Behind the founder: Marc Benioff

I want to 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. I'm looking at what's going to 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 to grow. I actually never look at the stock. I find the stock to be very distracting.

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 kind of 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's wanting to work on AI at my company. Now we got to figure out 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. Today, my guest is Mark Benioff.

He's co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, which is the second largest B2B SaaS company in the world, worth around $350 billion at the time of this recording, making $35 billion a year in revenue. and 25 years later is still growing like crazy and dominating the market. In our conversation, we talk about leadership, AI, domain names, beginner's mind, marketing, product, sales, the hardest moment in Mark's journey of building Salesforce, also what exactly is an agent, and so much more.

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This is a limited time offer. That's interpret.com slash Lenny. 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 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.

a number of epic domain names for example bill.com uh you.com code.com appstore.com uh first of all are there others i don't know about there's a lot okay salesforce.com That all came from, you know, I'll tell you, it's a good story, actually, because, you know, what happened was I was working at Oracle for 10 years from 1986 and 1996 rolled around like it was a snap of the fingers.

And all of a sudden I realized, whoa, what has just happened to the last decade? This decade just flew by. It was crazy. And it was a big moment for me in my career. And 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 after 10 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 went to Hawaii and rented a little house on the beach and I had done some angel investing and it was kind of a cool moment where some of my companies started to go. public, including Siebel Systems and others and Saba Software and people I had met at Oracle like Tom Siebel and Bobby Azdani. And then I was just fascinated at that point, you know, with the Internet. I had been working on it at Oracle for...

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 really long, long time ago, I think almost 30 years.

And so one of the domain names he owned was appstore.com, which I know you gifted 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 in college in 1984, I had 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 68 000 development system and on these

Apple headquarter buildings in Banley, on Banley Road 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 19-year-old kid.

But he's running around the building and like, you know, we have this refrigerator over here with all these fruit juices. There's a masseuse over here doing shiatsu 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 freaking cool okay so you can just imagine like you're like whoa this is like i'm in a movie

And there's a lot of other cool parts of the movie, too, that were going on. And it kind of started my relationship with him. And then I kind of actually kind of got to know him then, you know, as I eventually got to Oracle. Then eventually I started Salesforce. And I have this moment at Salesforce. And it was, I think, 2000, 2001. I cannot remember exactly what it was.

And we were at the opening of one of his movies for Pixar, and we're having dinner. There's a lot of details around the dinner. It'll be a hugely long story if I go forever. And he says to me, well, Mark, listen to me. You're doing so great. You've got your company, Salesforce. If you need any help, you make sure you call me, okay? And I'm like, yes, sir, I will do that.

took out his you just introduced the 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 he's like i'm like that's such a cool screen steve goes oh thanks so much and i go steve you know you could do movies on there too not just or photos you didn't have to do something no mark i will never do a device like that absolutely not

And that's a little insight into his personality that he would never, ever exactly like say, oh, yeah, I'm going to do the movie device, the photo, the phone, the this. So anyway. Things were kind of moving along at Salesforce. And so I kind of was like, I'm kind of stuck. And I kind of need to kind of get through my block, writer's block, entrepreneur's block. I'm going to reach out to him. And he's like,

come down here right away. So literally got in 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 now. And I'm like, okay, what are they? Your company, it better get 10 times larger than it is now or in 24 months or it's over. Okay. 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. And the CEO of Avon was on his board at the time. So that was on his mind. And one last thing I'm going to tell you, you must do. I'm like, yes, sir. What is it? You better go build an application economy. An application economy? Yes. What does that mean? I don't know, but you're going to go figure it out.

It was like, you know, meeting with your guru and, you know, getting a Zen koan or something where you're like, now you have a puzzle I have to solve. And I literally went away and I had all the notes from the meeting, you know. I went through it over and over and again. And then finally, I'm like, I 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 to build apps and then sell them and that you could do all these things. I did all that and, you know, launched AppExchange in like 2005 or 2006. And we didn't call it AppStore because when we tested the AppStore name and focus groups.

customers like this is not a app store this is an app exchange we're all going to exchange apps and capabilities anyway it rolled out iphone rolled out and then you know he basically said to me one day hey come down and see me this is maybe like a year after iphone 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 etc and then we're sitting there like it's the apple auditory it's 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's just very, very good theatrical performance. I could never do what he does. It's incredible. You know, he's got the thing. And then he says, and I'm here to reveal to you the app store.

And all of our people go, you know, they just break breath and they're all like, go white. Because they're like, oh, Mark has been talking about App Store for years. And how could Steve even know? 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 walked down and he's sitting down there by himself, you know, working on something. And he's like in the corner of the stage.

I go, hey, Steve, can I talk to you for a second? He goes, of course. Very generous of me. Very kind with me. He goes, Steve, I'm going to give you a gift. Wow. But Mark, what are you going to give me?

Steve, I'm going to give you something you don't have, but maybe you'll need, which is the appstore.com URL, appstore.com, and the trademark 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 going to be very big and you know whatever but thank you very much and

That was the story of App Store. It's kind of amazing. It was kind of a very amazing relationship that I had with him. Very grateful to have that relationship and dramatically influenced me in my career and my whole life. 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.

He's a very generous person, and I'll tell you that he never turned down anything that I asked him to do. And 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 not buy this house whatever and so he went he said 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. 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, I said,

wow, well, this has worked out better than I thought. And 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. I feel like we could do Steve Jobs stories all day. Oh, no, I have. I could do hours. I have a lot of Steve Jobs stories. Oh, man. But yeah, anyway, those are a couple of them.

By the way, I also love that he had like B2B SaaS advice, like here you need a big customer, you need high ACVs. Oh, he hated those. He hated SaaS 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.

What are you going to do? You're going to 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 it steve no mark you cannot love this this is not great 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

It feels like a place he was wrong in the end here, which is cool to know. I want to go in a different direction. He was rarely wrong. He was rarely wrong. If it would be SaaS, $350 billion of value, he would have only existed. Speaking of that.

So I want to zoom back to the beginning of Salesforce and when you launched Salesforce. It's crazy to think back to that when basically you were trying to convince people the future of software was not desktop software. It was going to be in the cloud. It was SaaS. You had all these end of software logos. You had mascots walking around. There's no software thing. You hired fake protesters at, I think it was Siebel's conference. Like it was very hard. I think you read one of my books, Lenny.

I know the history of a lot of these things. It's one of the most legendary launch events in startup history. So I've heard of it many times at this point. It was a crazy moment. I mean, Siebel, who was really the enterprise software company doing. CRM, was doing kind of a user conference. And I was looking for an opportunity to kind of launch our product. So we hired a bunch of actors.

And they were doing this event in San Francisco and, you know, San Francisco is very woke. So, you know, nobody, you know, people expect a protest. So we got some picket signs at Home Depot and made some signs, you know. that said the end of software is near, you know, and all kinds of other, no software and all these things. We had a lot of funny things on signs.

And we ran a protest outside of Siebel that they were in the software business. But we were like, oh, no, you know, we've got to get out of software. We've got to create the end of software. And so we have picketers outside of the streets. Anyway, he comes out.

himself out of the building and is really gets super upset and right then we hit a button and we have other actors in a van who come out and they are staging a themselves as news crew so they are like k nms 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. I think he's also one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation.

And he's just fuming 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. And that night we had our huge launch event. 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 22nd of 2001 or 2000, 2000, February 22nd, 2000.

I love this. I haven't heard that interview, the reporter part of that story before. It was kind of crazy. I love it. And it sounds frivolous potentially, but I think the genius of this that I want to touch on is... Frivolous is a good word. It probably was frivolous.

So what I imagine is you were 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 what you did right to get the word Salesforce out, to get people to pay attention at all to what you were doing? Well, it's a noisy world, Lenny. And you can see that you can get on Twitter. It's like. I mean, there's a lot of noise. And how do you break through? And we have that challenge today. We're introducing a huge new product called Agent Force.

I've only been working on it for a couple 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 going to be about Agent Forsen. I really, you know, and I, I, I'm trying to think about what are all the things I need to do 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 to agent force we're seeing. incredible results. We've, you know, cut our human escalation from our support infrastructure down by 50%. We're resolving 83% of all of our inquiries. Robotically, it's incredible.

So now how do I get that message out? How do I do it globally? How do I, how do I find my KNMS moment, you know, where I can. come up with something that's viral and exciting. And I'm trying lots of different things. I'm even having, I have Matthew McConaughey 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. I'm like, 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.salesforce.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? And I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really 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 positioning against them? I'm trying lots of things. And what I'm trying to do, Lenny, is what I recommend to all entrepreneurs.

And 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 going to 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 what's going to 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 1,000 to 2,000 account executives just to focus on agent force. 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 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 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.

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

Well, that's a good, that is a key thought, though, that he's saying, which is you've got to find it. But finding that is the hard part. So you've got to be like, you have to be like, 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. He's out there testing his jokes in clubs and doing all kinds of crazy things. I won't go through all the crazy 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. 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 think another thing that's extremely important is, you know, I have a pretty deep meditation practice for three, four decades, which is...

We have to be cultivating our beginner's mind. We have to kind of use our mindfulness in a way to kind of clear everything out and then kind of get back to what is my beginner's mind. 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've been doing this a long time. I've been writing software since I was 15. I'm now 60.

That's 45 years. I don't want to have an expert's mind. I want to 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 could work? Rather than saying, oh, I know what is going to work, or this is the one thing that is going to definitely work, or we have to do this. As soon as you start using words like that, you know that you're going to completely implode and fail.

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 because this is a 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 through dealers, resellers. We sell direct. So I know I need more account executives. Number four is I need to be telling lots of customer stories. So number one, customer zero, me. 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 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. And the last thing is I just shipped the product into all 135,000 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 move forward? 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.

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slash Lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan, coda.io slash Lenny. I love this idea of a beginner's mind. I imagine it's very difficult to operationalize, especially for a company at 25 years old at this point. Other than obviously you meditate, you put a lot of effort and focus into building this. It's hard to do that within a company. 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 where 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 Zen temples. And by the way, that's one of the things that Steve Jobs loved to do. And he used to go to these great sushi restaurants. There's a great one in Kyoto.

named Sushi Iwa. And if you go in there, you'll see he's signed something for them. It says, all good things, Steve Jobs. And I said, you know, what did he do? He would go to this great sushi restaurant and then he would go. to Ryoanji, the rock garden temple, an incredible metaphysical temple. And I go, I've gone there. I've gone there for decades. I brought a lot of friends of mine there. And yeah, you got to clear your mind and let, let it come in.

You know, you got to receive it. You need to listen. I remember I 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 is 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 got to go.

Anyway, it turned out he had written a whole album while we were there in his head, and he was basically transcribing it all. It was an incredible creative process. Look, we're all writing an album in our head. What album are you writing? What music are you writing? How are you getting into that zone yourself? If you're a great entrepreneur, you want to be a great entrepreneur. You want to be a great CEO. You got to clear your mind and you got to be ready, okay, to write that music.

And that music could be your business plan, your product plan, your product launch plan, like we're talking about for my Agent Force product. But that's what we're all trying to do. And I use a place like Kyoto as a place to do that also. geography is important where you are matters you know i know you're in marin so marin county maybe you go out to the top of mount tam you know maybe you go to spirit rock with jack cornfield you know and go kind of clear your mind there

But you've got to find the place to do that and 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 don't know how long this goes. I am lucky that I've met a lot of cool people. I don't know how I got so lucky to meet some of these people.

i want to zoom out a little bit and talk about every 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, you're like, don't kill me for saying this. You're like user experience. They're like, oh, so complicated. Let's spin around. We are too complicated. I agree. Okay. I'm curious just what you.

believe is 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 wow i didn't even know that roughly I actually never look at the stock. 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 goal.

right it the stock isn't the goal it it's it's coming at the end of the journey you know it's like that's not why we're doing this you know that the journey is the reward that's also something steve jobs would say all the time another bow to steve jobs here I think that this is like really important. And, you know, I look at myself as a startup. I am a startup CEO. I am a startup entrepreneur. I'm still at the beginning of Salesforce.

And no matter what I'm doing at Salesforce, whether I'm the CEO, I'm sometimes the chairman of the board. Like last week, we had a board meeting, sometimes a product manager. I'm just, this is a startup. And we're a 25-year-old, 75,000 person, $38 billion, $300-something billion market cap startup. But we're a startup nonetheless. 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. I want to bounce around a little bit, but let's talk about agent 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? What does an agent, other than beyond what LLMs are today, is there an example you could give of 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 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, what about this? What about that? And it knew his history. It understood him. It knew what was going on just 20 years ago. And, you know, this whole store changes digitally to reflect, you know, his interest, his ideas. And it's starting to talk to him and work with him. 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 working with you. Someone that's an interesting for you and slip. It's something that is working with you. Could be your.

piece of software in your phone, could be a robot that's going to be in your home, could be your car that is, you know, knows you, 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 have i go into ucsf all the time as my i'm actually just getting through an achilles rupture right now so i've had a lot of interactions and

you know, the hospital or you're getting your healthcare, getting your labs done, getting your physical done, getting your scans done, whatever it is. And there's always these preoperative and postoperative or 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 a lot cheaper and a lot easier with an agent.

And then when I talk to my doctors and nurses at UCSF, 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 going to make their lives a lot better, a lot easier, 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, 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. Or I want to 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, you don't drink it, but they give it to you through an IV. 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 health care in the U.S. So the agent's going to call you and say, hey, did you drink the water? Did 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 going to be there by your side. So that's a healthcare example. There's a lot of examples that we could probably have. There was just a story in the New York Times, which isn't about agents specifically. It was about comparing ChatGPT to a doctor. where they tested 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.

Yeah, they wrote up a clinical study where they actually did kind of looked at in a semi kind of peer reviewed way that ChatGPT in many cases was giving more accurate. diagnoses than a doctor because 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. 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 Minority Report... you know, or her or across the board or read some of these books, you know, like one of my favorite books on AI is Ghost Fleet.

You know, you think about where are we going with AI? Where are we going with AI? And, you know, with Salesforce, I think about, you know, our journey and I've been waiting for this to happen. 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 AgentForce platform. This week at Salesforce, we'll probably do about 2 trillion AI transactions, you know, with our, you know, total now.

Einstein and AgentForce platforms were definitely the largest provider of enterprise AI transactions in the world, as far as I could tell. And I keep thinking, wow, this is going to 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

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 where we call a data cloud and then federating that data cloud to other data sources. So that's the two steps we've been doing. Automate the customer touch points. Aggregate the data. And then step three is the agentic platform on top of that. And when you think about what's happening now that you can go to help.salesforce.com and have your issues resolved with that on the agentic layer.

That's amazing. And then the fourth layer that will come will be the robotic 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 it's not my magic vision this is a vision that's been around it's been the 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 powerful. This is really moving fast.

You mentioned Einstein briefly. I'll also mention my dog is named Einstein and I got Einstein swag once with the... uh the socks and i love them so and 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 a great name to talk about artificial intelligence and um

It really has been there. You can see him behind me right on my shelf, on my bookshelf. I keep him back there. You see Einstein? I can go grab him. Oh, I'll go. Check it out. Here he is. Show and tell a segment podcast. Oh, yeah, that was a big. That's a key part of our vision for.

Salesforce, our Einstein platform is everything we're doing. We wouldn't get to agent force without getting to good old Einstein here. Very cute. As you talk about all this, I imagine many people are thinking, oh, shit, we're not going to have. There's many people working. What are we going to do with our jobs, AIs, agents? 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 going to 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 like my own company and what I'm telling my own employees, which is that, yeah, we're going to have to rebalance some of our workforce because.

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 AgentForce. So that is, you know, very real and we all need to adapt. At the same time, I'm hiring a lot more account executives and folks to 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.

The interesting thing about health care, though, is that a lot of the jobs that I think they're going to get created, just we don't have people for. And I think there's a lot of things that we need help with in the world that we don't have people for. So I think a lot of these jobs will not necessarily get replaced. And I think that I have a home in a small town.

And in this small town and, you know, it's very much a blue collar town and folks are, you know, still working in their restaurants, driving trucks, you know, working in the supermarket. And, you know, working on their homes, building, construction, gardening. Look, it's going to be a long time before, you know, I think.

jobs in the small town where I have a home will 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 that jobs will get impacted. It'll be a tale of two cities, literally. And I think you will see different impacts in different places. So what I'm hearing there is support people trending down, account executive sales trending up.

Right now, that is Salesforce in a nutshell. That touches on something I wanted to touch on also, which is that 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. Salesforce, I think very publicly, is very sales-led, very marketing-led, not product-led. Obviously, product is a core part of it, and it all works together and all these things.

But I guess just any advice for founders that are very product oriented and maybe hesitant to lean into sales? Yeah, I would say we're not sales led. Well, I think let's just use agent force as an example, right? We're running the year. We're running this year. This is our fiscal year 25. Okay. It ends in the end of January next year. And Lenny, you know, this is the year data cloud.

This was not supposed to be the year of Agent 4. So it's the year of 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 135,000 customers. We've implemented... data cloud into all of them they all need to turn it on our our teams need to show our customers how to build data cloud and how it's going to help our customers have

a better data structure. They 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, wow, this agent technology is happening much faster than I thought it was going to, and we are going to market 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. It's a great story. Great entrepreneur. have this company, fantastic company 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, invested 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. 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 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. It's not just about your investors. It's not just about your employees. It's not just about...

your stakeholders, it's about everything. So you better be ready to be an orchestra leader. You can't just be playing the clarinet. And I think that's kind of what you're getting to, which is that there's entrepreneurs who are like, I'm just going to play the clarinet. And for those, I don't think they're going to go as far as they could go. You want to be playing the whole symphony and you want to get everyone running. And that symphony is sales, service, marketing, product, 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. Not just one stakeholder. It's not just about product and technology. And if you're going to narrow cast yourself, you're doing a disservice, not just to yourself, but to everybody else as well. Speaking of big mind and beginner's mind.

We have a recurring segment on this podcast that I call Fail Corner. And where it comes from is people come on this podcast. They share all these stories of everything's going great. We're killing it. I've had all these successes. And people get discouraged because they hear just like all the...

People only succeeding when 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 when 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. 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. And we look up front. And the two pilots seemed to be missing. And then the one guy with the parachute jumped out of the plane. And then we're all like, whoa, what are we going to do? And we had to do some really crazy and somewhat destructive things at the moment.

to basically get the regeneration of the company. One of those things that we did two years ago was we had to architect a layoff. And we had never done a scaled layoff before. We had to lay off 10% of the company to save the company. I didn't want to do it. I mean, it's the last thing I want to do as an entrepreneur, which is to kind of adjust our headcount. But we were coming out of the pandemic and we had just hired too 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 that we were overhiring. 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 it's like there's an economic cycle associated with it and an inflation cycle too.

I learned a lot in the pandemic. And 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 over-communicate. I'm having all employee meetings. It's a complete dumpster fire. It's a nightmare. I'm getting bashed in 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 thicker during that moment.

Because, you know, it just is not it's never going to go well, no matter what. And it didn't go well. And but we got through it, you know, and like to the point where, you know, you're giving me these accolades. Wonderful.

you know on this on this 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 and we had to go through a technology and a product and an innovation transformation and those two things were going to require us to do a number of things and they were going to be painful

and so we all had to go through some of that pain to get the gain that we have now and it that was not easy but you know i i was in shock that i was going through this two years ago because i had already been running the company for 23 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 and that's the nature and my friend michael dell is probably the best entrepreneur i know you know he says there is no linear success so what that means is 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. Okay.

And there's going to be changes. It 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 going to be about up and to the right, you're in the wrong business or you have the wrong life, right?

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 the entrepreneur life is a rock and roll roller coaster and you

Get ready because it's going to be pounding you all the time. One of these people they described that jumped out of the airplane, kind of speaking on the roller coaster ride, is your co-CEO, Brett Taylor. And what's interesting to me is he's also all in on agents.

And what it makes me think about is like, there's this meme of what did Ilya 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. I just think that this idea that agents are one of the most important things that we're all going to work on. And I think everyone is going to go to agents. So, you know, I look, I just.

heard about google today has agent space you know and i what i first i was like i guess they like the agent force name i love sundar he's one of my favorite people in the world you know um We heard Microsoft now has agents. I read Oracle has agents. 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.

You don't want to be the only one. You want to be in a market. You don't want to 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. you're getting better, and you're moving forward. It's like the automobile industry. One of my favorite people is Kira Toyota. Toyota-san was now the chairman of Toyota, was the CEO of Toyota's grandfather, started Toyota.

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 beginner's mind now we're learning another japanese word here kaizen kaizen is continuous improvement and you need to be doing continuous improvement and with where we are right now with agents where every software industry is going to move to agents we have to just like

Every software industry, well, at least in CRM, we're automating customer touchpoints. Data and managing data and 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 to freaking figure out agents. No, no, no, no, no. That's a mistake. So that's, that is.

the mindset you want. 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? 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 TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K of RAM. You know, and I was doing a podcast recently and they're like, well, who did you sell your first piece of software to? And I said, well, I sold it to C-Load Magazine.

in Goleta, California. And, um, for $75 for $75. And they said, thank you for that. And then they said, Oh, that's great. And did you, you know, sell them to send them the disc? And I'm like, no, no. There was no disk. CLOAD standed for cassette load in BASIC. That was the command in BASIC, C-L-O-A-D. Cassette load, CLOAD, that was the command.

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 15-year-old kid in high school, early game high school, California. But, you know, 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, what? Huh?

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 it was like 1979 or 1978. So nobody knew I was selling software. I was in high school. You know, I, it 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, right? You want to embrace that. Does it make sense what I said? I kind of 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 going to, 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, one of our customers said this, and people think I said it. It wasn't me. I want to be. You know, I want to get to the future first and welcome our customers there. That's what I think is, by the way, that's what I think Elon Musk does so well. 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 brand you know brain machine interfaces and driving electric cars and all of these things are going to be happening in the future. And, you know, I'm going to have, I'm going to have 10 companies that are going to do all of them. Wow. Not only thinking about it, he's doing them each.

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 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. Same, Mark Benio. We're all so grateful to you.

Thank you. 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 dot com. See you in the next episode.