Marc Benioff & David Friedberg: Why Ohalo Switched to Salesforce

Welcome, David. Fantastic. Welcome to the earnings call.

Great to have you.

And they're changing how we feed the planet with a breeding technology that boosts crop yields by 50%, maybe 100%. Scott already sent me a can of seeds. I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about what I got or not, but it was pretty awesome. And I'll tell you, David had chosen a CRM product when he first started Oholo. And how does it pronounce? Oholo? Oholo? Mahalo?

Oholo. I should ask you. It sounds like a Hawaiian word. It sounds like a— but it's not.

Based on an important, actually, part of bioengineering history, right?

Yeah, well, there was an agricultural find in the Sea of Galilee where they found this old pot of seeds, 20,000 years. So it kind of rewrote what we thought about the history of agriculture and plant breeding. So we named it after that little village.

Fantastic. Well, yes, you're right, it sounds like a Hawaiian word, but it's not. And I know that you started with another CRM product we won't talk about, which— what it is, and But I remember when you called me and you said, well, maybe I'll try to vibe code this whole thing, whatever. And then a few months later, it turns out you're—

Well, we did a little vibe coding. I did a vibe code to make a CRM product over the weekend. And you quickly realize just how much it takes to do maintenance, to do accounts, to do security. There's just much more to it. And we realized pretty quickly there are certain, I would say, software applications that are maybe verticalized, where you have to build custom workflows that make sense for your particular business. But then there's platform software. And platform software, we realized pretty quickly, is really what we need to build our entire company around. And Salesforce is what we kind of decided to go with on CRM. We're already on Slack. We're not going to go— vibe code Slack. We're not gonna vibe code CRM. But then we build custom workflows, custom interfaces, custom prospecting tools that my sales teams— I've got agents that are out scanning public county databases trying to find where farmers are planting what crops, what their names are, what their contact info is. I've got agents doing all sorts of prospecting. That interface gives my sales team leads. That integrates with Salesforce. They can then go run the standard workflows that are a little bit more standardized across verticals, and we can build all of our custom workflows in parallel and in concert with the Salesforce tool.

Well, it's been very exciting, and I'll tell you, I'm thrilled to have you as now a large Salesforce customer.

One of your small ones, but yeah.

Well, I would say large in terms of presence, in terms of, you know, everybody knows you now, Dave, because your podcast is so popular. The number one podcast in the world is what I heard.

In San Francisco, for now. That's right.

But what I want to know is this. So when you do think about the future and you think about your company and, you know, bringing the best of AI and the best of, you know, CRM together, you know, how do you plan to do that?

Again, I think it goes back to this point about where do we create value? I'm not going to create value as a, as a business by doing something that everyone else does. If everyone else is using Microsoft Excel, I'm not gonna go build Microsoft Excel. If everyone else is using an ERP tool, you know, we integrate with NetSuite, and I know that you guys have an integration with NetSuite. We're not gonna go build an ERP tool, and we're not gonna go build Slack. We're not gonna build communications and messaging. We're not gonna build CRM. We're gonna build custom interfaces for doing plant breeding. We're going to build custom interfaces for prospecting customers. We're going to build custom interfaces for selecting the right product for a farmer based on my satellite and radar imagery that shows me what that farmer's field is going to look like next season, making an estimation, and then making the right product selections for him. So the interface to do that for my sales team, for my customers, that's where we add value. And then the actual following up with the customer, connecting with the customer record, making that transaction record, storing it, that needs to be done safely, securely. It needs to be done with the right account settings, the right access. That's what we're not going to go build, and that's really where the partnership works. Now, when we make a selection, it has to be a selection with standard, you know, platforms that we can work with, that integrate, that have the integration capabilities, that have the ability to service and support. I'll give you another example. Just internally, we use Slack, right? That's our primary communication messaging tool. And in Slack, we've got an Ask HR channel now. And so we basically used Claude to set up an Ask HR channel that anyone in my company can ask the HR questions that they would normally spend time calling up the HR people saying, hey, I got this question, I got this question. Ask HR has access to all of our internal HR documents. And it knows who you are, whether or not it can access your personal information. It knows standard benefits policies. And it could just answer all your questions for you. through Ask HR. I don't need to go build a communications tool to do that. I can leverage Slack and I can leverage Claude to deliver that internally. It's another good example of kind of the sort of thing where we can build something custom using our internal benefits, our internal HR policies, but then we can leverage the platforms and Claude to deliver that.

Okay. Now, because I'm a competitive person, I have to ask you this last question, which is kind of where I started. You know, this all started because we were just talking on the phone about something else. We're personal friends. And all of a sudden he said to me, yeah, I'm using the CRM product and I'm turning it off completely. I'm not going to use this product anymore.

Yeah.

And then I was like, well, why? You know, so can you just tell us the story? You had already invested in the CRM platform. You know, this is one of our competitors. And then, but you decided not. Now you don't have to tell us who it was, but what are some of the features and functions that you saw in Salesforce that then gave you this ability to achieve all this productivity that you so badly desired?

I wasn't sold. As great a sales guy as you are, I wasn't sold in our first conversation. I was still pretty reticent. I'm like, Marc wants me to do this. I'm gonna do it for Marc, but I'm not sure. OK? This is what I told my team. And there's a guy, great guy, named Ben. Ben works at my shop. And Ben used Claude. He used Cursor. And he spoke to your Salesforce guys, stood it up. And what took us months of going back and forth trying to customize this other CRM tool and build the application and workflows around it that we needed, We were pulling our hair out. We're like, let's just build it all from scratch. And that's when you and I talked. So Ben used Claude and Cursor, got into Salesforce, and was able to get everything stood up in under a month. And so I wasn't sold until we did it. And then I was like, OK, I'll give Mark credit at this point. And maybe we should send him a check and pay for the product. But yeah, I would say that was the—

By the way, that's been a huge—

You're a great marketing guy, but The product and the capabilities, that sold itself actually. Like when we got in there and Ben was able to do this in under a month and he told me he did the whole thing in under a month, just Ben. And he ran the whole thing.

And I think that has been the huge shock for us that, you know, these new next-gen tools, the cursors, the Replit, the Clods of the world make our product better. That all of a sudden it can customize the data, the metadata, set up the preferences, do the administration, do things that Maybe you needed, you know, a bunch of service folks to kind of do. Now all of a sudden you're getting going in a month. Maybe it might have taken you before 6 months to a year. All of a sudden now you're fully automated and your ability to add new functionality and do new things. This has provided this kind of very strong platform. And as I said, it's a deterministic platform.

Totally.

And while Cursor is more, you know, non-deterministic or more probabilistic on the front end, it's helping you to administer it. Maybe starting to build new screens for you, analytics, but nothing is going to be better than having this solid foundation.

I was probably early on the SaaSpocalypse train, as you know, because I know you listen to my show. And I always said, like, I think SaaS was this temporary phenomenon between the founding of the internet and the start of AI. But I think that it's a little more nuanced than that. It's probably this verticalized SaaS where you try and standardize a vertical on a bunch of workflows, which actually destroys value in that vertical because everyone's now doing the same thing in the same way. So no one can differentiate in that vertical. We've actually dumped all our vertical software, verticalized software. We make all of our verticalized SaaS in-house. But the horizontal, the platform, Salesforce standardizing on Slack, this is really where I think we've realized that's actually gonna get bolstered, and it's more valuable with all the other capabilities we can now build around it. So, you know, I'm definitely sold in that sense. I don't think— I think there's still a SaaS-pocalypse, but with a lowercase s rather than the uppercase S. For verticalized tools where I think AI really allows you to rebuild something that's unique, which creates value for your business in a vertical.

Rebuild it on Salesforce. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

Great. Thanks so much, David, for being with us. We really appreciate you coming in today.