Behind the founder: Marc Benioff

0:00 I wanna zoom back to the beginning of Salesforce. One of the most legendary launch events in startup history. Just looking back at that, any lessons from what you did right to get people to pay attention. I'm throwing everything against the wall and looking at what's gonna stick. I am looking to try to find the winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy. Your stock is at an all-time high. I'm curious just what you believe has most contributed to you being able to stay on top and continue. I actually never look at the stock. I find the stock to be very distracting. The stock isn't the goal. That's not why we're doing this. AI is the defining technology of our lifetime and probably any lifetime. When was kinda the moment for you where you started to realize this? I keep having these kind of existential freak out moments about AI. This is really moving fast. As a founder, you're just like, God damn, I just got used to AI and everyone wanting to work on AI in my company, now we gotta freaking figure out an agents. No no no no no, that's a mistake. You want the mindset of Oh, the next thing is coming, I can't wait for the next thing.

1:01 Today my guest is Mark Benioff. He's co founder and s of Salesforce. which is the second largest B2B SaaS company in the world, worth around$350 billion at the time of this recording. Making thirty five billion a year in revenue. And twenty five years later, it's still growing like crazy.

1:19 and dominating the market. In our conversation, we talk about leadership. AI Domain names. Beginner's mind.

1:26 Marketing. Product sales. The hardest moment in Mark's journey of building Salesforce is Also, what exactly is an agent? And so much more.

1:35 If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that I bring you Mark.

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3:49 This is a limited time offer that's interpret dot com slash Lenny. Yeah. Mark, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Excited to finally get connected with you and excited to do this podcast with you too. I'm even more excited. And I actually want to start with something that

4:07 I think most people don't know about you, but To me is almost like a microcosm of how far ahead you look and almost how Basically how visionary you are. And that's That you've owned.

4:18 A number of epic domain names. For example, build.com. Uh U.com, Code.com, App Store.com. Uh, first of all, are there others I don't know about? There's a lot. Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com.

4:32 That all came from, you know, I'll I'll tell it's a good story, actually,'cause You know, what happened was I was working at Oracle for ten years from nineteen eighty six and Nineteen ninety six rolled around like it was a snap of the fingers. And all of a sudden I realized, Whoa I what has just happened in the last decade? It just the decade just flew by. It was crazy. And it was a big moment for me in my career and I had a

4:56 you know, it was it was a huge acceleration. I went from being you know, a kid right out of college to working for Larry Ellison. And um but it after ten years I was pretty trashed. And so I said to Larry, hey, I need to go. And um you know, take some time off. And so I uh went to Hawaii and rented a little house on the beach.

5:17 And I had done some agile investing and it was kind of a cool moment where some of my companies started to go public including Cel Systems and others and Saba software. And people I had met at Oracle, like Tom Cel and Bobby Asdani and um Then I was just fascinated to that point, you know, with the internet. I had been working on it at Oracle for

5:38 a couple years, so I started buying a bunch of domain names of companies that I thought companies not they weren't companies yet. Now they are companies. But ideas that I thought the names would be great companies one day and reflected where I thought things were going. And Yeah, it's a long time ago now, you know, it's a a really long, long time ago, I think almost thirty years.

5:59 And so one of the domain names you owned with uh Appstore.com, which I know you gift it to Steve Jobs, I read in your book, is there a story there that you could share because that's an epic domain just to gift. It's a great story, but it's really a story about my relationship with Steve Jobs. And when I was, you know, in college in nineteen eighty four, I was have the opportunity to be an intern. at Apple and I wrote the first Native assembly language on the Macintosh. It's kind of a crazy thing to be able to say, but it's True that I was writing these example programs for this Macintosh sixty eight thousand development system.

6:34 In on these You know, Apple headquarter buildings in Banley on Banley Road and in Cupertino. And started to have a relationship with Steve Jobs in that Not that I was actually talking to him. I was like this snot nosed nineteen year old kid. But he's running around the building and like, you know, we have this

6:53 refrigerator over here with all these fruit juices. There's a masseuse over here doing shiats and massages. There's a motorcycle in the In the lobby, there's a pirate flag on the roof, and there's Steve Jobs. running around yelling at everybody. And it was

7:09 Frickin' cool. Okay. So you can just imagine like you're like Whoa this is like I'm in a movie. And uh there's a lot of other cool parts of the movie too that were going on.

7:21 And it kinda started my relationship with him. And then I kinda Actually kinda got to know him then. you know, as I eventually got to Oracle and Then eventually I started Salesforce and I had this moment At Salesforce.

7:35 And uh it was I think two thousand, two thousand one, I cannot remember exactly what it was. Uh And uh w we were at the m opening of one of his movies for Pixar And we're having dinner. There's a lot of details. It'll be a hugely long story if I go forever. And uh he says to me, Well Mark

7:57 Now listen to me. You're s you know, you're doing so great. You've got your Company, sales force. If you need any help, you you make sure you call me, okay? I'm like, Yes, sir, I will do that. And he

8:09 took out his you just introduced the uh iPod. And he's like, You know, I got a thousand songs in my pocket here, look at this and That and all that. And it's this cool device and it's like I'm like, that's such a cool screen. Steve goes, Oh, thanks so much. And I go, Steve.

8:24 You know, you could do movies on there too, not just or photos. You didn't have to do songs. No, Mark. I will never do a s a device like that. Absolutely. And that's a little insight into his personality that he would never, ever exactly like say, Oh yeah, I'm gonna do the movie device, the I had the photo, the phone, the this.

8:43 So Anyway. Things were kinda moving along at Salesforce, and so I Kind of was like kind of stuck. And I kinda need kinda get through my block.

8:56 Writer's block, entrepreneurs block. I'm gonna Reach out to him. And he's like Come down here right away. So literally

9:04 Guided my car, brought a few of my Team with me. And we go down And he's like, Oh yeah. Oh yeah, you're blocked. There's three things you need to do right.

9:14 Now And I'm like, Okay, what are they? Your company it better get ten times larger than it is now in tw or in twenty four months or it's over. Okay. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Number two. You better sign a huge customer for the Salesforce automation product like Avon. They're a great Salesforce.

9:33 And the CO of Avon was on his board at the time, so that was That was on his mind. And one last thing I'm gonna tell you you must do. I'm like, Yes, sir, what what is it? You better go build an application. Economy.

9:46 An application economy? Yes. Well what does that mean? I don't know, but you're gonna go figure it out. And It was like you know, meeting with your guru.

9:58 And You know, g getting a Zen Co on or something where you're now you have a puzzle I have to solve. And I literally went away and I had all the notes From the meaning, you know. I went through it over and over and again.

10:12 And then finally I'm like Think he wants me to build an app store. And at that moment I went to the domain registry and I bought Appstore.com. And then I started working on it at Salesforce so that we would have the ability with our platform

10:28 To build apps and then you know, sell them, you know, and that you could do all these things. So I did all that and you know launched App Exchange in like two thousand five or two thousand six and We didn't call it App Store because when we tested the App Store name and focus groups.

10:46 Customers like this is not a s app store, this is an app exchange, we're all gonna exchange apps and capabilities with each other. Anyway. It rolled out, iPhone rolled out, and then You know, he basically said to me one day, hey, come down.

11:02 And see me, this was maybe like a year after I I filmed. I'm like I'll be right down. And I get down there. And I have some team members with me and They'd heard this story before, et cetera.

11:15 And then Mm. We're sitting there like it's the Apple Auditory. It was not like at a hotel or anything. I remember it very clearly like it was yesterday. And he said, I brought you all down here today And you know, he does very good theatrical performance. I could never do what he does. It's incredible. Yeah, he's got the thing.

11:32 And then he says, and I'm here to reveal to you the app store. And all of our people go, Yeah, they they doesn't break breath and they're all like, No white. Yeah. Because

11:45 They're like, Oh, Mark has been talking about App Store for years and how how could Steve even No and then at the end of it. It's all over. Everyone leaves the auditorium. They're all going out to play with the app store and all these things. And I walk down and he's sitting down there by himself, you know, working on something. Yeah, he's like the corner of the stage.

12:06 I go, hey Steve, can I talk to you for a second?'Cause Course. Very generous with me, very kind with me. Go Steve. I'm gonna give you a gift.

12:17 Well. But Mark, what g what are you gonna give me? Steve, I'm gonna give you Something you don't have, but maybe you'll need. Which is the app store dot com URL, app store dot com, and the trademark.

12:30 for App Store because after that meeting we had like six years ago I ended up trademarking these things and buying this URL and he's like Oh, it's very nice. But you know this app store thing isn't gonna be very big and You know, whatever, but thank you very much. Yeah.

12:47 That was the story of App Store. It's kind of amazing. It's kind of a it was kind of a very amazing relationship that I had with them. Very grateful to have that relationship and dramatically influenced me in my career and my my whole life. Mm-hmm. There's one thread that I love about everything you shared here is how generosity was at the center of so much of this, him helping you, you helping him. Just wanting to help each other. It's he's a very generous person and um I'll tell you that he never turned down anything that I asked him to do.

13:15 And um I have so many stories but one one story was I was I was thinking about um buying this house and I wasn't sure, should I buy this house, should I not buy this house, whatever And so he went, she said, I'll go I'll go look at it for you, you know. And so He went and he's looking at this house and then he calls me and he goes, Well, I don't know if you should do this or that but this might be good

13:39 Maybe it is good. Maybe it is a good idea. And then I'm you know, emailing with him after that and you know, he's very sick and it's all very sad. And then He sends me an email and the last email he sent to me was he said

13:53 I said Wow, well that this this this this has worked out better than I thought he goes Mark, everything has worked out so much better than we could have ever imagined. And it was just a beautiful thought and incredibly sad all at the same moment. And that was my last correspondence with him. Mm-hmm.

14:14 I feel like we could do Steve Jobs stories all day. Yeah. Oh I know I have I could do hours. I have a lot of Steve Jobs stories. Oh man. But um yeah, anyway, those are a couple of them. By the way, I also love that he had like B to B SaaS advice, like here you need a big customer, you need to hide that E C V h the marketplace. He hated Sass and he hated That I was doing enterprise software. He's trying to talk me out of being an enterprise software executive. He's like now, Mark.

14:39 Yeah. What are you gonna do? You're gonna go home and tell your kids that you're working on enterprise software. Who do you sell to CIOs? Have you had met them? How can you be doing this? What I can't imagine a more horrible career. I'm like, I love that Steve No, Mark, you cannot love this. This is not great.

14:56 It was really a funny thing. He really disliked that, but yet he was incredibly supportive of me. He would call me all the time. It was really it was really amazing, actually. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Feels like a place he was wrong in the end here, which is cool. Cool to know. Um

15:11 I wanna go in a different direction. He was rarely wrong because rarely wrong you'd be Sass. Three hundred fifty billion dollars of value, he w would have existed. Um speaking of that. So I wanna zoom back to the beginning of Salesforce and when you launched Salesforce. It's crazy to think back to that when

15:27 Basically you had to con you were trying to convince people the future of software was not desktop software. It was gonna be in the cloud. It was SaaS. You had all these end of software logos, you had mascots walking around with this no software thing. You hired fake protesters at I think of Seabull's conference. Like it was very hard. I think you read one of my books, Lenny. I I know the history of a lot of these things. It's it's one of the most legendary

15:50 launch events in startup history. So I've heard of it many times at this point. It was a crazy moment. I mean See both Who was really the enterprise software company doing CRM was doing kind of a user conference.

16:04 And I you know one was looking for an opportunity to kind of want launch our product. So we hired a bunch of actors. And they were doing this event in San Francisco and Yeah, San Francisco's very woke, so you know, nobody expects No.

16:19 People expect a protest the protest. So we had a Yeah. Got some picket signs at Home Depot and made some signs, you know. That said the end of software is near

16:30 You know. And uh all kinds of other no software and all these things. We had a lot of funny things, home signs. And we ran a run in a protest outside of Cel that they were s in the software business, but we were like oh no. You know, we've gotta get out of software, we gotta create the end of software. And so we have picketers outside of the streets. Anyway.

16:51 He comes out. Himself out of the building. And is really gets Super upset. And right then we hit a button.

16:59 And we have other actors in a van who come out and they are staging a uh themselves as news crew. So

17:09 They are like K N M S, no more K, no more software. And We're like they're interviewing the protesters, so now he thinks that it's a media thing. He calls the police. He got very upset. He's a great guy, by the way. I love Tom Siebel. He's you know, we're

17:27 I think he's also one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation. Yeah. He's just Fumine and he doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't exactly know it's us. And we're just having the best time of that night. We had our huge launch event. Um

17:44 at one of the top theaters in San Francisco and we hired um A great band and uh it was really We just had so much fun. It was just it was just a really great time. That was all happened. I remember very well it was February twenty second. of two thousand

18:02 One or two thousand. Two thousand, February twenty second, two thousand. I I love this. I haven't heard that interview, uh the the reporter part of that story before. It was kinda crazy. I l I love it. And it sounds frivolous potentially, but I think the genius of this that I wanna

18:18 It probably was frivolous. So what I imagine is you're trying to get people to even know Salesforce exists to differentiate to get the name out. And I feel like that's something a lot of founders struggle with. They don't really know how to get their name out, how to get people to pay attention. Just looking back at that success, I guess just any lessons From

18:36 what you did right to get the word Salesforce out to get people to pay attention at all to what you're doing. Well, it's a noisy world, Lenny. And you can see that you can get on Twitter, it's like I mean A lot of noise. And how do you break through?

18:52 And um we've got challenge today. We're introducing a huge new product called uh Agent Force and I've only been working on it for a couple of months now. I introduced it at our Dreamforce conference and That was one way, you know, to break through, which was I took our conference and said, It's just gonna be about Agent for some. I really you know, and I I I'm trying to think about what are all the things I need to do

19:15 to get my company a hundred percent on agent force, my customers Everyone,'cause I know I have a window of opportunity here. And we're first, we're ahead. You know, we have hundreds of customers on this now. We're on it, which is amazing. You know, we've moved our whole help infrastructure.

19:35 Two agent force were seen. Incredible results. We've you know, cut our human escalation from our support infrastructure down by Fifty. We're resolving eighty three percent of all

19:48 Of our inquiries, uh robotically, it's incredible. So now how do I get that message out? How do I do it globally? How do I Do how do I find my K N M S moment? You know. Where I can

20:02 Come up with something that's viral and exciting. And I'm trying lots of different things. I'm even having I have Matthew and Woody Harrelson who are two friends of mine helping me, so they said We'll cut ads for you. They have not been together in an ad ever. And they haven't done anything together since True Detective and they're friends of mine. They're like I'm like

20:22 Ver again, very generous people. to agree to do this and um it's there we've shot three ads so far. I put them out on Twitter. to get feedback, you know, from folks. Are they are is this a good idea? I am running this help dot salesforce dot com to show What we can do with it. Is that a good idea? I'm training all my salespeople on how to sell it. Is that a good idea?

20:45 And I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really uh a terrible product co pilot that I'm have to position against and market against. So and is that a good idea? Should I be marketing and and and and positioning against them. I'm trying lots of things. And what I'm trying to do, Lenny, is when what I recommend to all Entrepreneurs.

21:05 And the m the message is really in the medium here, which is that I am looking to try to find the winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy. I don't know actually which one of those things. is gonna be the most important thing in launching this product. So I'm trying a lot of things, you know, with that old expression, I'm throwing everything against the wall and looking at

21:25 At what's gonna stick. And then once I find that thing, I will then Grow that as my strategy. And that is what I'm trying to do. I'm even expanding my distribution organization. I'm trying to hire an additional one to two thousand account executives just to focus

21:40 on agent for so I'm trying to do everything I can to get that light switch to go on where I can show customers, this is an incredible opportunity. To lower your costs, to make things better. And to show that for the first time we can have digital labor, that Salesforce isn't just managing your data, but

21:59 We're a digital labor provider. So this is that moment. There's so much there that I love. This idea of Trying a bunch of things, looking for the tactic that becomes your strategy. It feels like also there's like this focus of just like go all in and focus on this one thing and then try a bunch of different ways for this one thing that you're focused on to win.

22:18 There's also an element of I just had Seth Go down on the podcast and his you know, one of his big lessons is be remarkable. Be some Create something people remark about. So this uh uh celeb sort of oriented ad that you're working on, I think is a really good example of that.

22:31 Well that's a good that is a key thought though that he's saying, which is you gotta find it. But finding that is the hard part. So you gotta be like You have to be like um one of my friends is Chris Rock, the comedian. And so you know what he'll do is He just doesn't go out and do a Netflix special, right? With all of his jokes.

22:49 He's out there testing his jokes. in clubs and doing all kinds of crazy things. I won't go through all the Crazy stu stuff he does to test his jokes. But by the time it gets to the big Netflix special, right? He knows what works and what doesn't work.

23:05 So that is something that we all have to do as entrepreneurs. We need to be testing lots of things. We need a lot of experimentation. And we can't be too arrogant. I I think another thing that's extremely important is you know, I have a pretty deep meditation practice for three, four decades. Which is

23:23 Uh we have to be Cultivating our beginners' mind. We have to kinda use our mindfulness in a way to kind of clear clear everything out. And then kind of get back to what is my beginner's mind.

23:35 You know, in the beginner's mind I have every possibility, but in the expert's mind I have few, and in some cases maybe none. So I'm been doing this a long time. I've been writing software since I'm fifteen. I'm now sixty. That's forty five years. I don't want to have an expert's mind.

23:52 I wanna have a beginner's mind. And how do I have that beginner's mind? Because Those ideas will come at me. If I can go, what are what could work? Rather than saying, Oh, I know what is going to work.

24:05 Or this is the one thing that is gonna definitely work. Or we have to do this. As soon as you start using words like that, you know that you're Gonna completely implode and fail.

24:16 You have to say, Here, we have to do all these things like in my company right now Like we just did this all hands call. I was like, There's six things I really want to get done, but Like one thing is I didn't get everybody focused on agent force and like Really watch the energy. Number two is I need to find more fuel in the company to fuel this idea'cause this is

24:36 Uh Clearly a breakthrough product. So how do I get everyone focused on it? Number Number three, where I think it's really important we need more distribution capability. We don't sell through franchises. We're not selling, you know, through dealers.

24:51 You know, resellers, we sell direct. So I know I need more account executives and Number four. is I need to be telling lots of customer stories. So m number one, customer zero, me.

25:03 And number two is I need to tell you all the stories, like you can see the story of Disney. I'm doing a huge amount of AI work for them and agent force work. Let me tell you the story about Disney. And I'll I need to tell you that story. And then we have This whole ecosystem of people around the company called trailblazers, millions of them. Who know our platform, they all have to become agent blazers.

25:23 And the last thing is I just shipped the product into all hundred and thirty five thousand Salesforce customers. So it's their nascent and they need to flick it on. I need to motivate them to turn it on. Like these are the six things I'm thinking about all the time. So it's not just one thing. I'm trying to figure out what it is and I need a beginner's mind. to kind of assess how do I

25:44 How do I move forward? How to How do I evolve? How do I inspire? How do I motivate? How do I energize? This episode is brought to you by Coda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests to storing all my research to managing my newsletter content calendar. Coda is my go to app and has been for years. Coda combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help me get more done.

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26:57 I love this idea of a beginner's mind. I imagine it's very difficult to operationalize, especially for a company at twenty five years old at this point. Other than obviously like obviously you meditate, you put a lot of effort And Focus into building this. It's hard to do that. Within a company?

27:12 Is there anything you do with meetings, with leadership, with the way you operate that? kind of spreads this way of thinking within the org. Well, Salesforce is now the second largest software company in the world, but also the second largest software company in Japan, and that's a country that I put a lot of time and energy into I love going there and I love going to Kyoto. And when I go to Kyoto I like to go to some of these amazing

27:34 Zen Temples. And by the way, that's one of the things that Steve Jobs Love to do. And he used to go to these great sushi restaurants. There's a great one in Kyoto. Name Sushi Iwa, and if you go in there You'll see his

27:48 Sign something for them says oh All good things, Steve Jobs and You'll s then and I said, you know, what did he do every he would go to this great sushi restaurant and then he would go to Ryoanji, the Rock Garden Temple, incredible metaphysical temple. And I go there I've gone there. I've gone there for decades. I've brought a lot of friends of mine there.

28:09 And yeah, you gotta Clear your mind and let Let it come in. You know, but you gotta receive it. You need to listen.

28:16 I remember even brought Neil Young there, the musician, you know, is one of my favorite people in the world and obviously I love his music. This his soundtrack. is the soundtrack of my entire life. And we were sitting there and he was so deep in meditation that then he started walking around And the temple was closing and then Like he was in the zone and I didn't want to bother him, but I'm like, you know, I think we gotta go.

28:38 Anyway, it turned out he had written a whole album while we were there in his head and he was, you know, basically transcribing it all. It's an incredible creative process. Look, we're all writing an album in our head. We're all you know, what album are you writing? What music are you writing? How are you getting into that zone yourself? If you're in a great on you want to be a great entrepreneur, you want to be a great CEO.

29:01 You gotta clear your mind and you gotta be ready. Okay, to write that music. And that music could be your business plan, your product plan. You know, your your your product launch plan like we're talking about for my agent force product. But that that's what that's what we're all trying to do. And I use place like Kyoto as as a as a place to do that also,'cause

29:20 Geography is important. Where you are. matters. You know, I know you're in Marin. So Marin County, maybe go out to the top of Mount Tam. You know, maybe you go to Spirit Rock. With Jack Cornfield, you know, and go kinda clear your mind there.

29:34 But you gotta find the place to do that and create create the location. It may not be in the office, it may be somewhere else. By the way, you have the most amazing friends list, all these folks you mentioned. I made I don't know how long this goes. I am lucky that I've met a lot of cool people. Yeah. I don't know how I got so lucky to meet some of these people. I wanna zoom out a little bit and talk about Every

29:57 Every month or so I hear about a startup I do a bunch of angel investing that's trying to like Basically disrupt Salesforce, come after Salesforce. They bash your like don't kill me for saying this your like user experience they're like oh so complicated It's complicated, I agree.

30:12 Okay. Yeah. I'm curious just w what you believe has most uh contributed to you being able to stay on top and continue to grow. Like We're recording this today and your stock is at an all time high, basically, even though it's not a little bit more. Roughly.

30:28 Ha ha. I actually never look at the stock. Okay. I I find the stock to be very distracting and I encourage my employees also don't look at the stock because you know the stock is just a reflection. Money isn't the c isn't isn't isn't the isn't the goal. Right. It it the stock isn't the goal. It it it's it's come in at the end of the journey, you know, it's like

30:49 That's not why we're doing this. You know, the the journey is the reward. That's also something Steve Jobs would say all the time. Another bow to Steve Jobs here. I I think that this is like really important. And You know, I I look at myself as a startup. I am a startup RCO.

31:07 I am a startup entrepreneur. This is it I'm still at the beginning of Salesforce. And no matter what I'm doing at Salesforce, whether I'm the CO I'm sometimes with the chairman of the board, like last week we had a board meeting. Sometimes I

31:20 You know, product manager I'm just you know, this is a startup. And we're a twenty five year old, seventy five thousand person, thirty eight billion dollar, three hundred three hundred something billion dollar market cap startup. But we're a startup nonetheless.

31:33 And we have some great products, but we are just starting. And as an example Lenny, we are just starting the digital labor industry. And we have a product called Agent Force and we are just starting. We are just at the beginning.

31:47 I want to bounce around a little bit, but let's talk about ancient force. I know this is, as you've said, the thing you're most focused on right now. It's a big bet you all are taking. When people hear This word agent. I think a lot of people are kind of embarrassed to even ask like what What does that even look like? Like what is an agent other than you know beyond what LLMs are today?

32:04 Is there an example you could give of s something you've seen that maybe blew your mind of what an agent can do? Yeah, I saw it in the movies. I saw it in Minority Report, which was a movie that was Co written by our futurist Peter Schwartz.

32:19 And you know, the Tom Cruise runs into the gap store. And you know, all of a sudden it says, Hey Hey Tom, you know, have you thought about this new shirt? Look at these jeans. You bought this last time. Now you could try this. You could try that. You know.

32:34 What about this? What about that? And it knew his history. It understood him. It knew what was going on twenty years ago. And you know, this whole store changes digitally to reflect, you know, his interest, his ideas. And is starting to talk to him and work with him.

32:51 That is an agent. You know, it isn't just the agent that we saw in the matrix. you know, Mr Smith or whatever it is. It's It's someone that's huh working with you. Someone. That's an interesting Frey and slip. It's something that is working with you.

33:05 Could be your piece of software on your phone. Could be a robot that's gonna be in your home. Could be your car. that is, you know, knows you

33:16 Understands your preferences. Has an institutional memory of you? And now is helping to advise you. And I'll give you an example that You know, I'm gonna ha I go into U C S F all the time as my

33:27 I'm actually just getting through an Achilles rupture right now, so I've Had a lot of interactions. And you know, with the hospital or your getting your health care, getting your labs done, getting your physical done, getting your scans done, whatever it is. And there's always these preoperative and post operative or

33:43 pre procedure and post procedure Things and you're getting these phone calls. And every time I get a phone call, I'm like Oh, that probably just cost them a hundred bucks. And we probably could do that.

33:55 A lot cheaper and a lot easier with an agent. And then when I talk to my doctors and nurses at UC stuff, they're all burnt out post pandemic. Because they're scheduling pajama time to go through all their digital messages at night. It's like A lot of this could be done a lot easier with agents and AI and we're gonna make their lives a lot better, a lot easier.

34:16 simpler and Some of those things that they're doing, they don't need to talk to me about what my cholesterol number is because I got my labs. And the cholesterol number is this number or that number. You know, s a lot of this can be done with technology and then save the parts that are important for them, like when I come to see them.

34:35 Or I wanna have a real deeper, you know, more empathetic conversation face to face. with you know a deeply experienced doctor. That's a whole nother opportunity for me. That is an agent. Or the agent is like here's an example. Like I had a CT scan. And you have to drink this contrast and then all of a sudden the contrit, but they give it to you through an IV

34:55 And then they're taking better pictures, but then you have to drink water to flush the contrast out of your body. And do you think anyone called me and said, Hey, do you drink the water? No, nobody calls me to drink the water. You know, you have to remember you're on your own. In healthcare in the US. So

35:11 The agent's gonna call you and say, Hey, do you drink the water, you take your meds? You know, do you need to have a repeat lab, you need to go see your doctor again. So the agent is gonna be there w by your side. So that's in a healthcare example. There there's a lot of examples that we could probably have. There's just a story in the New York Times, which isn't about agents specifically, it was about

35:29 Comparing chat GPT to a doctor. Where they teste a doctor's ability to diagnose versus a Chat GPT directly or a doctor plus chat GPT. And By far the best was just chat GPT, removing the doctor from the equation.

35:43 Yeah, they wrote up a clinical study where they actually did a Might have looked at. in a semi kind of peer reviewed way. that chat GPT in many cases was giving more accurate uh diagnoses than a doctor because

35:59 The doctor had a more bias coming in working with the patient. So that's Super interesting and I think something that we should probably all look at that study and think about that. Speaking of the New York Times, there's actually this quote I found. You did this op ed talking about AI. So the quote is Throughout my career in Silicon Valley, I've witnessed numerous waves of innovation, but none compared to the profound impact of AI.

36:21 AI is the defining technology of our lifetime and probably any lifetime. When was kind of the moment for you where you started to realize this, where it's like, Oh shit, this is not just another cool toy. Well, I keep having these kind of existential freak out moments about AI and It's happened over a series of decades, but For those of us who grew up with these movies like War Games and Monore Ford

36:47 You know, or her or um Across the board. Um, or read some of these books, you know, like one of my favorite books uh on AI is Ghost Fleet. You know, you you think about where are we going with AI? Where are we going with AI and

37:05 Yeah. With Salesforce, I think about you know, our journey and I've been waiting for this to happen and you know, trying to bring us along, especially in the last decade with the development of our Einstein platform and now the development of our Agent Force platform. This week at Salesforce we'll probably do about two trillion

37:21 A I transactions, you know, with our Yeah, total now Um Einstein and uh agent force platforms were Definitely the largest provider of

37:31 enterprise AI transactions of the world, as far as I could tell. And I keep thinking, Wow, this is gonna get more and more, you know, intense. And One one step was we had to automate all these customer touch points. So like wearing my Disney fanboy shirt here

37:49 Yeah, we run the Disney store and the Disney Guides and there's Disney Real Estate and there's the Disney Plus call center and There's every aspect of Disney when you're a customer, you're interfacing with Salesforce. So that's what we've loved doing, automating all these customer touch points. Sales, service, marketing, analytics, Slack. You know, integrating it all with MuleSoft. That's what we do. And then aggregating it all into a big database or we call it data cloud, and then federating that data cloud to other data sources.

38:17 So that's the two steps we've been doing. Automate the customer Touch points. Aggregate the data. And then step three is the agentich platform on top of that.

38:29 And when you think about what's happening now, that you can go to help.salesforce dot com and have your issues resolved. With with that on the agentic layer. That's amazing. And then the fourth layer that will come. Will be the robotic.

38:42 Drone layer. where those robots and drones will then feed off of the platform and all of these capabilities. And that vision of the future is something that We've all had in the industry, you know, for years. Not my Magic vision. This is a vision that's been around. It's been the

38:59 the fundamentals of computer science that we would move from having we'd go from this kind of from data to automation. And that is what we're all driving. And we're driving that industry. We're going lower cost, easier to use, and more automated constantly. And that's

39:16 powerful. Like this is really moving fast. Uh you mentioned Einstein briefly. I'll also mention my dog is named Einstein and I got Einstein swag ones with the Uh, the socks and I love them. So and I also that's also an example of you bought Einstein.com or very early. That was another domain name that you owned. Well I just thought Einstein would be

39:38 A great name to talk about artificial intelligence. And um It really has been there. You can see'em behind me, right on my shelf. On my bookshelf. I keep it back there. You see Einstein. Uh I my figure is.

39:51 Oh I'll go. Okay, let's check it out. Show and tell uh segment of the podcast. Oh Yeah. That was a big old step. That's a key part of our vision for

40:04 Salesforce our Einstein platform was Everything we're doing. We wouldn't get to Agent Force without getting to To good old Einstein here. Very cute. As you talk about all this, I imagine many people are thinking, Oh shit, we're not gonna have

40:17 As many people working, what are we gonna do with our jobs, AI is agents. Uh, I know anything you say could be taken way out of context and just like Mark Benioff says everyone's Not working, but I guess just I know you've said you're not gonna be hiring as many engineers next year. I guess anything there to help people understand how the workforce will change in the future. Well, I can tell you about my c my own company and what I'm telling my own employees, which is that Yeah, we're gonna have to rebalance some of our workforce because

40:44 You can see it in the numbers I just gave you, which is we need less support engineers because we have a robotic support layer. You know, with agent force. So that is You know very real and we all need to adapt and

40:57 At the same time I'm hiring a lot more account executives and folks to um you know grow the company. So I just encouraged everybody on the all hands call to think about that. And then I just gave you the idea of Health care.

41:10 The interesting thing about healthcare though Is that a lot of the jobs that I think they're gonna get Created. Just we don't have people for it. And I think there's a lot of things that we need help with in the world that we don't have people for.

41:26 So I think a lot of these jobs will not necessarily Get replaced. And I think that you know, I have a I have a home in a small town And In a in in this small town and

41:37 You know, it's very much a blue collar town and Folks, you know, still working in their restaurants, driving trucks. you know, working in the supermarket, um And uh, you know, uh working on their homes.

41:51 Building construction Gardening. Uh Look, it's gonna be a long time before, you know, I think jobs in the small town where I have a home

42:02 We'll ever get. You know, impacted. But in the large town where I have a home San Francisco. Well, then I just gave you an example where I think

42:11 But sh jobs will get impacted. So It'll be a tale of two cities. Literally. And I think you will see different impacts in different places.

42:21 So what I'm hearing there is support people trending down. uh account executive sales training up. Right now. That is Salesforce. In a nutshell. That touches on something I wanted to touch on also, which is that your

42:35 A lot of founders today are very product minded, very product oriented founders and they want to build product first companies. grow product led, all these things. Uh, Salesforce, uh, I think very publicly is very sales led, very marketing led. Not product lit, obviously product is a core part of it and it all works together and all these things.

42:52 But I guess just any advice for founders that are very product oriented and maybe are hesitant to lean into sales and investment. I would say we're not sales led. Well, I think let's just use agent force as the example, right? So We're running the year. We're running this year. This is our fiscal year twenty five. Okay. It ends in um The end of January next year.

43:11 And Lenny, you know, um, this is the your data cloud. This was not supposed to be the year of Agent Force, so it's the year data cloud I just gave you the pitch. We've automated all the customer touch points. Now we're adding the data cloud to all of our customer implementations. We have a hundred and thirty five thousand customers.

43:29 We've implemented data cloud into all of them. They all need to turn it on. Our teams need to show our customers how to build data cloud and how it's gonna Help our customers have better data. If beta's better data.

43:42 Structure. I almost combined beta and data together. So they need a better data structure, data architectures, data cultures. And then we had our breakthrough. And I can tell you the story where all of a sudden I'm like

43:57 This agent. technology is happening much faster than I thought it was going to, and we are going to mark now. And by the time we get to Dreamforce We are going to take this incredible technology. We accelerated it radically because we bought this company called AirKit, which is One of our Ohana

44:15 Yeah, we It's a great story, you know, we Great entrepreneur. Um how this company, fantastic company.

44:23 called Relate IQ that we bought many years ago, about 10 years ago, stayed with us for many years, like six or seven years. Wanted to leave. And said, Great, we gave him the investment to leave, invest in the company through Salesforce Ventures. built this amazing platform and then we said, now we want to buy it back. And then he came back about a year ago.

44:43 And then it just accelerated the agent vision and then we delivered agent force. Production code at the end of October. So all of a sudden now we are releasing this product. I think it's very important if you're an entrepreneur to realize

45:00 It's not just about the product. It's not just about sales. It's not just about marketing. It's not just about accounting. Not just about your investors. It's not just about your employees. It's not just about

45:11 Your stakeholders, it's about everything. So you better be ready to be an orchestra leader. You you can't just be playing the clarinet. And I think that's kinda what you're getting to, which is that there's entrepreneurs who are like I'm just gonna play the clarinet.

45:27 And for those I don't think they're gonna go as far as they could go. You wanna be playing the whole symphony. And you want to get everyone running. And that symphony is sales, service, marketing, product.

45:38 You know Every part of your shareholders, your stakeholders, your customers You have to be constantly playing the whole symphony. And you have to have a big mind. to think about, Whoa I have a lot of stakeholders in my company.

45:52 Not just one stakeholder. It's not just about product and technology. And if you're gonna narrow cast yourself, you're doing it to service not just to yourself. But to everybody else as well. Speaking of big mind and beginners mind. We have a recurring segment on this podcast that I call Fail Corner.

46:09 And where it comes from is people come on this podcast, they share all these stories that everything's going great. We're killing it. I've had all these successes. And people get discouraged'cause they hear just like all the People always only succeeding when all they often fail. And so I try to ask guests to share a story, and let me ask you this. Is there a story you could share of when

46:27 It was a big struggle for you when you're struggling when something went super wrong. that you work through and learn something from. Sure. Well, I mean ca I'll just give this example. About two years ago we went through this huge transformation in our company. And there were a lot of crazy things that were happening, but it was a little bit like we're all on this airplane and everything is going really well. And then something seems to be going really wrong.

46:52 And we look up front. And the two pilots seem to be missing and then the one guy with a pop Parachute jumped out of the plane. And uh then we're all like, Whoa what are we gonna do? And we had to do some really Crazy and somewhat destructive things at the moment.

47:08 to basically get the regeneration of the company. One of those things that we did two years ago was we had architectural layoff. And we had never done a scaled layoff before. We had to lay off ten percent of the company to save the company. Yeah. I didn't want to do it. I mean

47:24 It's the last thing I wanna do as an entrepreneur, which is to kind of adjust our head count. But we were coming out of the pandemic and we had just hired two many people. Now it turned out that a lot of companies in Silicon Valley all did that same maneuver during the pandemic. Things were So robust in the pandemic.

47:41 That we were over hiring. And by the time the pandemic was over We had too many people. I mean, what did I know? It was my first pandemic. And all of a sudden, you know, my next pandemic I'll know. You know, that this like there's an economic cycle associated with it.

47:56 And an inflation cycle, too. So I learned a lot in the pandemic. And uh now we're here now all of a sudden we're architecting two years ago this layoff. And then when we did the layoff, then I'm trying to overcommunicate. I'm having all employee meetings. It's a complete dumpster fire. It's a nightmare. I'm getting

48:15 Bashed on the press, on Twitter. Everyone's like shooting at me, you know. It's like, Oh boy, you know, if I had a thick skin, it got a lot thick thicker during that moment. Because You know it just

48:29 It's n it's never gonna go well. No matter what. And it didn't go well. And um but we got through it. You know, and uh like to the point where you know, you're giving me these accolades, wonderful

48:41 you know, on this on this uh podcast about where we are today financially and from a structural standpoint or Now from product innovation standpoint But that's not where we were two years ago. It was clear we had to go through a financial transformation. Which included An adjustment of our headcount.

48:57 And we had to go through a technology and a product and an innovation transformation. And those two things were gonna require us to do a number of things. And they were gonna be painful. And so we all had to go through some of that pain.

49:11 To get the gain. that we have now and it that was not easy. But You know. I was in shock. that I was going through this two years ago. Because

49:22 I had already been running the company for twenty three years. Things were going pretty well. And yes, there were a lot of failures. During that period I just didn't expect another massive issue. To hit me. But guess what? They're constantly Massive issues coming at you. And there's more coming.

49:37 And that's the nature. And my friend Michael Dell, who's probably the best entrepreneur I know. Yeah, he says. There is no linear success. So what that means is

49:47 That stock chart that you just referred to, there's no up and to the right perfect chart. You know, where it's just one line. I don't care who you are. Apple doesn't have one. No one has one.

49:58 Okay. And there's gonna be changes. Could be economic changes, it could be societal changes, it could be the pandemic. There's no up and to the right. And if you think it's only gonna be about up and to the right, you're in the wrong business or you have the wrong life, right? You wanna

50:13 Hey, the monastic life is maybe more for you where you're You know, you're just out living in that more of that steady state. Right, but if you want more variation Where it's not steady state.

50:24 The entrepreneurial life is a rock and roll roller coaster and you Get ready because it's gonna be pounding you all the time. One of these people they described that jumped out of the airplane kinda speaking on the roller coaster ride. is your co CO, Brett Taylor. And what's interesting to me is He's also all in on agents.

50:41 And what it makes me think about is Like there's this meme of what did I see when he left and tried to kick out Sam Altman? I'm curious just like what did you guys see about agents being the future that you're both so Committed to this. So interesting.

50:55 I I just think that this idea that agents are one of the most important things that we're all gonna work on and I think everyone is gonna go to agents. So You know, I I look, I just heard about Google today has agent space. You know, and I when I first I was like well, I guess they like the agent force name.

51:15 I love Sudbar, he's one of my favorite people in the world. You know, um We heard Microsoft now has agents. Oracle I read Oracle has agents now. SAP has agents. Everybody's got agents. And good. That's what we want. We don't want to be the only one. If you're the only one and no one else is working on it, you've got a problem actually.

51:34 So You don't wanna be the only one. You wanna be in a market. You don't wanna be one company offering a solution and the only one. You want to be in a competitive market where people are competing with you and you're selling against somebody else and

51:49 You're getting better. And you're moving, you know, forward. It's like the automobile industry, you know, one of my favorite people Is um uh Toyota. Toyota song. was now the chairman of Toyota was the C of Toyota's grandfather started Toyota.

52:04 He says better, better, better, never best. You know, it's it's the Japanese motto of Kaizen. So We talked about Japanese shoshin, which means beginners mind. Now we're in another Japanese word here. Kaizen. Kaizen is continuous improvement.

52:20 And You need to be doing continuous improvement and with where we are right now with agents we're Every software industry is gonna move to agents. We have to just like

52:31 Every software industry Well, at least in CRM or automating customer touch points. Data. And managing data and data Data

52:40 Building that data infrastructure. Agents, it's all related. We're all moving in the same direction. I'm just thinking as a founder, you're just like, God damn, I just got used to AI and everyone's wanting to work on AI at my company. Now we got a I don't know. No, no, no, no, no, that's a mistake.

52:56 Mm. So That's That Is The mindset you want.

53:02 You want that mindset. You want the mindset of Oh, the next thing is coming. I can't wait for the next thing. In some ways you have to be saying, I can't wait for the next failure. I can't wait for the next success. I can't wait for the next innovation. Oh well that's innovation overall, right?

53:18 See, we're in an industry where technology is constantly getting lower cost, easier to use, and more automated. So if you're doing it for two and a half decades or four decades or four and a half decades now that I've been doing it. You know, when I started in this industry I started on a computer called the Tier S eighty model one. With four K.

53:37 of ram. You know. Yeah. Mm. I is I was doing a podcast recently and they're like, Well, who did you sell your first piece of software to?

53:47 And I said, Well, I sold it to Seaload Magazine and and uh in Valita, California and um For seventy five dollars. For seventy five dollars. And they said thank you for then and then they said Oh, that's great. And did you, you know, sell them the send them the disc? And I'm like No no.

54:05 There was no disc. C load standed for cassette load. In basic, that was the command in basic C L O A D. Cassette load. Cloud, that was the That was the command.

54:16 And so that was the name of their magazine and then you would get the cassette every month with five or six things that they had bought from people like me. I mean, they didn't know they were buying it from a fifteen year old kid in high school and early game high school, California. But you know, I I had written the how to juggle thing and they bought it for seventy five dollars. They sent me the one page agreement and I signed it. And then I told my parents and they're like

54:40 What Hm. You're doing what? Oh okay, that's nice, honey. Great job. So they didn't understand. Nobody knew. Like it was crazy. It's like night was like nineteen seventy nine or nineteen seventy eight. So nobody knew w I was selling software. I was in high school

54:57 You know, I It w there was just a moment in time. But I need to have that mindset all the way along, which is what is the next great thing, what is the next great success, what is the next great failure. And that you're growing, you're evolving, you're learning from that. That that's what you want. You want to have that growth mindset.

55:17 Right. You want to embrace that. Does it make sense what I said? So that kinda kinda jumped on that one little thought. Oh gee, yeah, I've got this now under control, but now I've got agents, so no, what am I gonna

55:30 It's like no, that's what you want. And by the way. I want what's after that too and what's after that and what's after that. That's what's really exciting about the future. It's coming. I want to be

55:44 One of our customers said this and people. I think I said it it wasn't me. I wanna be You know, I wanna get to the future first and welcome our customers there. That that's what I think is ex by the way, that's what I think Elon Musk does so well.

56:00 Like he is like I don't know what all the crazy things he's doing to see the future, he's off clearly doing some unusual things. But then he's like, Yeah, we're gonna have robots in the future and bra you know, brain machine interfaces and driving electric cars and All of these things are gonna be happening in the future and you know, I'm gonna have I'm gonna have ten companies that are gonna do all of them. Wow. He's not only thinking about it, he's doing them each.

56:26 Amazing. Amazing. No one like this. Never seen anything like it. Don't understand how it is even possible. Same. Mark, I know you have to run Uh, this was incredible. I think this is a beautiful place to end it. Oh, Lenny, it was so much fun. I've been looking forward to being on your podcast and talk about entrepreneurship and thanks for everything you're doing. For the industry and for entrepreneurs everywhere.

56:48 Say Mark Benny. We're all so grateful to you. Oh. Thank you. Bye, bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast.com.

57:15 See you in the next episode.

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