Siebel Systems

dynamic time.

What basically happened is that some other companies sort of in our space, so we were in the customer management space, we were in the workflow automation space, and some other companies, people will probably not remember these names because they're all dead, companies like Filenet, and a company called Siebel, and a company called Scopus, now all sucked up into Salesforce and Oracle.

Several of those had gone public.

And I went to my board of directors and I said, you know, should we consider doing something like this? And they said, well, why don't you go down to Wall Street You spend a lot of time there.

I mean, it was small.

It was like Siebel Systems and things like that.

But, you know, now it's a massive category.

And so I think the same thing will happen.

They made massive acquisitions every year.

PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Siebel, Sun Microsystems, NetSuite, et cetera.

Uh, and so they're-- the reason they're doing this is because their organic growth is not positive, right? They can't grow organically.

It's a double-edged sword.

Dave, what do you think of this move?

Actually, I think Siebel Systems, Tom Siebel invented this even before Mark Benioff at Salesforce.com, where prior to Siebel Systems and Salesforce, a CRM system would cost you maybe 50 bucks a year for a license, but it wouldn't work particularly well.

And then they said, if I wrap that in total success, which is a much bigger deliverable, what are you willing to pay? And if my salespeople are twice as effective, I'm willing to pay $20,000, $30,000 a year for this now.

So the price point went up like a factor of 1,000, but the customer was happier because they got the total solution.

My guest today is Ken Goldman, who was the president of Hillspire, Smith's family office, for about five years.

Previously, he was the CFO of Siebel Systems, CFO of Yahoo, and he has served on dozens of public and private boards.

We cover how a 500% family office actually operates.

how you hire and retain people when you have no equity to offer, what he looks for before backing a fund, and why he thinks we are in a bubble even though the insider he talks to keep telling him otherwise.

We essentially said what you're traditionally using ACT or GoldMine or using a spreadsheet, you can use Salesforce for.

But Marc had this bigger vision, and he said, "We're going after Siebel, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft." We didn't have the product set to go after those competitors, but he was such an incredible marketer that he created this perception in the industry that some of the largest companies in the world could adopt this technology, and that we would deliver on a roadmap that would satisfy the requirements over time, and he did.

You said the word roadmap multiple times in different contexts there, but I do a show every week with Jason Lemkin and Maria Driscoll.

It's very successful and popular, which is fun, but Jason said last week that if you are not well into your 2027 roadmap already, you are behind.

This is why there's been the advent of the CRM category back in the early, early 2000s, actually going back to the late 1990s.

A company called Siebel was a startup at the time, and they were one of the first CRM systems out there.

They're now owned by Oracle.

Salesforce has since taken over and really dominated the CRM market.

Uh, no offense to the Clay people.

Uh, it's like Siebel back in the day.

Yeah.

Like, it's like, okay, you could build a CRM with it.