Benioff, is worth
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and transformation. If you can imagine those things then you can almost imagine the horror of seeing Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, on stage at his company’s annual conference, Dreamforce. It’s November 2013, and that’s where I am, along with Cranium and Spinner
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is that Benioff represents a threat to HubSpot, and while he may be ridiculous, he’s not someone you want to have as an enemy. Salesforce used to be HubSpot’s biggest ally, investing in HubSpot and even selling HubSpot software to its customers. Halligan loved Benioff so much that he
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named the company’s biggest conference room after him. That happy relationship ended six months ago when Salesforce acquired one of HubSpot’s rivals, ExactTarget. Supposedly Benioff first tried to buy HubSpot, but Halligan rejected his offer. At the keynote I’m sitting
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next to one of our sales reps, who tells me that Salesforce.com has been calling our customers, urging them to dump HubSpot and switch to ExactTarget, which has been renamed
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Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Salesforce.com claims that its marketing software is better than HubSpot and works seamlessly with Salesforce.com’s core CRM software. These claims may or may not be true, but Salesforce.com makes a compelling sales pitch. A lot of our
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customers use Salesforce.com. They bought HubSpot as a kind of add-on to their
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software. Why keep paying extra for HubSpot when they can buy their marketing software from the same company that makes their CRM software? No doubt Salesforce.com also offers an attractive price if you buy the bundle. “So what do you say when your customers tell you that
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Salesforce.com is trying to poach them away?” I ask the sales rep. “What story can we tell our customers to counter the story they’re getting from Salesforce?” The sales rep just shrugs. Halligan has decided that if
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Salesforce.com is going to enter our market space, then we will enter theirs. In secret, HubSpot’s engineers have started
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developing a CRM program to compete against Salesforce.com, but we haven’t announced it yet. Cranium has become obsessed with Salesforce.com. He hates these guys! He wants to kill them! He’s like Ahab stalking the whale. Before
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the ExactTarget deal, Cranium loved Salesforce.com. He used to spend a fortune buying booth space at Dreamforce. In 2011 he made forty HubSpot employees dress up in orange cheerleader tracksuits
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trouble. Sure, Benioff is full of shit, but so are we, and Benioff is way better at being full of shit than we are. Also, Salesforce.com’s sales are about fifty times what ours are. In terms of hype, the disparity is even greater. Just two months before this, HubSpot
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. When it comes to these things, nobody comes close to Benioff. Nobody has cashed in on the bubble as well as he has. In 2012, Salesforce.com lost more than a quarter of a billion dollars, and in 2013 it will lose almost as much. In 2013 the company is fourteen
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making a profit. But its revenues are growing more than 30 percent each year, and growth is what investors are looking for, so even though Salesforce.com is bleeding red ink, its stock has doubled over the past two years, and Benioff’s personal net worth has soared to $2.6
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multitoned shoes, called Cloud Walkers, custom made by Christian Louboutin. He says he chose that Huey Lewis song because the power of love is what Salesforce.com is all about. He doesn’t want to talk about business. He wants to talk about the hundreds of millions of dollars that he
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and Salesforce.com have donated to worthy causes. “The best drug I ever took,” he says, “was philanthropy.” I suspect that opening with a big-name band
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and got them to rename the place after him. Next he shows a movie about Haiti and earthquake victims, and talks about all the money Salesforce.com has sent there to help rebuild the country. When the movie ends, he introduces the prime minister of Haiti, Laurent Lamothe, along with supermodel
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“Back in Time,” and then there’s a huge fake thunder explosion, dry ice machines blanket the stage in fog, and the co-founder of Salesforce.com, Parker Harris, drives onstage in a white Tesla and leaps out dressed as Emmett “Doc” Brown from the movie Back to the Future, in
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how Harris has just returned from the year 2019 and brought back some software he found there, and that is what Salesforce.com will be announcing today. The truth is that Salesforce.com has little new to introduce. All of the stuff about hospitals and Haitians and Huey Lewis is meant to
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—yet oddly enough only four members of Benioff’s twenty-two member management team and only one member of his board of directors are female. Salesforce.com is run almost entirely by white men. But look—over there! It’s the prime minister of Haiti! And wait, hold on—is that
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Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. Alec Baldwin gives a talk. Tony Bennett and Jerry Seinfeld make appearances. It’s all part of what Salesforce.com describes as “dynamic programming to exhilarate the Dreamforce community.” Cavernous halls are lined with countless booths rented out by software makers hawking programs that
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work with Salesforce: add-ons, plug-ins, mobile apps. There’s a “connected devices playground” and a “Dreamforce hackathon.” There are more than a thousand breakout sessions and
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“success clinics,” where people can learn how to sell stuff. Two people dressed up in foam balls—the Salesforce.com mascots, SaaSy and Chatty—bounce around the conference, dancing awkwardly with legions of mostly white people. The final day features a speech by Deepak
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of megalomaniacal self-aggrandizement. Five months from now, in April 2014, Benioff will announce plans to make Salesforce.com the anchor tenant for a new skyscraper that is already under construction in San Francisco. Salesforce.com will commit $560 million to help finish work on the one-thousand-foot glass-and-steel
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skyscraper, which will become the company’s headquarters and be named the Salesforce Tower. When it opens in 2018, it will be the tallest building in the city, dwarfing everything around it. Maybe Benioff is oblivious to the
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liner at pier 27 to serve as a hotel and party space—the Dreamboat, he calls it. Salesforce.com still isn’t turning a profit, but thanks to Benioff’s huffing and puffing Salesforce.com’s market value has topped $50 billion and Benioff’s own net worth has swollen to $4
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starting to swoon. One index of thirty-seven publicly traded cloud-related companies loses $58 billion in market value over the course of two months. Salesforce.com, our rival and role model, drops 25 percent. Workday, another cloud company that’s comparable to HubSpot, drops 40 percent. On May 1, the
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good news for HubSpot, which by the summer of 2014 was borrowing money to pay its bills. The market wasn’t on fire. Shares in Salesforce.com, our rival and the best-known SaaS company, were still well below the levels they had reached in February. It was far from certain
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an amazing gift: customized Bose QuietComfort 15 headphones. “Congratulations for earning your place as the best marketing team in the world,” Cranium writes. “Workday, NetSuite, Salesforce, Rackspace, LinkedIn, and Facebook all look up to you and want to do marketing like you do (all of those companies have asked me to
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’s a huge deal for Hubspot—it’s our version of Dreamforce, the four-day orgy that Salesforce.com puts on every fall in San Francisco. We’re a fraction of the size of Salesforce.com, but we’re trying to flex our muscles and look big. This year the show is
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buy apps and music from Apple. We hire drivers through Uber, and rent apartments through Airbnb. Companies use Workday for HR, Zendesk for customer service, Salesforce.com for customer tracking, Slack for messaging, and on and on. Most of these companies don’t operate their own data centers. Instead, they rent
Getting Started With OAuth 2.0
by Ryan Boyd · 29 Feb 2012 · 91pp · 18,831 words
in their online filesystem of choice Integrating business applications with one another to drive smarter decisions by mashing up multiple data sources such as a Salesforce CRM and TripIt travel plan In order to access or update private data via each of these APIs, an application needs to be delegated access
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will be immediately redirected back to the application with an authorization code, as described below in Step 2: Exchange authorization code for an access token. Salesforce provides this option as “no user approval required” on their control panel page to define Remote Access Applications. Error handling If all request parameters are
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app. Programmatic revocation is defined in a draft extension to the OAuth 2.0 specification and is implemented by popular OAuth providers such as Salesforce and Google. Salesforce allows for revocation of both refresh tokens and access tokens, while Google only enables revocation of refresh tokens. Here’s an example revocation request
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://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/revoke?token=ya29.AHES6ZSzF" The extension also defines a JSONP “callback” query parameter that OAuth providers can optionally support. Both Salesforce and Google support this parameter. A 200 response code indicates successful revocation. Chapter 3. Client-Side Web Applications Flow The Implicit Grant flow for browser
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with an error message indicating the failure. This allows the app to gracefully prompt the user as needed for renewed authorization. For the Google and Salesforce OAuth authorization endpoints, you can provide an additional query parameter value immediate=true to enable immediate mode. How Can Access Be Revoked? See the description
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, this defeats some of the benefit of this flow. Step-by-Step To demonstrate this flow, we’ll use an example built on top of Salesforce’s REST-based APIs. Our example will retrieve and output all contacts accessible to the resource owner in the
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Salesforce CRM system. We’ll assume the example application is a native mobile application written by Acme Corporation and distributed to its employees through a corporate
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user for their credentials The first step is asking the user to provide their credentials to the application. In addition to a username and password, Salesforce requires that a user enter their security token when logging into an app from an untrusted network, such as the networks used by popular mobile
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the authorization server, providing the credentials and client information. You can find the authorization server URL in the API provider’s documentation. For Salesforce, the URL is https://login.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token Here are the required POST parameters: grant_type Specified as “password” for this flow. scope The data your
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application is requesting access to. It is not required for Salesforce and is optional for other APIs. The Winter ’12 version of Salesforce introduces optional values for this parameter. client_id The value provided to you when you registered your application. Although optional
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in the spec, this value is required by Salesforce. Registration of the app is achieved using the App Setup→Develop→Remote Access menu. client_secret The value provided to you when you registered your
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. username The username provided by the resource owner, encoded as UTF-8. password The password provided by the resource owner, encoded as UTF-8. For Salesforce, you need to concatenate the security token entered by the user at the end of the entered password and pass the combined value as the
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_type=password" \ -d "client_id=3MVG9QDx8IKCsXTFM0o9aE3KfEwsZLvRt" \ -d "client_secret=4826278391389087694" \ -d "username=ryan%40ryguy.com" \ -d "password=_userspassword__userssecuritytoken_" \ https://login.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token If the user-provided credentials are successfully authenticated, the Salesforce OAuth authorization server will return an application/json response containing an access_token: { "id":"https://login
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.salesforce.com/id/00DU0000000Io8rMAC/005U0000000hMDCIA2", "issued_at":"1316990706988", "instance_url":"https://na12.salesforce.com", "signature":"Q2KTt8Ez5dwJ4Adu6QttAhCxbEP3HyfaTUXoNI=", "access_token":"00DU0000000Io8r!AQcKbNiJPt0OCSAvxU2SBjVGP6hW0mfmKH07QiPEGIX" } What do each of these response parameters mean? access_token The access token used to access the
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API on behalf of the user who provided their credentials. This is the only required item in the response. id (Salesforce-specific value) The unique identity of the user. This URL can also be accessed as any other OAuth-protected resource to obtain more information about
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header sent in the request. instance_url The URL prefix the client application should use to access the API. This response parameter is specific to Salesforce’s implementation. signature A signature used to validate that the identity URL hasn’t been modified since being sent from the server. Although
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isn’t strictly necessary; instead, the application can use the built-in protections of HTTPS to ensure communication with Salesforce’s servers. This response parameter is specific to Salesforce’s implementation. issued_at (Salesforce-specific value) The time the signature was generated, used for validating it. Step 3: Call the API Since the
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curl request: curl -d "q=SELECT+name+FROM+Account"\ -H 'Authorization: Bearer 00DU0000000Io8r!AQcAQKJ.Cg1dCBCVHmx2.Iu3lroPQBV2P65_jXk' "https://na12.salesforce.com/services/data/v20query" Step 4: Refresh the access token Although Salesforce does not support refreshing the access token when using this flow, the spec does accommodate it using the method described
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is to use Google’s APIs and OAuth endpoints, the tool does enable you to specify a custom client ID, client secret, and custom endpoints. Salesforce has blogged about how to use the tool with their APIs. Figure 8-1. Google’s OAuth Playground Note This tool is made available by
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an ID token as the id_token parameter. Apigee’s Console The Apigee Console enables exploring APIs from 20+ API providers, such as Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, and SoundCloud. For those APIs supporting OAuth, it performs a typical OAuth flow, though without exposing the protocol-level details of the OAuth exchange. After
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) OAuth 2.0: Token revocation Vendor Documentation Facebook Authentication Facebook Graph API Digging Deeper into OAuth 2.0 on Force.com Authenticating Remote Access with Salesforce Google OAuth 2.0 Google’s Internet Identity Research Google’s OAuth 2.0 Controllers for iOS OAuth 2.0 on Android OAuth 2.0
Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie · 15 Nov 2019
, Intel, Teledyne, ROLM, Amgen, Genentech, Advanced Micro Devices, Tandem, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Dell, Electronic Arts, Compaq, FedEx, Netscape, LSI, Yahoo!, Amazon, Cisco, PayPal, eBay, Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, Uber, Skype, Twitter, and Airbnb. But Mary Jane and the other Alpha Girls would need steel in their spines to stay
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Magdalena’s names. “What are you doing with these guys?” Jim asked, studying the fax. “I’m building a company,” Magdalena replied. “To be called Salesforce.com.” SONJA By early 2000, Eve, the online cosmetics giant, had surpassed even Sonja’s expectations, becoming nearly twice the size of Sephora online. The
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for a board meeting, and most important, a scheduled call with Marc Benioff to talk about a situation that had surfaced with their start-up, Salesforce. As she thought about the call, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, approached, followed by his trainer, gym owner Ken Preminger. Magdalena and Ellison,
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the first and second outside investors in Salesforce, were normally on good terms, tending to chat about camping, hiking, and Yosemite. She found him easy to talk to, though she also knew that
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looked Ellison straight in the eye and said, “You need to leave the board and stop copying us.” Ellison had become a board member of Salesforce after investing $2 million. As their trainers fidgeted in awkward silence, Magdalena went on, “This is a clear example of conflict of interest, of
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up about something she felt strongly about. Her father had taught her to stand on her own two feet as a child. The friction between Salesforce and Oracle, a sort of David versus Goliath scenario, had generated a media frenzy. Ellison accused Benioff, a skilled salesman, of using the controversy
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to generate media attention for his company. As Ellison noted, dismissing any notion of copying Salesforce, Oracle was evolving from a database company to an online provider of software services. But the situation was also deeply personal. Ellison had been Benioff
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and friend. At six foot five, Benioff was sometimes called an Ellison “Mini Me.” Ellison had supported Benioff when he took his sabbatical and launched Salesforce; he had invested millions and given Benioff flex time to get the company started. When Benioff announced he was leaving, Ellison told him not to
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juggling act. Robin’s story kept Theresia tossing and turning at night. MAGDALENA Magdalena and Marc Benioff were confident they could raise venture funding for Salesforce. Magdalena, of course, had USVP, and Benioff knew VCs in the Valley, including former Oracle president Ray Lane, who had just joined Kleiner Perkins
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Caufield & Byers. Magdalena organized meetings so that various groupings of USVP venture partners could meet Benioff, chairman and founder, one day and Salesforce execs John Dillon, the CEO, and Jim Cavalieri, the systems engineering head, another day. The meetings advanced up the food chain until it was time
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USVP partnership. Benioff could be mesmerizing when he was on, but he came across as aloof when he wasn’t. He loved talking about how Salesforce’s software for salespeople could be sold in an entirely new way: online and by service rather than as a massive package that was expensive
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to buy, complicated to install, and generally far more than what most clients needed. Salesforce had what it called “multi-tenant architecture,” where the same software served different customers and made resource distribution more efficient. The CRM software would be
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fees. Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez, Paul Nakada, and the programming and tech development team had built a prototype within a month of joining Salesforce in March 1999. (Dominguez flew down from Portland during the week and slept on a futon under his desk.) That July Magdalena had been the
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Brooklyn native and self-described “bean counter”—he started his career as an accountant—thought there was a market for it, but Benioff had valued Salesforce at $100 million. He wanted to sell 10 percent for $10 million. Federman looked at Benioff and thought, He’s got holes in his
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was Benioff. Both men had made a lot of money from their Siebel investments. When it was Magdalena’s turn to make the case for Salesforce, she told the USVP partners, “We are going to take on Siebel Systems. We are basically going to take the ten to fifteen percent
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t gag this down,” he told his partners afterward. “It’s all about valuation.” Magdalena, who had committed $500,000 of her own money to Salesforce over her lunch with Benioff in San Mateo, was shocked when USVP passed. But after making pitches to multiple firms—including Accel, where she met
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When Siebel changed his mind, Benioff, who had also been mulling over an idea for an Internet-based start-up for sales teams, had launched Salesforce. Federman liked the concept a lot more coming from Tom Siebel. Siebel had a reasonable valuation for Sales.com and was a tech superstar. He
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managed to keep their spouses and their lovers separate and happy. She would just have to be respectful of her husband—USVP—and her lover—Salesforce—at the same time. PART FIVE Girl Power 2002 LATE FALL 2002 Magdalena normally avoided all-women’s industry events, likening them to “bitch
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Magdalena joins US Venture Partners on Sand Hill Road, 1998. Founder Bill Bowes is at front center. Photo courtesy of Magdalena Yeşil Magdalena at a Salesforce Christmas party, Roy’s Restaurant in San Francisco, ca. 2001. Photo courtesy of Magdalena Yeşil Magdalena with husband, Jim, and their sons Troy (left),
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a month. Investors were spooked, and the potential for bankruptcy was real. A 10 percent staff reduction had been ordered across departments. Since its infancy, Salesforce had relied on small payments from small companies. It offered its software free for up to five users for the first month, and customers could
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any time. All this was done on a contract-free “pay as you go” model. Small businesses, typically more open to adopting new technologies, were Salesforce’s most important evangelists. All this had worked beautifully until the economy collapsed and most of those small Internet companies went bankrupt, decimating the evangelist
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ranks. Magdalena pondered Salesforce’s fate. There were parallels between raising kids, she realized, and building a company. Get them to crawl before they walk. Nurture, lead, and
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desire to be pulled into the morning chaos of missing socks, homework, breakfast, and backpacks. Magdalena turned her attention to the cash flow crisis at Salesforce. Its business model—Marc Benioff’s genius in attracting attention and defining the company—was intentionally anti–Siebel Systems: no licensing of products, no discounts
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expense. It was one price for all, pay for what you need when you need it. It had been great for customers but crippling for Salesforce. Adding to its current problems, the company couldn’t expand without hiring more salespeople, generating more expenses. As Magdalena opened an Excel spreadsheet, she
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maybe four months left before running out of cash. They had two possible sources of money: equity from investors and payments from customers. Customers accessed Salesforce software entirely online, a novelty at the time. They could access it every day, all day, through an account on its website. Magdalena thought
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Customers bought the license, took it to their offices, paid for it to be installed, and owned it outright, like moving furniture into a home. Salesforce operated more like an electric company, charging the customer by the amount of usage. Studying sales revenue, expenses, and the commission structure, Magdalena zeroed in
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no licenses, no discounts. It was as much a part of him as his Hawaiian shirts and his golden retriever sidekick, Koa. For Magdalena, saving Salesforce had nothing to do with protecting her $500,000 personal investment. It was about saving the team, the idea, the product, and the potential. If
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they didn’t do something soon, Salesforce would go the way of so many other dot-coms, into the abyss of what venture capitalists euphemistically called “orderly shutdowns.” SONJA At her office
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to let some insecure VC rumormongers stop her from landing big deals. MAGDALENA Magdalena was ready to take her idea—improving the cash flow of Salesforce—to Marc Benioff. She had crunched the numbers repeatedly, as well as sought feedback from the sales team leader, Frank van Veenendaal. Veenendaal had
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way forward. When she was confident her proposal was thoroughly vetted and cogent, she drove to San Francisco to meet Marc. They usually met at Salesforce’s office at One Market Street or a restaurant nearby. Occasionally they’d sit in Magdalena’s car, when she found a rare downtown parking
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filled with an oddly colored liquid. One day a little while back, as the two were about to go into a conference room to pitch Salesforce to an investor, Marc had grabbed Magdalena’s bottle of water and poured some yellow powder into it. She thought the powdered vitamin mixture looked
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is against everything we stand for.” To Marc, the “End of Software” mission statement and the NO SOFTWARE logo were how the company differentiated itself. Salesforce was committed to providing every company—small, medium, and large—with the same affordable and easy-to-access software, with no contracts or up-front
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was free advertising. Marc ventured outside several times a week to check the positioning of the posters. Magdalena, though, was not about to give up. “Salesforce’s no-risk, no-commitment environment for our customers is threatening our very livelihood,” she said. “We have got to the stage where we’ve
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to longer contracts. But Marc shook his head determinedly. When the economy tanked, VCs and others had urged him to drop the dot-com in Salesforce.com, saying “Don’t you know dot-coms are dead?” Dot-coms were now “dot-bombs” and “dot-cons.” But Marc believed in the
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transformative power of the Internet. Benioff was a lover of nature, technology, animals, and yoga, which he was known to practice with his dog, Koa, Salesforce’s “chief love officer.” But most of all, at heart, he was a salesman—and a pragmatist. He thrived on people buying what he was
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a boombox blasting music. Not much of a drinker himself, Marc handed Courtney a glass of champagne. She said yes to the job offer from Salesforce because she believed that the delivery of software desperately needed to change. At this point, she had little faith in Marc as a leader and
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for staffers in need and had established a culture of philanthropy. She told Magdalena that the employees’ biggest fear was being acquired by Microsoft. The Salesforce team had begun to realize they had a great product, and they wanted to stay independent. Magdalena also got to know former Oracle employee Tien
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on the idea of a poster featuring his friend the Dalai Lama meditating under the slogan “There is no software on the path to enlightenment.” Salesforce printed 650 of the posters and sent them to journalists and clients as invitations to a benefit for the Himalayan Foundation. The idea backfired, and
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the press weighed in with scathing stories and headlines: “On the path to enlightenment, Salesforce.com has taken a detour.” Marc issued a public apology, and Tien fielded calls from the Dalai Lama’s people warning legal action. But through
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everyone took seats in the partners’ conference room. Zuckerberg casually handed Theresia and the others his business card. It read: “I’m CEO, Bitch.” MAGDALENA Salesforce had gone public in June 2004, and since then, the stock had been fluctuating, tempting employees to constantly track gains and losses. Marc wanted to
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than anyone else. Work for the customer, not the investor, or employees, or your boss.” The IPO had made paper millionaires out of many of Salesforce’s early investors and employees. Courtney Broadus was just happy to be able to pay off her car lease. She was amused when she began
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to stay home in California to take care of him. She watched the proceedings from her home in Atherton. Walking into USVP shortly after the Salesforce IPO, Magdalena was oddly melancholy. Her $500,000 personal investment was worth millions of dollars on paper—cause for a lifetime of celebrations. But
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Over a difficult breakfast with Marc Benioff, Magdalena, without going into details, told him she had health concerns and would need to resign from the Salesforce board. She told him that she would be fine, but the concern in his eyes was clear. They’d come a long way together, and
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as Clarify and Aspect Communications, changed the way businesses and customers interacted. The legacy of these companies was seen in later-enterprise software companies, including Salesforce, WorkDay, and PeopleSoft, which had been acquired by Oracle. * * * Arriving at Bill’s apartment, MJ studied her hands; she was still wearing her wedding
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nearly died a thousand deaths, had recently reported annual revenues of $1.3 billion. If plans went through, the company’s headquarters would be called Salesforce Tower, and it would be the tallest building in San Francisco and, in fact, in the western United States. At the moment, the tallest things
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seats. She didn’t believe in quotas. Magdalena was getting her second wind in her career. Walking along the streets in Istanbul, she passed a Salesforce office. The company she had helped build was now global, with about thirty thousand employees, and her friend Marc Benioff was a billionaire many times
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over. Salesforce Tower in San Francisco had officially opened a few months earlier and was now the tallest office building west of the Mississippi. The company had
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beyond her perception and her sense of reality. One of the few times she hadn’t embraced the unknowable was when she’d left the Salesforce board too early. She had set unreasonable, perfectionist standards for herself. That decision, made out of fear, had been a mistake. It had gone
The Crux
by Richard Rumelt · 27 Apr 2022 · 363pp · 109,834 words
other situations entirely. There is no avoiding the fact that wide knowledge and experience are very helpful in tapping into appropriate analogies. Marc Benioff started Salesforce.com as a direct analogy to Amazon. Howard Schultz started Starbucks after observing a coffee shop in Milan, Italy. Bill Gross started GoTo as an
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work. There can be no one approach, or “strategy,” for dealing with them all, as we will see from the challenges that Salesforce.com and Ryanair have faced. SALESFORCE.COM The development of Salesforce.com nicely illustrates the sequence of challenge and strategic response that shapes a company over time. To say that
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Salesforce.com had a “strategy” during its development so simplifies the concept as to make it almost meaningless. Marc Benioff was the kind of kid who
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. Marc Benioff recalled how in 1996 he dreamed how to build a cloud-based CRM: “I came up with the idea about how to build Salesforce.com in my sleep. Literally. I had a weird dream in which I envisioned Amazon.com, but instead of the tabs with Books, CDs, or
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was to build publicity. He courted reporters and writers, held extravagant Silicon Valley parties, and did everything he could to spread the word. He described Salesforce.com as a radical disruptor, aiming to obliterate the standard software industry. Benioff adopted a symbol showing the word software with a red slash through
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it and coupled it with the slogan “No software.” A video promotion showed the Salesforce.com jet fighter shooting down the old “software” biplane.3 The buzz and sense of creating the future did attract a group of talented developers
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surprisingly, was getting companies to actually buy the product. The crux of this challenge was that such decisions were largely made by the IT department. Salesforce.com was relatively unknown, and signing up might well make the CRM people in the IT department redundant. The initial attack was to bypass corporate
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. The company changed its policy to target small businesses, especially the many being suddenly created by the Internet boom. With the Internet crash in 2000, Salesforce.com faced financial difficulties. Many of its small business customers disappeared. An internal debate arose about billing—could the company remain true to its no
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base to offer “apps” and, eventually, bundles of apps. This idea then morphed into one of letting customers adapt the product to their own circumstances. Salesforce.com took the original tabs (Accounts, Leads, and so forth) and added “blank tabs” that the user could customize. The key to making this work
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called it an “iTunes for business.” Then in 2006 came tools for writing code to actually run on Salesforce’s servers (Apex) along with tools for building custom visual interfaces. With these steps, Salesforce.com was moving away from simply being a cloud-based CRM to being a cloud platform for a
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by being able to offer this ability to clients for their own social networking programs. Clearly, Benioff began with some underlying set of ambitions for Salesforce.com. Yet there were numerous strategic challenges that had to be met during his ongoing quest. And, obviously, as each challenge was met, the ambition
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were designs, not choices. And the power was in these designs coupled with a willingness to shift and adapt as well as in forceful implementation. Salesforce.com was the first dot-com listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In early 2021, it had sixty thousand employees, was valued at $243
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two in the Fortune list of “best companies to work for.” The free sign-up has evolved into free trials. Point your browser to www.salesforce.com to get one. Benioff’s design has become known as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and is the model for a host of other
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’s business pattern. Perhaps I am not the salesperson I should be, but we parted ways without devising a strategy for WebCo to become the Salesforce.com of the Web-commerce world. WebCo never developed a strategy that would enable it to “grow up.” Today the company remains small, has a
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-market CRM Total Cost of Ownership” (Yankee Group, July 2001). 2. Marc R. Benioff and Carlye Adler, Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company—and Revolutionized an Industry (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 134. 3. Ben McCarthy, “A Brief History of
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Salesforce.Com, 1999–2020,” November 14, 2016, www.salesforceben.com/brief-history-salesforce-com. 4. Marc Benioff, comments at Dreamforce 7, November 18, 2009. 5. “Telegraph Travel,” Telegraph, September 28, 2016. 6
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, 42–45 Amazon close coupling of activities, 188 cloud-based computing, 79 customer-centric strategy, 123 long-term financial approach, 267–268 Marketplace service, 42 Salesforce.com as analogy, 48 semiconductor manufacturing, 78 value and earnings, 259 ambitions characteristics of gnarly challenges, 38 chunking the challenges, 75–76 clash among internal
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ambitions, 70–73 versus goals, 20–22 Salesforce.com’s adaptive strategy, 59 Vietnam War, 71–73 AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), 77, 81, 103 analogies, 48–49, 147–150 analysis and diagnosis of
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, 131–133 Rosenthal, Brian, 157–158 Rude Awakening (Keller), 219 Rumsfeld, Donald, 292–294, 296 Ryanair, 48, 59–62 Sales Force Automation (SFA), 57–58 Salesforce.com, 48, 55–59 Samsung, 195 Sankarlingam, Velchamy, 210 scaling, 195–198 GM’s reform, 221 identifying challenges in the Strategy Foundry, 306 semiconductor industry
Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh · 14 Apr 2018 · 286pp · 87,401 words
heavily defended niches to exploit breakout opportunities. For example, Slack’s rapid growth after its launch blindsided a host of entrenched competitors like Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Second, you can leverage your lead to build long-term competitive advantages before other players are able to respond. We’ll explore this concept
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thus dealing in bits rather than atoms), online marketplaces avoid many of the growth limits of human or infrastructure scalability. PROVEN PATTERN #5: SUBSCRIPTIONS When Salesforce.com first launched its on-demand customer relationship management product, there were many legitimate questions about this new software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Selling
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enterprise software. The cash flow disadvantages and required personnel shifts were real concerns, but mainly for existing players in the market. New SaaS businesses like Salesforce.com and Workday were designed and built around the new model, giving them a major advantage over existing players who tried to convert their on
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seven-figure range simply to make the model work. This meant that software vendors focused on the needs of only the largest customers. In contrast, Salesforce.com and other SaaS vendors can sell software licenses in any quantity, not only to Fortune 500 companies, but also to midmarket and small to
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work on two largely separate products, but that’s precisely what we did, despite the inefficiency and messiness. Second, we had to rapidly scale a salesforce while we were still developing the product they were selling. This took a lot of hard work on the part of LinkedIn’s CEOs, Dan
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an app to a platform so that you can attract people to build on and to your platform (thereby leveraging the network effect of compatibility). Salesforce.com’s Force.com ecosystem is a great example of this. By offering the ability to build third-party applications on top of the
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from a “force multiplier.” There are over 2,800 apps on the Salesforce AppExchange, and an International Data Corporation (IDC) study showed that the Salesforce ecosystem generates 2.8 times the revenues of Salesforce.com itself. That means that while Salesforce.com has revenues of “only” $8.4 billion, its platform gives it the
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your business. You’ll often have to do things that don’t scale when it comes to sales (e.g., founder Marc Benioff brought in Salesforce.com’s first customer, Blue Martini Software, by calling in a favor from its CEO Monte Zweben), operations (e.g., Paul English listed his personal
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—are known for their distinctive cultures, regardless of their era. The same can be said for more recent start-up market leaders like Airbnb and Salesforce.com. Typically, the credit for these cultures goes to the founders. Bill Hewlett and David Packard are synonymous with the HP Way. Bob Noyce, Gordon
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app, users can upload financial details and get a mortgage loan decision in minutes. Quicken Loans launched Rocket Mortgage in November 2015, Detroit, MI SALESFORCE.com Salesforce.com Salesforce.com provides cloud-based applications for sales, service, and marketing, as well as enabling partners to offer and run their own solutions on the
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Salesforce Platform. Founded February 1999, San Francisco, CA SLACK Slack.com Slack provides cloud-based collaboration tools and services that connect teams with the apps, services,
Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI
by Carissa Véliz · 21 Apr 2026 · 503pp · 129,255 words
out to invest in the governance of AI, he created the National AI Advisory Committee, which included executives from Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Salesforce, and few representatives from civil society. Tech executives were invited to state dinners at the White House. The more personal connections get struck between government
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, Salman, 268 Rushkoff, Douglas, 189–90 Russell, Molly, 138 Russia, 85–86, 187 Rutherford, Ernest, 55 S safety, illusion of, 178–80, 252, 265, 279 Salesforce, 81 Sandberg, Sheryl, 78 Sarajevo, 239 Saramago, José, 268, 289 scenario planning, 254–55, 285 Schaake, Marietje, 81 Schlick, Moritz, 175 Schmidt, Eric, 75, 78
The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff
by Clara Shih · 30 Apr 2009 · 255pp · 76,495 words
Conventional wisdom said that “innovation was dead.” I did not agree. I realized massive changes needed to be made in our industry, so I started salesforce.com with one simple idea: Make the software applications people use for business as easy to use as a Web site like Amazon.com. Innovation
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an Internet connection can create even very complex and robust Web applications without any of the onerous infrastructure investment once required. Just look at the salesforce.com developer community, which now has over 450 independent software vendor (ISV) partners and 100,000 developers from around the world. Together, they have
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a few days she developed Faceconnector (formerly Faceforce), the first enterprise social networking mashup that pulls Facebook profile and friend data in real time into Salesforce CRM. Clara had the vision that the next generation of enterprise software won’t be about software at all. It will be about people
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Clara. Force.com for Facebook makes it easy for Facebook developers to build enterprise social apps on Force.com’s global, trusted enterprise infrastructure. At salesforce.com, we’ve spent the last ten years building out enterprise-grade functionality like workflow, security, multilanguage and multicurrency, and integration services “in the
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service reps and sales reps to tap the knowledge of customer conversations taking place on social networks, are proof that social CRM is real. At salesforce.com, we have witnessed firsthand the power of connecting on Facebook. Early on, I encouraged everyone in our organization to sign up and required
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looked to social networking as an opportunity to become relevant in our customers’ conversations, in their communities, where they want to be. We have a salesforce.com page to increase brand presence through sharing information about our company, posting photos from events, and uploading videos, such as a “trailer” to
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best part is the strength we have in numbers. Our employees update their profile with work-related information, and even mentioning that they work at salesforce.com magnifies our footprint. Another real benefit has been in recruiting. The very best way to source new talent has always come from leveraging
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-level employee—must do to best prepare to compete, survive, and win in this revolutionary new era. —Marc R. Benioff Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com From the Library of Kerri Ross xii Th e Fa ce b o o k E ra Acknowledgments I first need to thank my
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innovative companies of our time, and have kept this manuscript honest. I owe this manuscript largely to the inspiration and support of my mentors at salesforce.com for whom I have tremendous admiration both professionally and personally: Marc Benioff, George Hu, Steve Fisher, Kendall Collins, Steve Lucas, Ariel Kelman, and
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have changed my life and changed an entire industry. I am grateful for the many lessons I learn each day from my AppExchange team at salesforce.com—Ryan Ellis, Ed Park, Sara Bright (Varni), Marie Laxague Rosecrans, Leyla Seka, and Eugene Feldman. I couldn’t have asked for a better
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Shih is the creator of Faceconnector (formerly Faceforce), the first business application on Facebook. In addition, Clara is the product line director of AppExchange, salesforce.com’s online marketplace for business Software-as-a-service applications built by third-party developers and ISVs. (Editor’s note: Upon completing this book
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, Clara has created a new role and team at salesforce.com focused on enterprise social networking alliances and product strategy.) Previously, Clara worked in strategy and business operations at Google, and before that as a
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was missing. Photos and SuperPoking are fun, but where were the business applications? I was working (and still work) at an enterprise computing company, salesforce.com, which made its name From the Library of Kerri Ross 2 Th e Fa ce b o o k E ra developing customer relationship
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“consumer” social media. New companies emerged, like Telligent, Socialcast, and Small World Labs, to build enterprise social technology from the ground up. My employer, salesforce.com, brought voting, tagging, profiles, feeds, and other Web 2.0 capabilities into its IT platform and CRM applications. Oracle announced a strategy around “social
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people always overestimate what you can do in one year and underestimate what you can do in one decade.” —Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO, salesforce.com The Fourth Revolution pproximately once a decade, a radical new technology emerges that fundamentally changes the business landscape. In every case, regardless of prior
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Data-mined biographical and contact data are being sold to salespeople and recruiters. For instance, Massachusetts-based company ZoomInfo has developed a product that allows Salesforce CRM users to access business information about sales prospects from its database of tens of millions of people and companies. Instead of selling data about
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study is a good example of social filtering at work in online communities. MyStarbucksIdea for Facebook MyStarbucksIdea is an online ideation community (powered by the Salesforce Ideas application) for Starbucks Coffee Company customers to post, vote, and comment on suggestions for how Starbucks could be improved. Less than a year
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of thousands of ideas, comments, and users. As part of the Force.com for Facebook platform partnership between Facebook and salesforce.com, a prototype was built that takes the original Salesforce Ideas application and brings it inside Facebook. This new application, called MyStarbucksIdea for Facebook, applies social filtering to how each
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a popular Facebook application that allows users to promote their favorite charities on their profile page. With Force.com for Facebook, its platform partnership with salesforce.com, Facebook hopes to take social platform applications even further into the realm of business and productivity applications. For example, application developer Appirio used
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on other sites. For example, Faceconnector (originally called Faceforce) is a mashup I developed that pulls Facebook profile information and friend data into the Salesforce CRM application. Depending on the individual’s privacy settings and degrees of separation, a sales rep viewing a lead or contact record in
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of possibility to CRM by enriching critical sales practices with contextual information and relationship-building tools. Figure 4.1 CRM systems like this one from salesforce.com offer business visibility for managers, improved rep productivity, and effective selling processes. This chapter is divided into three parts. First, it walks through
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. They might even ask mutual friends for introductions. Figure 4.5 Faceconnector (originally Faceforce) pulls real-time Facebook profile and social graph data into Salesforce CRM account, contact, and lead records so that sales reps can tap into the insights of the online social graph to make their pitch more
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provide deal information on public social networking sites. Rather, this informal deal collaboration is happening within enterprise systems like CRM, wikis, and intranet sites. Salesforce.com is investing heavily in this area with new sales collaboration features in its sales force automation application that allow reps working on one sales
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way. Most cited a passion for the product and a desire to demonstrate their knowledge and be viewed as an expert in the community. Recently, salesforce.com unveiled its Service Cloud offering, connecting product conversations across different information silos such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook with internal knowledge bases that
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allows vendors to monitor, aggregate, and search conversations customers are having about their products, and to incorporate crowdsourced solutions into their centralized knowledge based in Salesforce CRM. In addition, Get Satisfaction, Lithium, and FixYa are popular startups that specialize in crowdsourced support tools. Get Satisfaction is used by companies like
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see Figure 4.11). Figure 4.11 Get Satisfaction helps alleviate companies’ support volume by tapping into customers to help answer each other’s questions. Salesforce.com hopes to tackle all three dimensions with Service Cloud, a set of technologies that augment traditional knowledge base solution data with crowdsourced knowledge. Service
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to find out what everyone on Twitter has said about something. For example, because I’m in charge of product management for the AppExchange at salesforce.com, I looked up “AppExchange” on http://search.twitter.com. There were hundreds of tweets (see Figure 6.2). Figure 6.2 Twitter search
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that allows employees of the same company to answer and view colleagues’ answers to a simple question: “What are you working on?” This is salesforce.com’s Yammer page. From the Library of Kerri Ross C h a p te r 6 S o c i a l I n
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a haystack. Tools are being developed to help product managers aggregate, summarize, analyze, and prioritize community feedback. The MyStarbucksIdea for Facebook application (built with Salesforce Ideas) profiled in Chapter 2,“The Evolution of Digital Media,” is one example. Instead of having customers post free-form ideas, Starbucks community managers have
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so that product managers can close the loop if and when the idea becomes implemented. By providing categories and tying participation back to CRM, Salesforce Ideas attempts to bring structure and analytics to traditionally unstructured user-generated content, making it easier for product managers to sort through the best ideas
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, take action on them, and even continue to track them through product development, marketing, and sales. Dell Computer is also using the Salesforce Ideas application to crowdsource ideation. In its first year, Dell’s ideation community, IdeaStorm, generated over 10,000 new ideas and half a million votes
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the Dell product management team, which has been able to accommodate the request and provide a better experience for customers. Dell is also using Salesforce Ideas internally to get suggestions from employees on how to make the company a better place to work and advance their careers. From the Library
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. Doostang positions itself as a private, exclusive network. I, for one, have Doostang to thank for helping place me in my current role at salesforce.com. Ryze Ryze was founded in 2001 by former engineer Adrian Scott. Like Doostang, it has half a million members. A lot of Ryze members
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this book). Here are the lists I use: • Family • Grade School Friends • High School Friends • Stanford Friends • Mayfield Fellows • Oxford Friends • Former Google Coworkers • Salesforce.com Colleagues • Faceforce User • Met at a Conference • Soccer Team • Never Met It’s not that you are being secretive or two-faced by exposing
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workplace, school, or region. Workplace or school (high school, college, or university) networks require e-mail addresses from that domain. For example, to join the salesforce.com network on Facebook, I need to provide my work e-mail address. Facebook will send me a verification e-mail to that address, and
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once I click on the link inside the e-mail, then Facebook takes it as proof that I, in fact, work at salesforce.com and allows me access to the other members in the network. This can be a good way of quickly finding people you know so
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governance. Social networking providers will need to continue rising to the challenge with more and better features that address enterprise requirements. Facebook’s partnership with salesforce.com is a good example of this starting to take place. By bringing a trusted corporate standard around security, privacy, reliability, availability, and compliance
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make employees more productive. As mentioned earlier in this book, Facebook is also making a big push for the enterprise. It has partnered with salesforce.com to create Force.com for Facebook, a set of developer tools that makes it easy to build Facebook applications on Force.com’s enterprise
…
and productivity. The MyStarbucksIdea application and Appirio’s Jobs4MyFriends recruiting application previously profiled were both built using Force.com for Facebook. And of course salesforce.com itself is investing in making its Web applications more socially aware and better integrated with the various social graphs, such as our Service Cloud
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e s s 209 Greater Collaboration Across Organizations As organizational boundaries become less rigid, we will see greater collaboration take place across different organizations. Salesforce to Salesforce is a prime example of how this might play out. It’s a neat idea: Instead of a social network of people
…
, Salesforce to Salesforce is a social network of companies. It allows companies to easily share data such as leads, opportunities, accounts, contacts, and tasks with their suppliers,
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vendors, partners, and customers that also use Salesforce. In a social network of people, the primary interactions might be exchanging messages, writing on someone’s wall, or referring a friend for an open
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easily collaborate with one another without the traditional headache of integration and manual back-and-forth coordination. Here’s an example: Company X uses Salesforce to Salesforce to share leads with its indirect channel partners and introduce approvals around any joint selling opportunities. Company X also automates workflow to adjust orders
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ability to log customer support cases. Just as the people-centric social networking discussed throughout this manuscript helps facilitate interactions and transactions between individuals, Salesforce to Salesforce makes interactions and transactions between companies easier and more efficient with this innovative new conception of an online social network. From the Library of
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e to Us i n g Fa ce b o o k fo r B u s i n e s s Figure 12.2 Salesforce to Salesforce is an online social networking service for companies. A company, such as Liberty Resellers in this case, maintains a set of connections with
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suppliers, channel partners, and customers. Companies can make and accept connection requests just like an individual would on LinkedIn or Facebook. Figure 12.3 With Salesforce to Salesforce, companies can choose to share certain data and workflow, such as accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, tasks, or custom data, by publishing these to
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support, 77-78 prospecting for customers, 65-67 sales team collaboration, 72-73 social capital in, 71 233 sales leads, obtaining, 65-67 Salesforce CRM, 41 Salesforce Ideas, 112 Salesforce to Salesforce, 209-210 salesmen (in social epidemics), 101 Sanrio, unsanctioned communities related to, 149-150 Schatzer, Jeff, 140 Scott, Adrian, 125 search
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