Salesforce

Trello was number one.

Salesforce was number two.

It was in order of addressable market, basically.

Really? OK, so it wasn't about distribution.

That's right, that are used across the company.

So that's an interesting opportunity because what's happening is these SaaS tools are perpetuating team silos.

All of our sales data is in Salesforce.

All of our engineering feature work and bugs are in Jira.

I wish, you know, 30 years ago, I had a CRM.

Basically, all that was there, I think 30 years ago was either Excel spreadsheets or Salesforce.

And Salesforce, I looked at it once and my head was spinning.

I'm like, I can't do this.

Now we use Marquette and is it as robust as some of the others? No, but we get so busy that there's only certain times that I can ask the office to do something different and start and like turn their lives upside down for three weeks.

I mean, Publis has bought LiveRamp, right? So owning the pipes is part of that.

Salesforce, so I don't have to pay attention, but the rumor is Salesforce is going to buy Listen Labs.

Listen Labs, I happen to know, we have a deep relationship with them, and it's a two-year-old company, right? the for you know two billion dollars anyway

that's the ai interviewers right yes

Yeah, it was a new 52-week high on the time.

And there was talk, I believe, I think it was that Salesforce was swirling around these guys.

They were an acquisition target, I do believe.

Well, obviously, the cloud coming under some scrutiny today, and they sold off.

What do you think, sir? Yeah, I'm

still trying to figure out why they would buy this company.

Who's buying it? Salesforce is buying it.

Salesforce, huh? Interesting.

Well, I think Jensen Huang is one of the few that can say they are already making tons of money from this, right? I think what Wall Street is struggling to get is about, sure, AI can help improving efficiencies and productivities, but at the same time, it's not creating additional new values.

It means like, If AI agents can help me do what Salesforce used to be able to do, that means the value of Salesforce is actually being reduced right now.

So there's one added one, another one is added minus one.

So it's almost like a zero-sum game.

And where it really ultimately lands or where you and I would want it to land or any founder to land is basically you become part of the decision-making apparatus of that particular organization.

And examples here in the United States might be Salesforce.

They're always a great example where over time they have embedded themselves into organizations in ways that makes it not just difficult to extract or to remove if one wanted to do that, but you become part of the decision intelligence of that organization.

Might be data, it might be lots of different ways that that service unfolds.

Because again, that's surface area for us to have common understanding, to have this conversation around.

We're seeing these announcements of... what are basically mega corporations, right? These mega cap companies, um, Coinbase, Cloudflare, uh, Meta, formerly Facebook, Block, formerly Square, um, you know, Amazon, uh, Salesforce, you name it, they're all seeing the writing on the wall and the main thing that they're doing that is relevant to this conversation is they are stripping out management layers and they are re-architecting how their organizations function, okay? Because the underlying premise is is gone that uh the way they uh they were uh structured is optimal and they will lose in their own competition with each other if they don't address those issues now there's other issues that they are dealing with as far as pricing pressure um and just market dynamics that are making them have to revisit the fundamental assumptions of how to operate at scale, which no longer favors their prior structure, these large, vertically sort of, I guess, hierarchical institutional structures.

So... what that tells me is that they know that the unit of scale has moved down and out of the institutional firm structure.

And what I think that is and what I know to be true is that that is the individual.

screwed, exploited in new ways.

So I think back to Snowflake and Salesforce and these incidents.

I mean, yes, they were exploited to to some extent.

But if you sat on the beach.