Fortune CEO Series: Reshaping the World | Salesforce

Every industrial revolution is defined by trailblazers. They harnessed steam and water to power machines, unleashed electricity to power mass production, and pioneered electronics and it to transform everything. And now, now the next wave is building. The physical and digital worlds are blurring. We're in the fourth industrial revolution, a wave of innovation and technology radically transforming our economies, societies and lives. It's creating new jobs, industries and opportunities. But it's still a revolution. And revolutions never change the world. Gently. Many people feel unhappy, easy. They're afraid that the future may be good for only a lucky few. They worry about automation becoming irrelevant, being left behind. We see another way. At Salesforce, we live by a core set of values. Trust, growth, innovation, and the equality of every human being. We believe we can do well and do good. That the business of business is to make the world a better place. That we're all in this together and we can rise as one. That instead of letting the future happen to us, we can create a future for us. The fourth industrial revolution is going to be shaped by trailblazers.

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Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Simon Mulcahy.

Chief marketing officer, Salesforce.

Good morning, Dreamforce. Welcome to day two. And you can tell by that video there's incredibly powerful messages in that. And obviously, as chief marketing officer, I spent many, many hours looking at that video as we've prepared it. But the messages behind it and inside it are incredibly important. Actually just came from a really emotionally powerful session with Michelle Obama. And if any of you didn't get to see it, then go online to salesforce.com and watch it afterwards because some of the messages in that session are equally as important. Now we're all in this incredible world of change. And that was why we were inspired to work with Fortune and bring together at Dreamforce, about 100 CEOs in this Fortune CEO series to really look at some of the key challenges that we are facing, challenges that leaders across the world, especially CEOs, have to face. How do we rethink our organizations, what leadership looks like and what our organizations should look like? So that's the whole point of this CEO series that we've put together. And this session is going to be equally as powerful on reshaping the world. And we have an amazing panel for you now, actually headed by our incredible moderator, Patty Sellers, who's executive director at Fortune magazine. Also, she founded the most powerful women consortium program at Fortune. But there's also a consortium of amazing CEOs also. All of them are founders in their own right. So, Nirav Tolia, the co founder and CEO of Nextdoor, Sally Krawcheck, the co founder and CEO of Elevest. Jeff Lawson, the co founder and CEO of Twilio, and Tan Lee, the founder and CEO of Emotiv. Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for our next panel. Thank you.

Hello, everyone. I'm Patti Sellers. I'm with Fortune. And this is Nirav, Sally, Jeff, and Thanh. Welcome, all. So I am going to. So this, the name of this session is Reshaping the World. We're not going to get that lofty to start. We're going to get granular. So first question. What is the most important personal trait to succeed as an entrepreneur? You get a one word answer.

Am I starting?

You're off.

Let me think quickly. No, for me, this one's easy. It's resilience. Okay.

Grit.

Flexible.

Authenticity.

Authenticity. Okay. So in explaining who you are and what your businesses are, I'd like each of you to jump off that point, Explain your business. And Nirav, let's start with you. Explain Nextdoor and how you have shown resilience in building the company.

Sure. So Nextdoor is the private social network for our neighborhoods. It's now used by almost 90% of American neighborhoods and expanding rapidly overseas. The genesis of the company actually came through a point of resiliency. My co founders and I were building another company. We had been well funded and somewhat well hyped, but it wasn't working. And so we had to go back to square one. And we had a choice. We could fold up our tents, give the money back and stop trying to be entrepreneurs, or we could be resilient and come up with a new idea. And this new idea is something that's so inspirational to us. We looked around and saw the adoption of social networks becoming really mainstream and ubiquitous. Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for business colleagues, Twitter for people with whom we find common interests. But there wasn't a social network to connect with the people right outside our front doors. And that was this very simple insight we have. And we've been working on it ever since. And there have been some dramatic results.

And what year was this that you actually launched?

We decided to pivot our company. That's the Silicon Valley term that's used when you go from a failure to a hopeful success. We pivoted in the summer of 2010. We launched Nextdoor at the end of October 2011. So it's been just over six years.

Sally Krawchak, Grant, how does that first.

Oh, sorry.

No, go ahead, go ahead, Sal.

First of all, I love your company. I'm signed up. I think you all are doing an amazing job. So I'm the CEO of ellevest. It's a digital investment platform for women. I'm leaving the Michelle Obama talk even more invigorated and with renewed energy for getting more money into the hands of women. By the way, for those of you who are sitting there saying that is really a stupid idea for a company, women do not need their own investing platform, I assure you I thought the same thing for a long time and then recognize that in addition to the gender pay gap that we have in this country, we also have a gender investing gap which can cost the women in this audience millions of dollars over their lives. For other women, hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lives. And as I came to the recognition, having spent my career on Wall street, that Wall street and the investing industry is by men for men, does a better job for men, leaves women with this gender investing gap. I went out and took this to any number of CEOs, said, I'm not an entrepreneur. Y' all do it. And had the door slammed in my face again and again. I was told women were a niche market, women wouldn't invest because their husbands do it for them. Women are too risk averse to invest. Women are not that good at math. I mean, I got all of the stuff and decided at a point in my career when a number of my friends were doing board work and sort of stepping back, that instead I would dig in and start a company from dirt, as we like to say. And I'm happy to tell you today we're celebrating our one year Anniversary. We believe we are one of the fastest out of the chute digital investment platforms that is out there. And the feedback we're getting from the women for recognizing this challenge in building a product that really is targeted to them, takes into account they live longer, their salaries peak sooner, is just unbelievably gratifying.

Great, Jeff. Flexibility.

Well, you know, it's interesting. The founding story of Twilio is probably actually one of being stubborn, which is probably the exact opposite flexibility. But you know, we started Twilio because I'm a software developer. I've been writing code for 20 years and I had started three companies before Twilio. I was one of the first product managers at Amazon Web Services. And when I left Amazon, I just, I knew I wanted to start my next thing. And so I looked at a bunch of different ideas and I realized that all three of my previous companies. Two things were in common between all three of these companies. First was we were using the power of software to iterate quickly, to be agile, to out compete and build a better product than any of our competitors. Usually coming from more of a legacy background. Right. And so that meant you listen to your customers, you ship something quickly. I'll give you an example. I was the first CTO of StubHub and we shipped StubHub from the first line of code written to the launched website in six weeks, right? So that's agility. And the whole idea is you get it out there in the world, you get feedback from your customers, and every week you're launching a new version and you're listening to customers and you're iterating your way towards success. And that is a special, that's a superpower of software. And then the other common thread I had among all those companies was that at one point or another, creating that great software experience, creating a great customer experience involved reaching out and touching customers, notifying them of something, letting them call you to find out the status of something. Like customer engagement kept coming up that we needed to talk to our customers to build that great experience. And every time it happened I said, great, this is a really cool idea that we have, but I'm a software developer. Making a phone ring, that's magical. I have no idea how I would go about doing that, of letting a customer engage with me. And so I'd turn to the legacy communications industry and say, great, how do we solve this thing? And they'd say, oh yeah, we can help you with that. Step one is you're going to wire up a bunch of Copper wires from a carrier to your data center. Step two, you're gonna rack up a bunch of telco gear. And then step three, because none of that was ever designed to do this thing that you have in mind. Speaking of flexibility, you're gonna bring in our army of professional services, and we think we can make that work for you. It's gonna take $2 million and take 24 months. Sign here, we'll get started. And every time I remember thinking, well, first of all, I don't have $2 million to spend on this one part of my customer experience. But more importantly then, the money was the time. Wait, let me get this straight. It's been two years before a customer ever touched this thing that we have this idea that we have before we got any feedback from a customer. That's insane. And we realized the world of communications is diametrically opposed to the ethos of software. And so in 2008, we started Twilio to solve this problem of bringing communications out of its legacy, which is in physical networks and satellites and copper wires and all this kind of stuff, and bring it into its future, which is software. And so Twilio is a cloud platform that lets software developers build any kind of communications into the software applications that power any kind of business. And so we're a platform that allows companies to essentially use that power of software to engage with their customers in moderate and flexible ways.

And it's a platform that allows large companies to be more flexible too.

Exactly.

Mm, Great. Thanh Authenticity. Explain Emotive and how authenticity plays in.

Emotive is a company that is reshaping our engagement and understanding of the human brain. So our technology platform allows us to both augment the capacity of the brain, allowing us to interact with our external environment using inputs directly derived from electrical signals that we can measure from the human brain. Or it allows us to empower ourselves to understand how brain works so that we can use it in a more effective way. And I started the company in 2011 because the burden of neurological conditions is very significant. One in every three people. So one in three people have some sort of brain related illness. In economic terms, this is $2 trillion every year. And if we're looking out at 2030, we're looking at an economic burden of about $6 trillion. And yet there wasn't any really scalable, robust or affordable platform that allows us to study the brains in context. Most of the systems that allows us to, to look at the human brains really exists in the context of a clinical or medical setting. So Typically we only study brains when there's something wrong. We generally don't look at brains when we're normal, able bodied people. And yet the burden is imminent. It's upon us. We can pretty much replace almost any organ in our body with very little rejection rates, but we can't replace our brains yet. And so this is the great next opportunity for the 21st century. And we've built a company that now has 80,000 researchers and developers in 120 countries, quite successful in pioneering this space. And authenticity is really the key for us in really driving and building this community. Because as you can imagine, brain data is something that's very personal to everyone. We understand the value, the intrinsic value of brain data. We have billions and billions of data points, but it's very difficult to hand that over to a company unless you understand what that relationship is with the company and how they might use that to foster understanding about yourselves, but also foster deeper engagement, better understanding of the brain as a whole. And so authenticity is very, very cornerstone to, to what we do.

Who are your customers?

So for Emotiv, our customers are large Fortune 500 companies that want to incorporate human in the loop. So a lot of the work that is done today around autonomous driving or automation really is about driving artificial intelligence, on the one hand, to drive greater productivity and efficiency, but at the same time, we can't leave the human out of the equation. How do we build systems that take humans into account in that entire development cycle? Right, so we inform, we allow companies to really incorporate the humans into that conversation by tracking how the brain works in context. So whether it be, you know, looking at how a driver performs in an autonomous vehicle that's been designed, or whether it's looking at a new advertisement that's coming out and how customers would engage with that. So we're working a lot with companies, enterprises, research organizations, as well as looking at the general burden of health and wellness that's tackled by neurological conditions.

So back in 2011, when you started the company, we weren't really talking about AI. It was something that was totally like in the movies. Sally. Sally and I have known each other for at least 20 years, since we.

Were in middle school.

That's true, that's true. Sally, was it 2014 when you bought 85 broads? Okay, so Sally Crotch. I'm just gonna give this full disclosure on Sally for those who don't know, but Sally did have a very high flying career on Wall street and she was CFO of Citigroup. She was head of their whole Asset management business. She got fired. She went to be twice, and then she went to B of A. She ran Merrill lynch, bank of America, all their. What was the wealth?

Merrill lynch, the whole wealth.

Wealth, wealth management, funding her business. She got fired. She was on the COVID of Fortune twice. She got fired largely for speaking up, for using her voice, something that Michelle Obama talked about, for standing up for the customer. No one ever imagined that Sally, when she ended up kind of on the street, would do what she ended up doing. And I remember the day when the news came out that I remember I was in the back of a car with Alexa von Tobel, who started LearnVest. And I said, oh, my God. We were riding from some conference and we hitched a ride together, and I said, oh, my gosh. Sally KrawCheck just bought 85 broads. So this leads to a question for all of you. The moment you decided to start your company and you made the first move to build nextdoor, to build Twilio, to build your companies, what were you thinking and how much does it align to what your company has become? And we're gonna start with Sally, who bought a women's membership organization.

So. And it's been a journey because so much of what I'm doing right now, having had the privilege of having had an exciting and interesting and fascinating career, and I mean every minute of it, right? You know, fighting with my boss to return client money in the downturn, we got it returned, but he disagreed with me, and so he fired me. So every moment was an adventure on a roller coaster. But it's about impact for me. And so I bought the old 85 broads, which is now Elevate Network, because I became very interested in the power of women and the power of women in the workplace, the power of diversity. I don't believe, and I think the research backs me up, that in my old industry, Wall street, the financial crisis would have been as severe if trading floors had not been 90% men. And the research talks to us about the impact of testosterone on poor risk taking. And so I thought, well, jeez, if we can get more women to move ahead in business, networking is the number one unwritten rule of success in business. So on and so on. You know, I can have a positive impact. But for me, the big moment, as I was, you know, getting involved in some different businesses, the big moment for me was one morning when I was putting on my mascara, and the recovering research analyst in me had this big insight, which is son of a gun, the retirement savings Crisis in this country is a woman's crisis. We live five, six, eight years longer than men do. We 80% of us die single. We retire with two thirds the money of men. How can I have an impact on this? And I had what was then rebranded as Elevate Network that's helping to close the gender pay gap. And Patty, I had this moment where I thought, dear goodness, there's this gender investing gap I just talked about. And I don't. As I went around and talked to CEOs at big banks, if I don't do this, no one else is going to do this. Because at the end of the day, there are really not that many women in tech and there are really not that many women in financial services. So that means there are really not that many women in fintech. And shame on me if I see this as costing women this much money. Can help us, help us, help our families, help the economy. Because who doesn't want people to have more money and help society? And I don't do something about this, I should be shot or beaten. One or the other. One or the other.

So you're putting on your mascara that morning and are you thinking, hey, I can build a digital investment platform for women? I mean, was the thought that fully formed?

It got there quickly. It was retirement savings crisis, gender investing gap, Google it couldn't find anything on it. Hold on, here's an idea. Wait a second. Why isn't Wall street or the investing industry serving women? Well, all right, I can try to figure it out. A lot of people say hire a bunch of female financial advisors and talk to women. Wait a second. With technology, we can actually completely rethink the product and work with women to build a product that serves them better. One example, we were talking the other night. 0%. 0%. That's a percent of women who told us their goal in investing is to outperform the market. Right? That is actually the value proposition.

That's crazy.

It's the value proposition of the investing industry. By the way, as an aside, 0.1% are the percent of money in asset managers who actually consistently outperform the market on a five year basis. So women essentially told us what the industry is selling we're not buying. And so instead we built something really to their specifications. With a ton of skepticism. Yep. Right. A ton.

What about, okay, what about the rest of you? The germ of the company. Did you have the vision back then that led to what it is today? And if so, explain. If not explain. I mean, I know you didn't because you pivoted. So maybe you can.

Well, the premise for nextdoor is so simple. It's this idea that if we come together with our neighbors, there are so many ways that we can help each other to build stronger and safer communities. Because we were coming off of a failed company.

And what was the failed company?

The failed company was called Fan Base, and it was an attempt to build a series of communities around sports. We've always been interested in community. We've always believed deeply in it. And sports is an arena where community is very, very strong. People get very passionate about rooting for sports teams, but there is ESPN and there are a number of other competitors out there. However, when it comes to connecting with people, again, outside our front doors, there wasn't a technology platform doing that. So the original mission of the company was to bring back a sense of community to the neighborhood. And six years later, it hasn't changed. The specifics, of course, are completely different than what we would have imagined. The way that neighbors use the platform, we are surprised pleasantly almost every single day. But that germ of an idea that is so simple, which is around community, which is around helping each other, which is about using technology to make us feel more grounded in the physical world, those were all things that we were lucky enough to come up with very early in the process.

Jeff Tan so for me, the idea came over dinner one night with some friends. We were talking about communications with machines and the idea for extending human to computer dialogue and incorporating what we commonly use in our human to human communication, which is facial expressions, body language, we can intuit feelings and emotions into our dialogue with one another. That's missing from the way that we interact with machines because we typically tell it what we want and then it does the specific thing for us. We thought we could extend that by taking inputs directly from the brain, by measuring what's coming out of the brain in order to observe some of these metrics. So from that standpoint of enabling the human computer interaction, that aspect is the same. The other aspect of really democratizing the access to this technology has always been a fundamental part of our business and that has stayed the same within our vision. But there are other elements that have changed around cloud enablement, the big opportunities around amassing a large scale database about how the brain changes over time, that's new. Being able to extend to a lot broader application spaces and really closing the feedback loop between the human and the machine to really achieve a new level of humanistic intelligence, that's new because what we Talked about very early days was really just kind of migrating and extending the ways that we interact with computers, but not really closing the loop between the human and the machine itself. So there are definitely some aspects where we've broadened the scope of our work. And the nuggets are still there, though.

Who were you having dinner with?

I was having dinner with a longtime friend of mine who was known for inventing the fiber optic. He won a Marconi Prize for that, and we were having dinner. He studies genius, so he studies autistic savants. So typically with autism, you have. We understand it to have generally difficulty with learning in the conventional sense. But with autistic savants, they exhibit an incredible ability to compute very complex mathematical sums or to draw with an amazing degree of detail after seeing something only once. It's more like tracing for them. So Alan Snyder is his name. He's very interested in studying genius. He thinks that it's innate in all of us. If it's not learned, if it's not something that you learn, then it must be innate. Innate in all of us. We just haven't figured out how to tap into it. So that conversation with Alan one night kind of germinated this idea for evolving the way that we interact with computers. Because my previous business was in communications technology. Yeah, that's kind of the two fused together into some interesting concoction. And I couldn't shake the idea. I'm just dinner that evening. So it became the nugget for emotive.

That's great. Jeff, what about you?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Twilio as it is today, is not far from where we thought we wanted to build when we started the company. Right. We had this vision because I, as a developer, had always wanted the right tool set that I could use to build a wide variety of ways to communicate with my customers. And so we set out with this developer platform. We're going to put this platform in the hands of the world's developers. We now have over 1.6 million developers on our platform working at every kind of company, whether they are startups like Uber and Airbnb and Lyft and all the Silicon Valley, big success stories. Or whether it's traditional companies like Morgan Stanley or IMG bank, developers at every kind of company are inventing the future of their companies, of innovating on behalf of their customers. And we felt the developers of the world, essentially this was missing from their toolkit. We want put to put it in there. And so we had this idea for a platform and when we went out to raise money in the very early days of Twilio, two things happened. Number one, it was the summer of 2008. I went out to raise money and I had a hard time convincing investors that this idea for a developer platform, because I got all this feedback, they said, oh, developers aren't a market. Developers don't buy things. Right? And the advice I got from investors was, you should just go build an app, go build a PBX in the cloud, go build a call center in the cloud, just go build an app. And then one day after you're wildly successful, you can go add an API to it. That's what Facebook did. It seemed to work out for them. And that was sort of the conventional wisdom of the day, that developers can't drive innovation and there's no products for developers. But we had this insight into the market, we had this conviction because we ourselves as developers had wanted something like this. And we knew how many projects were going unbuilt inside of companies because fundamentally the developers who could be building those things didn't have an easy and agile and low cost and low risk way to try out the ideas that they're having. And that's the key, if you believe as we do that experimentation is the prerequisite to innovation, that in order to figure out the next big idea, and that can be a whole new company, it could be a new product, it could be a new feature of a product, but that figuring out that next thing essentially comes down to being able to try out a lot of things. And your ability to try things out is inhibited by high cost, high barriers. So anything you can do to lower the cost and lower the barriers to trying out new things, that's what leads to innovation at companies of every size. And so we really stuck to our guns and said, you know what, we really want this to developer platform. And so we said no to a lot of investors who would have been on board had we gone the route of just building an app, like they said. Now the other thing that happened in 2008 was, you know, the financial crisis. So I remember I walked out of one of the investor's office, I thought we had nailed our Series A. And then I looked at my phone and it was like, oops, the world, like Lehman Brothers just went bankrupt. And so we, we actually didn't end up raising any money, but we followed our conviction, we followed what customers were telling us. And now nine years later, that motion that we started with, that let's just put it in the hands of developers and see what happens has led to the most amazing things. We call it our developer first approach, where developers inside of many of your companies, they hold the keys, they know what needs to get done for your customers, and they actually know how to build it. And so if they're given the flexibility, given the right tools, they will assign astound you with the things that they build. And that goes to companies of all sizes and institutions of all types. One of my favorite stories, this thing that binds the world together is this idea that it's mind blowing when you think about it, but because of what code can do, because of the availability of distribution platforms like Google Ads and app stores and things like that, as a developer, you can change the world with a text editor.

With a text what?

Text editor.

The text editor.

Think about that. In the history of humanity, when you built something, it would be the people in your neighborhood who would know about it. It would be the people in your city that could see the most amazing accomplishments. You built a bridge and maybe a million people would see it, or you built a chair and maybe a dozen people would see it. And now you have a blinking cursor and you type some magical things and suddenly a billion people the next day can see it. That is unprecedented in the history of human creation. And so we build a platform to power that, to power all those people who can truly move the needle forward for your companies and for all the ideas that are out there. Because by lowering those barriers, they're now able to do it and try out all those ideas.

So rather than change your pitch or change your message, you decided to go to different investors and stick to your guns.

Yeah, we went to our parents.

Pardon me?

We went to our parents.

Your parents?

Yeah, they didn't know anything about developer.

Platforms, but they were like, okay, I went to Salesforce.

Did you? Yes.

You know, I was just about to say it seems like it's a prerequisite to have a successful startup. You have to have investors, traditional investors, tell you how dumb you are and what a stupid idea it is. It's almost part of the story. But when I was getting the women are a niche market, women don't want to invest, et cetera, et cetera. And I got it on several occasions. I one evening before I went to sleep, had a big old glass of white wine and said, I really need to figure out who's going to get it and go and really target those investors as opposed to sort of go these rounds and woke up in the morning and I Said, you know, these guys at Salesforce closing their own gender pay gap, they could get it. And I had a couple of others as well who were on my list.

So Salesforce invested in. This is Ellevest or Elevate? Yes, this is Ellevest Early. Like they were one of the first.

No, they were. This round that we did this summer, we brought them in and they had launched. It actually hadn't been announced yet, but they were in the process of launching an impact investing fund. And so as I was doing the research, someone said this could be interesting for them because they're launching this fund. I looked on the website. It wasn't there, but I thought, what did help, Mark?

Did you?

Yeah, the power.

You're not any old entrepreneur starting out with nothing. I mean, it does. I mean, you know, there is great value in becoming an entrepreneur after you have kind of built your platform, and that is, not everybody gets to do that. And good for you that you did that. It also puts more pressure on you to succeed. Right.

And you have to recognize that experience can hurt you. And so an example of where I thought the platform would be versus where it is, I use my experience, experience on Wall street and came at this with a point of view that women are just. Gosh, they just have these emotional blockages when it comes to money. And so we really needed to build a product that would help her get through these emotional blockages. And I felt really sure about this because I worked in financial services and investing, and I'm a woman, so therefore, who would I know? And we knowing that maybe there was just a tiny chance that I wasn't right. The way we approached the problem was to spend thousands of hours with these women and do the research with them every step of the way. And they did this to us. You know, they said, we do have emotional challenges when it comes to money, but we don't want to solve them with you. We just want to practically reach our goals in an environment that makes sense to us. We want you to take into account that we live longer, et cetera. And so I had to recognize that the fact that I wasn't 23, wearing a hoodie out of Stanford with no experience meant that I had biases. And so I on purpose surrounded myself with a bunch of individuals who were very different from me in background, in age, in experience, and really worked to respect and pull in, in a collaborative way, all of their ideas, rather than say, hey, I've been around. I got this.

Anybody, as long as we're talking about raising Money. Anybody else have any sort of best advice for raising money for a startup?

I think what Sally said is right. Not everyone is going to resonate with what you're building. If it were obvious, then you wouldn't need to build it. And so taking a step back and really trying to identify people that you, that you resonate with, whether it's because of your background, because of your idea, or because what they've invested in already, these are better ways to go out and get money versus just scattershot and walk up and down Sand Hill Road knocking on every door. Ultimately, your investors are great partners. I mean, the best relationships between entrepreneurs and investors are almost where the investor is part of the management team. And we sometimes talk about our very first investor as, as one of our unknown founders because he was there on day one and as we were thinking about starting next door, we had a couple of other ideas and we went to him for advice and this was the idea that he was really behind. And it helps a lot when the person who is writing the checks is also a fan of you and is behind you personally. I mean, now, whether that's Jeff getting his parents behind him, or whether it's finding entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs or investors rather, that have been entrepreneurs, it's really important because you want those investors to back you through good times and bad. And every startup has good times and bad.

One thing I would just say about that, and I think this scales to a corporate environment too, because it's a general principle of innovation. If you're trying to get a new project off the ground, a new idea off the ground, any sort of thing, and that can be a startup too. It's customers that guide you there. Right? So we had no investor interest until we actually had developers signing up, building interesting things with Twilio and paying us for it, then you better believe we had investor interest and we were at much easier time. And I think that goes for a wide variety of environments where there's always going to be skeptics, there are always going to be people you want to win over and want to influence. And the best way to overcome any of that is just to focus your energy on the customer and let the customers actually tell that story for you to whoever it is you're trying to convince, or if you're in a position to be convinced, ask hard questions about what are the customers asking for, what are the customer proof points, what's the customer feedback? And so just as a company, as an entrepreneur, as someone trying to get anything off the ground or someone Trying to vet which ideas are good and which ones are not. Just focus on the customer. At Twilio, we have this, one of our leadership principles called where are the customer's shoes? And we literally have pairs of our customers, old shoes hanging all around our office as a constant reminder that whatever we think we know is irrelevant. What we need to always be doing is put ourselves in our customer's shoes, not literally. And to understand what they're going through, what problems they're trying to solve, what motivates them. And that's the only way in which we're going to succeed, is by truly understanding our customers. And I think that's a good lesson for any scenario where ultimately you have to vet what's a good idea and what's not. What am I going to invest in, what am I not? Or who do I need to convince to invest in this idea or not bring the customers.

Yeah, the idea that as a startup, you have the opportunity to connect with customers more closely, more intimately than your bigger rivals. And Sally, this certainly speaks to what you've done. That's a fantastic opportunity. And do you have any advice for jumping on that opportunity? I mean, with Nextdoor, you don't really have, you don't have incumbent rivals, do you?

I mean, you're no direct rivals. But that's one of the reasons why it was difficult to start it. Because when we were going out and getting initially going, we couldn't point to something and say, see that we're building something like that. And so to the point you just made about really rolling up sleeves. My co founder Sarah's in the audience out there and she remembers our first year we had 175 neighborhoods adopt next door. Today we have over 160,000. So the first year that 175 neighborhoods. I think Sarah or I talked to people in every single one of those neighborhoods and I remember going to a board meeting and proudly announcing that we'd gone over 150 neighborhoods. And one of our investors said, okay, how many neighborhoods are there in America? Forget the world for a second, but in America. And Sarah said, oh, I think somewhere between 150 and 180,000. And the investor did some quick cheeky math and said, okay, so we're on 100 year run rate to get all of the neighborhoods to adopt next door. But you know, what you do as an early stage company is the unscalable things to better understand your users, your customers, to get that feedback. And then once you have those learnings, you can develop a Playbook and go fast. But before you run, you have to learn how to walk. And in our case, before we even walked, we had to learn how to crawl.

That's a very, very good point. So, Sally, you did have lots of incumbents to say we can do it better than they do and we can connect more closely. So explain how you thought about that and how you talk to your team about that.

Well, you know, the same idea here. You know, we did that very deep research before we wrote a single line of code with the target audience and took her very seriously. And I'd say even today, for everyone who goes through signs up for the process, they get an email from me, we admit it's automated and ask them how their experience is and the feedback that we can get from them. And what gives me chills is they are so appreciative of what we're trying to do that I get back paragraphs and paragraphs from women. All of them come back to me and I read them all and I answer them all. And you know, it's everything from on the third page of the experience, the third, you know, as I went through it, I couldn't, I didn't see the button at first, you know, to bigger and more macro things and that sense that we're in it together and really talking to her and with her, she's so appreciative of it and she's pointing us in different directions. So, you know, if I'd sat here a year ago, I would have said, as I probably did in my intro, we're a digital investing platform. Well, actually we're now becoming an investing and planning platform because she's asked us for financial advisors, she's asked us for planning, she's asked us for credit cards. And I think she respects the fact that we're working with her to do it, that she's pointing us in the direction of the growth. And while we've got, on the face of it, so many competitors, I mean, it's financial services really. Our biggest competitor for her is inertia because she's under invested. And so it really is a conversation about, you know, yeah, I've got my 401k, but how do I begin to think about myself as an investor? How do I plan? How do I get myself in financial control? So we compete with everybody and in some ways nobody.

How many customers do you have today?

In our community we've got 100,000, which is actually fascinating because today is our one year anniversary, literally of our launch and we literally passed 100,000 today.

Wow.

Which is exciting, right?

Fantastic. And where does that compare to your target?

Above it.

Good.

Above it. We are adding women faster than we thought. By some good measure, more than 40,000, 43,000 women have done a financial plan with us. So we're, you know, we're off to, you know, it's going to kill me, but we're off to a great start. It's hard. It's so hard.

Is this harder than being CFO of Citigroup?

You say, well, that job. Here's what I'd say. Being an entrepreneur is harder than running Merrill Lynch. Because the truth is, when you're running Merrill, you know, you're running 45,000 people. It's complex. There's always a problem, there are always issues. There's everything going on. But the truth is, when you begin a startup, you are always two mistakes, maybe three mistakes away from being out of business. And that, frankly, I knew at Merrill when we had $17 billion of revenue and two and a half billion dollars of bottom line, we can make a lot of mistakes. Right? And this is the sense that as a CEO and an entrepreneur, the people you hire, it's not 40,000, but these individuals are buying into this dream and you have such a responsibility to them and to their families that it's just, it just, it's a 3:30am wake up and, you know, with a, you know, worry sort of thing. So it's hard. It's really hard.

Thanh is Emotive your second startup?

It is my second startup.

Second. Jeff, you've had, you've been kind of a serial entrepreneur, serial inventor. One of the companies that you co founded was StubHub Nirav. You had founded Epinions, which is now owned by ebay. So, Sally, this is your. You've kind of started two companies, but this was your first entrepreneurial venture. And my question is, what did you both kind of learn and need to. Change about yourself may not be the right word, but need to discipline yourself to do or get yourself to change in a certain way. As you learned along the way, as you learn through those experiences, either by success or failure along the way, how to be a really good business builder.

So when I started Epinions In May of 1999, it was the very beginning of the real dot conf boom. And we started the website and launched it in such a fast period of time. The New York Times Magazine did a very long article on us and called us the instant company. And it was this idea of get big Fast, go as quickly as possible, move fast and break things. A lot of what in some cases you still hear today, nextdoor, is about the real world. It's not about the virtual world, it's not about moving fast, but it's about moving with quality. And so I think the biggest thing that we learned from Epinions is that if you don't have a really high quality core, when you try to scale quickly, it's difficult to do so. But if you can be patient, and it's so hard to be patient, it's so hard to be patient in a world where everyone wants to move fast, everyone raises money and wants results immediately. We look at some of the highest flyers whether, whether it's Instagram or Snapchat, and they're overnight successes. And so this idea that we were going to be very deliberate, very careful, and we believed so strongly in our mission that we were going to get it right instead of going fast, that was something that we had to almost relearn or teach ourselves from scratch because it's so counter to the conventional wisdom, particularly in our industry. And even today, when we have more pressure, the billion dollar valuation, now we're in five different countries, we have grand ambition. But that core of quality over quantity is something that has carried us this far and we can't forget it. It's critical to our success.

That's great, that's fascinating.

I actually take a minute to disagree with that really quickly. Not that quality isn't important, but I think it's a false dichotomy between deciding between speed and quality. And I think part of the job of building a company is to, you know, a lot of people start off building a product, right? And you spend all of your energies building a product. But pretty quickly, if you get traction, you need to focus on not building the product, but building the company, like, say, building the machine that builds machines, right? And how you do that has a big impact on the future of what you're going to unlock. And so we focused a lot in the early days of Twilio because we saw in our role as a platform serving developers so many opportunities to help those developers succeed and build engagement with their customers that they were asking us for all sorts of things. And we saw our job as building a company that was able to fulfill on both agility, so your ability to continuously innovate on behalf of your customers, and resiliency to do so with high quality, high availability, high reliability. Because in the cloud, trust is the number one thing you sell. And so we Built a system of small teams where we keep our teams very close to the customer and their roadmap directly reflects what customers want. And then we now have over 100 of these small teams building our product. But then you'd say, okay, well how do you make sure all of these people, all these small teams are actually doing so in a high quality way? So we developed a system called our operational maturity model where we train them in security and documentation, reliability and, and supportability and all the things that we've learned along the way. And how do you build things that actually are reliable? And as a result of this, we are on track. Some enterprise companies ship to production updates two or three times a year. Twilio we ship 40,000 production updates a year and we do so with five nines availability of our product multiple years running. And so it's all about building the system that's gonna get the outcome you want. And for us, we decided that we weren't going to fall into this trap of like, well, we can either move slow with high quality or we can move fast and break things, as some people say. We're going to try to do both. We're going to maintain the agility of that small startup that we started as, but we're also going to be able to deliver on the highest enterprise expectations that people are going to have of us. And I think that that's been a really neat guiding principle for us that I, you know, that I, when we started the company, I think we weren't sure, sure how we wanted to operate. But I think a lot of the Amazon influence in me led me to believe that like, you don't have to pick, you don't have to choose. This is software like you get to build the system however you want. And we decided to invest in a system that would be able to fulfill on both of those things.

Yeah, I think, you know, to your point, one thing that we've observed that has changed considerably over the last few years is just the nature of the amount of adaptation we need. Even in our teams. A lot of our work requires machine learning from the get go because you're dealing with massive amounts of data. And I remember the talent pool being very different, being able to very easily access pretty quality people who could do machine learning. But today in this current market, we're finding it extremely difficult because the competition from companies like Google and Facebook, Amazon, who know that, you know, AI and automation is so core to their market differentiation that they are driving up the cost for acquisition of these talent hires it has become very, very challenging.

So what are the numbers? How much more, how much more expensive is it to get AI talent today.

Versus Well, I was reading a report recently, just a couple of weeks ago, and we're looking at, you know, graduates out of school in multi hundred thousand dollar starting salaries and with many who are with several years experience in the millions of dollars of, you know, of a paycheck. I mean, that's a, those are staggering numbers. And it makes it very difficult for smaller companies to compete. And in the fourth industrial revolution where we're talking about integrating all of these systems with biological systems, with this speed of change, if you have consolidation of so much of this technology in some of these companies and you don't have the playing field anymore for incumbents to come in and to compete at any sensible scale becomes very difficult. And so this is one of the challenges that we're confronted with now that I, I think is changing the nature of how we lead. And I think that's when authenticity and mission and vision becomes very important. Because every company needs to be agile, every company needs to respond to customer needs. But you know, how do you attract the talent pool when there's a massive skills gap today? Right. It's rampant. Every company is facing this right now and we're no different.

I would underscore that. It's really interesting for us, the mission is making all the difference. You know, we have everybody. Oh, you can't find, you know, female engineers and you can't find black engineers. Well, you know, we're sitting here today at ellevest with 50% of our engineering and product team are female. A third people of color for us. And we're really seeing those resumes come in. And what these individuals are responding to is certainly the difficulty of what we're doing. We're building this investing algorithm and it's got to take into account this, and we're going to add this in terms of product, et cetera, the degree of difficulty is high. And we're also hearing it's the mission. I had one young woman come in to interview with me a few weeks ago, stunning young woman in terms of her background. And as she began to speak, this never happened before in the interview, she began to tear up and, you know, I'm not being that tough. And she began to describe that the reason she wanted to work at Ellevest is because her grandmother married her grandfather at the age of 18 and died at the age of 84 and was beaten every day of her life, every day of her life because she did not have enough money to leave that relationship. And so this young woman wanted to be part of our mission of getting more money to women so that more women can leave bad relationships. More women can say, take this job and shove it, you sexual harasser. Right. More women can start their own businesses. Remember, we women get 2 and a half or 3% of venture capital funding. And so to put women in a more financially strong position, that mission is drawing them to us. And I think it's women and millennials who are looking for something where they can really be excited about getting out of bed in the morning.

So this raises really what needs to be our last question, but let's get a little lofty here. Reshaping the world. So Mark Benioff talked yesterday about this being a marquee moment for the technology industry and the sort of lack of trust in business and government and the role of companies in society and CEOs to step up and do the things that, you know, to sort of heal America and heal the world. Heal. Deal with the, deal with the country and the world's problems. So, Sal, you just raised a very. You made me think of Ellevest in a way that I hadn't. This is a way to empower women to, you know, not be this woman's grandmother and to find a better life. So how are each of you, as you think about your company's futures, thinking about the opportunity to embrace a higher purpose in along the lines that Marc Benioff does at Salesforce?

Well, it's one of the reasons why it's so humbling to actually be here and be part of the conference, which is Salesforce truly is a mission centric company and so is Nextdoor. And that notion of community, of bringing people together, we believe that it's a tremendous opportunity in a world that is increasingly divided. We think that when people grab hands with their neighbors, only good things can happen. It's not about your background, your skin color, your political affiliation. It's about getting together to create a better life for everyone involved. And that has been the guiding light of the company. And whether that manifests itself in recruiting or the adoption by users and customers, or whether it just makes us feel good to be part of this thing that's larger than ourselves, I think it's absolutely critical. And that is the role that technology companies should be playing.

Yep, I completely agree. We are all about the mission of getting more money to women. And I tell you, professional women have taken a hit over the past year. And there was so much excitement a few years ago about all of us moving forward at work and making more money at work and closing the gender pay gap. It hasn't happened. It has not happened. And this is something that women can do that's in their control. You know, you might go and ask for the raise the boss and you might not get it. And that's what the macro numbers are showing us. But you can take the money that you're bringing home, invest it in a diversified investment portfolio and if history is any guide, change your life over time. So we're all about the mission.

Yeah, you know, I mean, the way I think about it, we've got two ways that I think about the mission of Twilio. One is the core mission of Twilio, fuel the future of communications. When you think about it, communications is so essential to what human beings do. I mean, the two most defining elements of humanity are the fact that we build and the fact that we communicate. And Twilio is the intersection of those two things. And that's what attracts so many people to Twilio. As far as people who work at Twilio, because communications has for the last hundred so years. Right. I mean, at first it was a monopoly run by AT&T and now there's the possibility that it could become a monopoly run by Facebook. And so the idea that Twilio would be democratizing all of the infrastructure and all of this technology that you need to build world class global communications for any type of application is a really empowering thing for the developers of the world. And then the flip side of that is what are we doing to benefit the world around us? And you don't have to benefit the world around you to be a for profit a company. Most don't, but we happen to believe that we should. Because building a company that is the new force in the world, like next to governments, companies, corporations are incredibly influential in how the world operates and being able to exert influence in a good way or a bad way. And so we choose to do it in a good way. That's why we committed 1% of our equity to Twilio.org the different thing about Twilio, some companies do that on the day they're founded and that equipment equity gets diluted down as raise the money. We did it right before our ipo. I think it was the largest and latest commitment of 1% of equity that had been done to date. And we had done it after we'd raised $250 million from investors. And now we Put that to work. And we get to use our technology to help power nonprofit organizations who are bringing good in the world. Because what we found is that the lack of communications is the cause of or the solution to, to a ton of the world's problems. And so we're letting those organizations, organizations like Crisis Text Line, who lets you text in when you need mental health help, that is a nationwide hotline. The only and best way to be able to get help over text powered by Twilio or the Red Cross that reduced their disaster response times by 50% because they use text to coordinate with volunteers.

That's great.

Really cool stories there. And so that's how we really roll social responsibility in our company, both our mission and then what we do for the communities and the organizations around us who can leverage our people and our technology to do good.

Good, Todd.

Our technology has the potential to transform not just the world around us, but fundamentally who we are. So for us, at the core of our mission is to make sure that it's available to everyone. Right? We don't want to create greater inequality. And so access to technology that can allow you to augment your capacity has to be made available to everyone. So inclusivity is really core to what we do.

Thank you, Thanh Jeff. Sally NIRAV AUDIENCE thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

Salesforce has changed my life. I wrote a blog post about this a few years ago that I was never expecting to go, I guess, viral. But it did. And the blog post is titled the best thing I built on Salesforce, my career. And it's true.

I was an at home mom.

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You know, and it's not easy to put yourself out there, think about what is it that makes you excited and happy and passionate.

What is it that I really love? Why do I like doing this stuff?

Maybe your passion is veterans. Your passion might be retail or if you're in banking.

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In Salesforce and you can apply it to any industry.

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Can do so much with it.

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That's where it's been life changing. I never thought I had the ability to do that. And I think Salesforce has not only given me technical skills, it's given me confidence in myself to know that I can achieve these things.

Being a trailblazer is coming out first and clearing the path for others.

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These tools actually push me to figure.

Out what the best is every day.

All of that is not possible without an incredible tool like Trailhead.

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I somehow found the user group and I went in there and I was actually hoping to pay somebody to help me and all these people helped me for free. I will never, ever forget that feeling. And I remember that experience and I try to recreate that for other people.

It's an amazing example of what an ecosystem can really do when it bands together and focuses on how we can.

All make each other better.

Where you can not only be proud.

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It's changed my life. It really has. And it's changed my company and the customers that I work with.

When your customers are happy, your company's thriving. And when your company's thriving, you're truly at your best.

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Do my whole life.

Being your best is not only having a great career, but it's enabling others to have a great career. And I think that makes me my best.