Eric Siu recounts meeting a CEO of a multibillion-dollar company who wanted to replace Salesforce and Slack with in-house code to save $5-10M. Siu argues this is backwards: for a company that size, top-line growth matters far more than shaving a few million in costs.
I was at an event a few days ago in Texas. I won't mention the company name. $4 billion a year in revenue plus. That's a good-sized revenue company, publicly traded. And the CEO, he's very tech-enabled. They have a lot of devs. He's like, I don't want to end up paying $1 million, $2 million for Salesforce anymore. I'm just going to code it. And I'm like, there's going to be a lot of bugs. He's like, no, we'll fix it. It's fine. He's like, I don't want to pay for Slack anymore. I'm just going to end up cutting it off. So he's easily breaking down maybe like $5, $10 million of money that he'll save. Now, of course, there's going to be some server costs and employment So maybe the $5, $10 million turns to $4 to $8 million in savings, whatever the number is. And I'm looking at him and I'm having a discussion with him and I'm not saying AI can or can't do this, but I'm like, this is a terrible use of time. If you're a CEO of a company that's publicly traded doing billions and billions of dollars in revenue a year, why are you focused on saving less than $10 million when you should be figuring out how to grow from $4 billion in revenue to $5 or $6 billion in revenue? And for me, if I was a shareholder, I would be really pissed. I'm like, this is the wrong thing that you're focusing on. Yes, is Salesforce expensive at $1 million? But percentage of revenue, that is a really small amount of money that they're spending on Salesforce. Why the heck would you focus on saving a few million bucks instead of solving the bigger problem, which is how do you grow your top line?
