00:15:26 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:15:26] S1: Yeah, mean, have 80,000 employees, I can imagine. You bring in these companies, they help turbocharge certain areas. Is there an example of one of these acquired companies that you point to as having big impact on the culture of the organization? [00:15:42] S0: Well, I would say, you know, one that springs to mind is David Schmeyer's company, Velocity. So we didn't really have much of an industries bent within Salesforce. And yet, you know, so many... There's so many important verticals that are a key part of the growth of the entire software industry. And we now have 13 verticals actually. And and that all really... That sort of focus on the industries, focus on the specific use cases for that industry that came through that acquisition. And so David came on board, brought Velocity in, it brought in six verticals. We've added another another seven since, and and he went on to be chief product officer, now chief strategy officer. And I think he's definitely helped us think about selling to those industry verticals in ways we never would have otherwise. [00:16:37] S1: That's very interesting. One of the pieces that's also been impressive about Salesforce over the years is there are large companies built on top of you that are just focused on verticals as well, like Veeva and the like. [00:16:51] S0: And Cino was probably a great example of that, and that was one of our early investments in the Ventures program, and they created an incredible company just based in financial services.
00:16:51 · John Somorjai, Alex Immerman
[00:16:51] S0: And Cino was probably a great example of that, and that was one of our early investments in the Ventures program, and they created an incredible company just based in financial services. [00:17:07] S1: Today, as you're thinking about, you know, build versus buy, you probably are told way more that we can just build that. Software development is faster and more affordable than it's ever been. And so, a part of your job must be figuring out, like, when that's actually true. Yeah. I'm curious, like, in this era of software, what is worth actually buying? [00:17:38] S0: Well, I... You know, when we think about the... You know, do we build by partner? I mean, we go through a lot of analysis with the product teams around what their roadmap should look like for the next three years. And do they truly have the people that can build what they're trying to deliver? Do they have the internal expertise for it, for example? Or And can they go out and easily hire it? And you know how hard hiring like AI [00:18:09] S1: It's a competitive
00:18:09 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:18:09] S1: It's a competitive [00:18:09] S0: way. AI engineers right now, very, very hard. And so in many cases, you can really speed up the the development process through an acquisition if you can find the right one and if you can integrate it quickly. And that's that's also, you know, one of the the things that you have to consider because a typical acquisition end to end from the moment you start with the idea to when it's actually integrated, it could be six to nine months. And so could you deliver something on your own much faster than that? And so those are the types of of calculations we we make and try to try to think about. But when the right asset shows up, you know, you really know it. You you can have a sense. And that was in the case when Alfred and Florian came came to meet with Mark and demoed Listen Labs to us. I mean, they were just brilliant. And I think we had... We thought the... Not only was the technology outstanding, but the the interface was so easy. It was so easy that my team started using it with no enablement whatsoever. Within ten minutes, we had we had a survey out and started. And it just could not have been easier. [00:19:23] S1: Is that how you diligence to ListenLabs? [00:19:26] S0: It was part of what we did. [00:19:27] S1: A survey on ListenLabs? [00:19:28] S0: To their customers. [00:19:29] S1: Yeah.
00:19:29 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:19:29] S1: Yeah. [00:19:30] S0: Actually. And that that was incredibly effective. But we do... By the way, our diligence process is pretty rigorous and the customer element, the customer feedback that we do is one of the most important ways of really judging how good the product is, and, you know, are these customers likely to renew? [00:19:52] S1: We're happy Listen Labs customers ourselves, and use it as a diligence tool as well. Very cool. Maybe on on this piece of, like, accelerating capabilities, another acquisition that that you were talking about earlier was Fin. Mhmm. You guys have long had a role in customer support. Maybe talk about what capabilities Fin brought to you all, and maybe the story behind that acquisition.
00:20:23 · John Somorjai, Alex Immerman
[00:20:23] S0: Yeah. And I think I think it goes back to what we talked about earlier, Mark's focus on having a beginner's mind. And so we have built an incredible service cloud business. It's now almost $11,000,000,000 in AOV. And the business, actually the foundation of it was an acquisition that we made in 2008, a company called Instinct, which was Alex Dayon's company. Another person that went on to be our chief product Amazing. He's exceptional. He's you know, has one of the greatest entrepreneurs to come out of France. And I think that what was very clear to us is that the whole movement towards native AI applications and the way that they were priced based on outcomes and the very fast time to value, how quickly you could get it implemented and up and running and having happy customers using it. It just wasn't something that we could build quickly enough. And so we had a wonderful relationship with Eoghan who we'd known for years. We got to know his AI team in Ireland who were just outstanding. Absolutely outstanding. Some of the best AI talent actually in Dublin, Ireland. And we we realized like, this could just turbocharge what we're trying to do with Service Cloud. And and so we were able to to buy the company. And it's it's real... As I said earlier, it's it's proving to be quite a a very valuable acquisition for us. [00:22:01] S1: Yeah. I mean, that that one's an amazing story from a rebirth of the company perspective too with, you know, the transition from Intercom to Fin and, you know, him coming back as founder.
00:22:01 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:22:01] S1: Yeah. I mean, that that one's an amazing story from a rebirth of the company perspective too with, you know, the transition from Intercom to Fin and, you know, him coming back as founder. [00:22:12] S0: And he's having a big impact at the company. Like, is... Eoghan is someone with a loud voice, and he makes his views known. Free spirit. And really trying to shake us up, and that's that is another benefit to bringing these people in. [00:22:27] S1: Amazing, amazing. Another product that, you know, I use every day, certainly you do, is Slack. I'd be curious if you were to rewind the clock, like, you had a rationale for acquiring Slack. Slack's role today in AI is pretty important and different than maybe what you could have expected then. I'm curious, like, how your thinking about Slack has evolved over the years. [00:22:55] S0: I think the core thesis for why we bought Slack holds true today, but it's even bigger than I think we all imagine because it is the perfect conversational interface for AI. And when we thought about it back in... So we bought the company in 2020, so it's now been [00:23:14] S1: There's a rumor out there that Mark only spent an hour with Stewart before the acquisition. I don't know if that's typical.