Marc Benioff

Great for him.

Certainly great for the CEO of Salesforce, Benioff, who also, I imagine, is very much in support of this.

But I think it is not without huge complications, as so many things are.

And maybe in California, what they should consider is the fact that they are perhaps spending way too much money as opposed to actually needing a whole lot more money.

There is leakage.

Yesterday in San Francisco, Mark Benioff gave this beautiful speech of why they built their own Salesforce AI powered by NVIDIA Open Source.

Because of leakage.

And he was just brilliant.

So you could not go anywhere without hearing about Drift and their marketing.

and their ceo was or like salesforce is a classic example i think like mark benioff is a marketing genius like i think that's what like you need a marketing focus or like a brand focus executive who understands like i need to invest in these things i don't have a mascot i need to have a distinctive brand asset i need to have this positioning in the market that is different and it pisses some people off but that's what i need because i can't make everybody happy

Yeah.

So you're saying that would, I think Mark Benioff is a great example.

Based on the convergence of brand and product, what decisions would a marketing leader be allowed to make that they don't get to make today?

I think

Ellison had one company.

Benioff had one company.

Jobs, depending on whether you count Pixar and Nexus, two companies had either two or three.

He's got seven so far, all of which are valued at more than $50 billion, two at more than a trillion, as we all know.

Oh, look, we recently had Dreamforce.

We had Dario Amadei on stage with Marc Benioff, our founder, the two founders, talking about Cloudforce.

And Cloudforce is a really important sort of next iteration of where AI is going.

And we're giving customers the choice as to how to access their CRM data.

And like they were contesting us.

And eventually it got to Benioff.

And almost to the point of like, why are these guys bothering us? They are saying this.

And he's like, invest in them.

We had a huge success in a symbiotic relationship with Salesforce.

But it was recognizing, in that case, what the market needed, where the technology was going.

And in this case, what Salesforce's strategy that was in between the ears of Benioff, which clearly was not even understood by his own team.

At that time.

I imagine my head where you've like, you've got a hundred mil, um, And you still care about views.

I was like, why is that? He's like, well, if you're doing anything, you want to do it well, right? And I was like, you know, Mark Benioff, like, like zillionaire, writes a book.

He wants it to sell copies.

When the founder of Nike writes a book, he wants it to sell copies.

What we're seeing right now is this pressure now is spreading to even myself as a software company owner.

So imagine you're Marc Benioff, you own Salesforce.

Obviously, they don't have the same pressures that we do, but they have pressures, I'm sure.

The software vendors are like, if we don't put AI into our solution, you know, are we are we going to lose our business? There's a term on the Internet called the SaaS Accomplice, where SaaS valuations have crashed, right? So as that happens, the vendors are putting more technology into their applications.