Bret Taylor | Curiosity Saves the C-Suite

Hi everyone, welcome to Grey Matter, the podcast from Greylock where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of Editorial at Greylock. Today we're sharing Greylock General partner Sarah Goa's interview with Salesforce President and COO Brett Taylor. During this discussion, Brett talks about lessons learned from his career as a product developer, two time startup founder and an operations leader within several large tech companies. He also talks about the high profile acquisitions he's led at Salesforce and lays out his vision for the future of the all digital work anywhere world. This interview is part of Greylock's Iconversations speaker series. You can find content from all past Iconversations events@greylock.com Iconversations hi everyone.

Welcome to Greylock's Iconversations. I'm Sarah Goa, a General Partner at Greylock and I'm thrilled to be joined by Salesforce President and COO and former Greylock Box Founder and CEO of Quip brand Brett Taylor. In addition to leading operations at one of the most important tech companies in the world, Brett's an extraordinary product leader who has helped conceive, create and commercialize technologies that have touched hundreds of millions of lives. He's the co creator of Google Maps and the Google Maps API and joined Facebook when a startup Friend feed was acquired. Brett serves as the CTO of Facebook for three years before founding productivity startup Quip, which partnered with Greylock and which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Since joining Salesforce, Brett has pushed for innovation and has been instrumental in the company's acquisitions of Slack, Tableau and Mulesoft. Brett also serves on the board of Twitter, most recently Salesforce, already a dominant SaaS company, has been a leader in the all digital work anywhere world as companies have had to digitally transform through the pandemic. Brett led the Slack acquisition, bringing Salesforce and Slack together to create the digital HQ which we'll get to hear more about. Brett, thank you so much for being here. It's a pleasure. I have so much respect for you Kevin. The extraordinary Quip team. I remember telling John Lilly when we invested this is a company I'd considered joining full time. It was one of the first times I fought that at Greylock. Thank you for continuing to be part of the family.

Thanks for having me. It's great to see you and it's been a long time.

Brett, today you are running operations at one of the largest tech companies in the world. You've scaled 0 to 1 to tens of thousands of reports and cross from consumer enterprise. You remain an extraordinary technologist and product leader but you've also obviously taken on go to market. It's an incredible story of just personal growth. Tell us about how you got to now.

So I went to college at Stanford, was a computer science major coterm so I got a master's degree and I was there during the dot com bubble. So it was interesting. Like the career fair my sophomore year in college was like, you know, free pizzas for every student in the computer lab, jobs falling from the sky. And by the time I got there from my junior year it was like tumbleweed going through as like every single one of those businesses had gone under. So I ended up at Google largely through luck in the sense there just weren't that many companies left after the carnage of the dot com bubble bursting. But actually most importantly is Marissa Meyer. I was a section leader while she was a teaching assistant in a class and had ended up at Google and started what became the associate product manager program at Google. And I was a member of the first associate product manager class. Probably the first career change I made in some ways because all of my other job opportunities were to be a software engineer. Marissa had made the case that I should consider product management. I not only didn't really understand Google's business model at the time, I didn't know what product managers did either. But I really liked Marissa and I loved Google the product. So kind of took a leap of faith and it turned out to be a great decision. Probably my crowning achievement at Google was Google Maps. But I worked on a bunch of products while I was there. And then right around 2007 I got really obsessed with the what at the time was called Web 2.0, but just the read write nature of the web. And Google wasn't really that interested in making products that were social, you know, at the time. Anyway, the Facebook envy came a little later. I tried a lot of proposals to build more social capabilities and maps and at the company, but sort of fell in deaf ears and came to the conclusion that if I wanted to work in that space, I'd probably have to do it outside of Google. So left and started Friendfeed.

Give us a sense of scale. Like how big was Google when you joined and when you decided to go do friendfeed?

I want to say it was between 200 and 500 people when I started. We're in one building, small building in Mountain View. That was before we moved into Silicon Graphics old campus. I say I'm not really sure we had a lot of contract employees Doing support at the time and I'm not sure how they sort of play into the employee number, so I'm not totally sure, but certainly under a thousand. And then I left probably over 12,000. So it was just a rocket ship, five years. And so yeah, I left having made Google Maps for the last thing I did at Google was our first developer conference. Because the Google Maps API, which ended up used by Trulia and Yelp and others was sort of my kind of passion project. I wrote it, product managed it, marketed it. I was more like a one man band on that. And it was the first real developer product we had. We had an API for ad system, but not really other than automation. There wasn't really a true developer product. And there was a number of early products there and kind of herded those cats and made our first developer conference in San Jose, which was about probably three weeks before I left the company. So I was really proud of that. And seeing what Google I O is now is pretty cool to see that evolution over the years. So then I became passionate about social software. I started Friendfeed. I joke. We were sort of like the Apple Newton of social networks. Not commercially successful, but we invented a lot of the interactions in the newsfeed that I think a lot of other social networking services adopted, much to our chagrin at the time. But we had a good reputation in the Valley. It was a real classic, fly high and fall quickly. I think in the middle of, I think it was 2008, it might have been 2009, we were in this big spread in the middle of business week and kind of the darlings of Silicon Valley. And then by the end of that year, Twitter had totally kicked our ass. And so it was like, you know, there's a point of view to ask me in that six month period, I was like, this is viable. We found product market fit, we're going to take over the world. And like six months later we're like, okay, we've lost. There's no silver medal in social networking. We ended up running sort of a process. We knew that we, we had lost. So, you know, we debated pivoting but just decided that we really wanted to work in social software. We were passionate about it, so decided that M and A was probably the better approach. Ran a bit of a process and chose Facebook at the end of that. And we had a few different offers, but. So it was a pretty emotional decision, but chose Facebook. And I ended up CTO there only for about, I want to say three years, maybe three and a Half years there and saw it through ipo, which was really fun. I'd been at Google during the ipo, but not in an executive role. And it's a really different vantage point to see scale. And you talk about my career trajectory, that was really where I think I learned how to become a manager. Both from Mark, but also from Cheryl, who's a real amazing. She spends a lot of her time quite generously mentoring and taught I think a lot of the Facebook management team what it means to be a manager. So learned the hard way. I definitely wasn't perfect there, but scaled an organization much larger than I ever had before. And I'm very grateful to this day that Mark gave me that chance and that opportunity. It's still funny though, because I was, I think I was 29 at the time and often the oldest person in the room. That was Facebook in that era. So just a different type of company. And then the big transformation there was mobile. Facebook is doing so well now. I think people often forget when we went public, our stock was depressed for almost an entire first year, in part because our user base had moved to the smartphone, but our monetization hadn't. So there was a lot of questions about Facebook as a business and what became mobile app install ads and a few other things. We were just in real time trying to move our business model to mobile, still dominated by the right rail of ads on the side of Facebook in a browser. And we similarly had lots of fits and starts and just adopting to the smartphone revolution, just, you know, famously poor application for a while that I led sort of the reimplementation on iOS and Android and we got through all that. But it was. I have a lot of battle scars from that. But at the other side of it, I really just realized just how much our consumer lives had shifted to the smartphone, but enterprise software hadn't and kind of became obsessed with it. And that's where equip came from. It was one angle of just saying if you were to reimagine the way we work around, push notifications around the smartphone, around the tablet, which at the time seemed like it was going to be bigger than I think it turned out to be, what would you build and how would you re architect the way we work? And then started quip in end of 2012 and then as you mentioned, Quipp ended up acquired by Salesforce. And I've been here for about five and a half years, so pretty long.

It's been that long. Oh my gosh. It's an extraordinary set of Companies and products that have changed the world. You mentioned that you had to learn to be a manager and a leader. You have as one of an exceptionally small group of people, you've managed both your very small teams having big impact and then very large teams having big impact. And you know, one analogy we use with entrepreneurs at Greylock is if you're lucky enough, like if you're quip, for example, you have rapid organic or enterprise adoption and each year your your company is suddenly two or three times bigger. And I personally haven't grown as a leader like 2 or 3x in the past year. It's a really hard thing to ask of people. It sounds like there are certain people who helped you, like Cheryl, for example, what helped you stretch back and forth across these different modes of operating these different scales.

Yeah, I mean one of the things that I've learned over this is to as a CEO and as an entrepreneur, but in general with my jobs, I think the flaw and the mistake I made early in my career that I've gotten better at is rather than trying to conform your job to you think about what is the most important thing this job demands of me and change yourself. I remember when I first became CTO of Facebook, everything from my staff meetings to just the cadence of my job was sort of what I wanted to work on. And I realized over the course of some swings and misses in that experience that if I approached each day and say, what's the most important thing that I want Facebook to achieve and how can I affect that outcome? It would really transform my day and it transformed the way I worked. And I look at scaling a company and really early on in a company's life cycle, probably the answer is products, right? You don't have one yet. You need to work on it and you need to spend a lot of time with your early customers and make your product useful. Make it some, you know, if you're on the enterprise side, you know, you need to make, you know, your customers successful and create enough value that someone will actually pay for the thing. And it's a lot of, you know, rapid fire iteration. You might get to that next phase where you found product market fit. And you know, maybe the thing that's most valuable for your company is recruiting, you know, and finding the leadership team that you need. You're the effective chief product officer and you need a chief product officer for the first time. Maybe you've gone from grit driven sales and you need a real head of sales and you're going to really need to scale that motion, maybe you've relied on PR and word of mouth for marketing. And to get to that next level, you actually need to optimize your paid customer acquisition. You really need a cmo. And then later you might find that your leadership team's not working and you need to dive in and fix something or change out your leadership team. But every stage of your company, especially as an entrepreneur, because it changes so rapidly, you need to bring a different version of yourself. And I think that's really hard. I think it means that, you know, some parts of that journey might be really fun and some might feel totally unnatural and, you know, actually, you know, quite uncomfortable, you might be kind of miserable through it because the part that made you successful in the phase before is not the part that will make you successful in the phase after. And if you look at the great entrepreneurs, the ones who have scaled from those early stages all the way to becoming successful CEOs of public companies, I think they've gone through these transformations and I think that's one thing that I've really embraced and it was really hard for me at times. You know, I think you end up having to have the humility to recognize, like, how you need to show up and just how rapidly that changes.

I think it's an amazing lens. You're a legendary founder, a legendary product guy and operator. But I think sometimes there is a type of legend that actually is a disservice to founders and operators as they're scaling. That's like, you're perfect, you've got the vision and you don't need to change yourself, you don't need to grow. And that's just clearly not the case in terms of the scaling and the learning that people go through. So thank you for sharing that. I probably spend half my time thinking about recruiting when you are evaluating whether hires can scale down from jobs at bigger companies. So I'm thinking like Molly Graham for example. Right. Or any of the other early quip folk and operate, you know, at that startup. Or when you, when you hire at Salesforce and you're looking at non obvious backgrounds, like what do you look for? How do you get yourself comfortable with the risk of people's profiles, what they haven't done?

First of all, I don't think there's a magic wand here. You know, I've made a lot of bad hiring decisions and a lot of great ones, and you learn from all of them. And there's not one litmus test that determines whether people can be successful. But I'll say A couple things, you know, one is there's a certain amount of grit necessary to be successful at any early stage company. And so I think if you're looking at that big hire from a Google or a Facebook or you know, any large company, when you're talking through their experience and talking through the anecdotes, you move out of your swim lane and you make something happen. Because it's the thing that needs to be done, I think is the most important thing. Because when I've seen folks fail to scale down, as you put, that's a great phrase, it's largely, you know, psychologically or genuinely or just reliant and kind of the infrastructure of these large companies. And you know, they're good at being a functional owner but not good at sort of really working on the most important thing. And I think, you know, if you think about what makes early stage companies successful, it's that everyone runs towards the fire, right? You know, and whether it's a big opportunity or a big problem, there's not much room for error. And if you don't fix it, no one will. Right? And I think that's a mentality that is you find at large companies. But you know, people can become, you know, indoctrinated and sort of reliant on the infrastructure of these companies. The other thing I found though is you also bring people's networks, which is really positive. You mentioned Molly, one of my closest friends, who's the chief operating officer of Quote and now the COO of Lambda School. You know, we obviously came from a similar network, but actually some of the executives that Molly and I brought into Quip, heads of sales and marketing and other things, you know, really helped us transform as we were maturing as a business because we, I think in some ways, you know, we had a great network from Facebook and Google and my previous startup. But those are all consumer companies and we needed to especially as we discovered product market fit, we really needed to be a real enterprise SaaS company. And to some degree it was both an advantage in the sense we made, I think consumer grade software at Quip, which was a huge selling point. But I think on the go to market side we were learning a lot of things the hard way. Learning lessons that some grizzled veterans of enterprise Software had learned 12 times before. So I'd say another important thing, particularly for startups is recognize where you have blind spots and if you can bring in a senior leader that has done it before, that's also compatible with your culture. You can skip a Step you can skip some learnings that other people have learned before. I'm a huge believer in cross pollination of experiences producing great outcomes. I had never worked in mapian before Google Maps. I'd never worked in enterprise software before. Quip. And if you have a beginner's mind and you're willing to learn a new domain, your naivete can be a huge asset too because you see things that other people don't. Finding that right balance of not being too stuck in your existing network and making sure the senior people in particular broaden the network of talent that you're bringing into your company and broaden the perspectives I think is really, really important. And it's no surprise to me. I'm friends with huge percentage of the successful founders in the Valley at this stage of my career and I'll have dinner with great folks like Patrick Collison at stripe and 80% of his conversation is questions. I mean the best founders are the most curious people in the world and I think if you embrace that, you'll end up bringing in a much more diverse range of talent into your company and you'll really benefit from it.

Many entrepreneurs, they are uncomfortable with the idea of bringing in go to market DNA because it's less familiar, because they're concerned about changing the DNA of the company. What advice would you have for them about managing that discomfort?

I admit I've drank in the go to market Kool Aid pretty deeply at this point. I'm at Salesforce and I think we're, I think one of the best companies in the world that marketing and sales and distribution. I think it's a huge strategic mistake. I talked to so many founders who view product driven and sales driven as polar opposites and my answer is why not both? You know, it's interesting. So if you take the greatest product driven companies, I'll take Slack, probably the prime example of this. The product's wonderful and it sells itself right, it spreads organically. The self service purchasing process is amazing, the onboarding process is amazing. And Slack and Atlassian and a number of other companies who pioneered that model have created this next generation of SaaS. Companies who all want to be product driven, which is wonderful, it's a great idea. But at some point if you want to move up market and you want to be on the minds of CIOs and CEOs outside of the early adopters, sales can be a really important part of that process. And if your product is amazingly easy to use and spreads organically, that leads to better negative Net churn, it leads to lower cost of sales. And it's a superpower you have against companies that only focus on sales and marketing as their distribution channel. And I think the sort of myth that it's a choice you make, that you're either product driven or sales driven, I think is set back. I've seen literally tens of companies that I think would have been more successful faster had they gotten over the philosophical hurdle of investing in sales capacity and really embraced that motion. And I do think it's in part because of these cautionary tales of really shitty enterprise software. And people are like, okay, that's what sales driven leads to. And I'm like, well, that's a choice. And I do think that the next generation of companies, I think Stuart did a great job of this at Slack as an example. I think it's, you know, in my mind the prime example of product driven company. But a great sales leadership team that's, you know, now I think a great part of Salesforce. But I think the answer should be both. I do think that it is hard. You know, I think what I've observed, and I certainly am guilty as charged too, if you come from a product background like I did, like how do you identify great sales leadership? What is a sales culture is very different than the culture of your product and engineering team. But that's part of growing up as a founder, you know. And I, and what I would say is like, if you're not going to do it, your competitor is going to do it and they're going to grow faster than you are. And if you found product market fit and you want to have the biggest impact, don't shy away from hard problems. And I would say this is probably the biggest opportunity I see from a lot of particularly early stage SaaS companies.

Well, I'm super excited to hear you say that. First of all, that's a very compelling message of if you don't do it, your competitors will. And second, you know, I've personally taken a career bet at Greylock in terms of backing extraordinary teams, building products that I think are the best products and the best experiences and through the Greylock network in our community, helping them add the DNA that they can grow up as businesses and be winner businesses. But I'd say it is a challenge, right? And it's a process. Let's talk about Salesforce. Obviously you guys work with businesses and organizations across every industry vertical in their digital transformation. You cover a huge amount of surface area. You talked about being obsessed with social or thinking about Developer platforms and being obsessed with social and then thinking about mobile. These are really big changes and like, you know, strong focus for you. What's important to you now and to Salesforce now.

Salesforce is really unique in the sense it serves such a broad market at this point. Our core platform, we call it Customer 360, but it's basically platforms for digital sales, digital customer service, digital marketing, e commerce. And then we have a platform underneath all of that that we also sell. And we've complemented that with a number of big acquisitions which you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation. So Mulesoft, which is an integration platform, Tableau, which is an analytics and visualization platform, and Slack, which I presume everybody knows who's listening right now, given the audience. And it's a really fun time for us because as hard as this pandemic has been for everybody, I think it's really accelerated every company in the world, investment and digital technologies. So if you weren't thinking about self service and chatbots for support, you are now, if you were a consumer goods company who hadn't yet gone direct to consumer, you are now, if you're a sales team who's weren't thinking about, okay, should we sell over Slack, Connect and Zoom, you probably are now because you're all stuck at your house. So, you know, to some degree what we're really focused on is like, how do we be a trusted digital advisor to all of our customers who are going through these times, like really uncomfortably fast digital transformations with our platform and that's the landscape of Salesforce and really focus on all of those different lines of business and industries. But the big bet we made this past year was acquiring Slack. And that's really what I'm focused on right now, is making that successful. And you know, it's interesting, I think, you know, at the beginning of this pandemic, there's a lot of people talking about things like Zoom fatigue. I think it's in part because I think we didn't really transform ourselves. We kind of translated the old world into the new. So we took every meeting in a conference room and moved it to a video conference room. And of course, staring at your own face all day, sitting in one seat, barely able to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom, you're gonna feel exhausted by the end of the day. When I talk to entrepreneurs like Matt Mullenweg of WordPress who have been, you know, running distributed companies since before it was cool, they'll talk a lot about things like asynchronous work and they'll talk about all the freedoms that a distributed workforce affords. I think the bet on Slack is really bet on that future. This isn't a pandemic behavior. I think we're 18 months into it with all these variants and the great relocation and the great resignation going on right now. Clearly flexible work is here to stay and we want to be a part in defining what that future of the work looks like. Stuart is this amazing phrase that we've embraced wholeheartedly called the digital hq. And I love it because especially as entrepreneur, like the most fun thing was choosing my office. I remember finding the abandoned warehouse in Mountain View for friend feet and I remember finding the office above the Warfield building in San Francisco for equip. And you have to think now, if you were starting a company today, you wouldn't start with choosing your office space. You'd start with building your digital hq. What are the tools and technologies that you use to connect your employees? Because you're not together most of the time and you know, we're saying, okay, well, how can we take customer360 and this vision for a digital HQ and make it help every company in the world go through this transformation? And that's pretty fun. And it's, it's a fun vantage point right now to as someone who's entrepreneurial, but obviously embraced the other, other side of my, my leadership. And it's an amazing opportunity working with Stuart just to someone I've admired for a really long time. When I was doing Friendfeed, he was working on Flickr. I've known him for like a decade now. And so kind of feels just like an amazing opportunity to work with someone who I've been really close with for a long time.

It both sounds like really fun to work with people that you think are talented that have a strategic impact on what you're trying to do with Salesforce strategy. There's part of your brain that's focused on that and then part that's segmented toward the other parts of M and A and growth. For Salesforce, what was significant about Mulesoft and Tableau?

Mark has this phrase that I've really embraced, which is have a beginner's mind. And that's not his phrase. Be says it more than any technology executive that I've heard and I've really embraced it, which is wake up every morning and try to forget what you think you know and look at the world through the lens of a beginner's mind and with Our M and A strategy, it's really recognizing that great innovation happens can come from anywhere. Just a quick anecdote. It's not lost to me that like Google, when we moved from that office in Mountain View to our first campus, it was Silicon Graphics old campus because they were going out of business. And Facebook, we moved from Palo Alto to our office in Menlo Park. It was Sun Microsystems old campus because they went out of business. And it was interesting. Like every campus I've ever moved into was like a graveyard of a dead technology company. They basically failed to transform because the world moved on from where they were. And it's interesting. It's so easy on the outside to say, why didn't they see that this change was happening? Why didn't they embrace the classic innovators dilemma? The answer is interesting. I found culturally, having been in the inside and the outside, the disruptor and the incumbent, you end up with this myopia where the narrative, when you have tens of thousands of employees, the narrative from your colleagues becomes louder than the narrative from your customers. And I remember a while ago being on Microsoft's campus and seeing everyone carrying around Windows Phones. It was a long time ago. And everyone I talked to is convinced that the Windows Phone was going to be successful. And you walk like one foot outside the campus. And I was like, there's no way. But you know, it's interesting because you end up with this sort of like reality distortion field. I give a lot of credit to Mark Benioff own philosophy and personality here. And certainly something I embrace is we have great ventures arm, we have a great partner ecosystem and we're always looking for great ideas in Silicon Valley and elsewhere just around us. And if we see something that is adjacent to where we are, our customers are benefiting. And Most importantly, where 1 +1 is equal more than 2, if we combined it with our platform, we could do something greater. Yeah, of course we're going to do that because we're led by our customers and we don't have the arrogance to think that innovation only can happen. At Salesforce, mulesoft is a great example of that. You know, this is a, you know, API led integration platform. The way we found it was through our customers every time we were in like a service cloud deployment. MuleSoft was the tool that the IT department had chosen to integrate with the ERP system or whatever. It was like, what is this MuleSoft thing and why is it so popular? We got to know them and we're like, wow, this is amazing. Maybe we should show up to our customers saying, hey, we're going to help make integration part of our value proposition rather than have to have to figure it out yourself. And it's been a huge success. We just had our investor day last week after Dreamforce. And I mean, it was one of those things looking at the revenue growth since we acquired it. It's amazing. I'm so proud of it. I think it shows that, you know, that having a beginner's mind about innovation is a huge part of our company. It's interesting too, because Mark is obviously an entrepreneur, head of product. David Schmeier is an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. I think we're a company of entrepreneurs and it's a huge part of our DNA.

How do you prevent that distortion field that you talked about? Because Salesforce is a large company now. Like, you could stay in the, I don't know, in the slack of Salesforce all the time and never exit and only hear that opinion.

So it's a huge challenge. I mean, especially what I would say is one of the things I've observed from people who are new managers and particularly like founders and CEOs whose teams are growing, is not knowing how and when to delegate and what to delegate, you know, and you'll see polar opposites. You'll see people who, you know, essentially micromanage every decision and don't know how to really empower and bring on leaders. You'll also see the opposite, though, where people sort of delegate too much and you can end up with fires burning that you don't know about. And it's a real skill. And I think the best way, and I'm speaking, you know, probably to your B2B audience right now, but is spend time with the customers. It's not that hard. If you want to know if your product is starting to develop warts, you'll hear it. If you're talking to your customers. If you want to know that there's a competitor creeping up on you, you'll hear it from your customers. If you want to know that there's a adjacent product that's really valuable, that's always being used in conjunction with your product and it might represent an M and A opportunity you'll hear from your customers. Last quarter alone, I had seven DC level customer meetings and oh my goodness. So, yeah, in one quarter. And it's just a huge part of developing a successful business is like, are you truly obsessed with your customers or is that something you put on like a, you know, poster in the cafeteria? Not that there are posters or cafeterias anymore. But, you know, and I, and I do think that if you end up focused, navel gazing on your own organization, you're not out talking to the people whom you're actually serving, who are your customers. I don't think you're doing your job. It's a great way to see things early. And also it can be a really great reality check about your internal narratives and what's actually going on.

So because you're also a consumer guy and half our audience is B2C and actually like, you know, the lines are less clear than they used to be, what advice would you have for companies trying to remain user centric? On the consumer side, it's a much.

More of a art form because obviously you can't talk to tens of millions of people every single day. So it's a different thing. Reid Hoffman gave me great advice here, which is, I think, you know, what I often see from consumer companies is you know, what you want to achieve when you're at scale. But the hard part is getting to that scale and really recognizing the different milestones that you need to overcome to get to that point. And Facebook, I think, did this really well. Where, you know, it started off a service for universities, it expanded sort of iteratively beyond that. And I remember every stage was controversial. When we let in the parents, that was like a huge controversial thing. We let everyone in. But even after that point, our growth team would focus on individual countries and having maturity models and really recognizing at every stage where we were and what sort of, in the sort of Clay Christensen jobs to be done since, like, what are we doing at that point? And if you have three friends on Facebook, you're doing a different job than you do if you've got thousands and you've been a member of the network for years. Really have a strong point of view about what stage of your growth curve you're on, what jobs you're being hired for at that point, and recognizing your different cohorts of users are probably in different stages of maturity as well. There's a couple failure modes that are common. One is you just never find that sort of moment to reach scale with consumer services. The other, though, you see time and time again as you become an IT company for a couple weeks, but your platform sort of buckles under that pressure and you end up not really having seen the flywheel take off. That moment is the most nuanced where I think people end up sort of embracing top line vanity metrics and sort of Often losing sight for really durable consumer growth. And so the one thing I'd say is have a strong perspective on what those aha moments for your, your consumers are and become relentlessly focused on those. And don't get distracted by the top line vanity metrics because, I mean, you as an investor know better than I. But there's just a graveyard of companies that hit a lot of top line metrics but don't actually get that durable flywheel of traction that comes from being much more opinionated about, like, why people are using your service in the first place.

Both those graveyards are large, you know, extraordinary products that didn't get the flywheel going. And then extraordinary products that, you know, a hot second were incredibly interesting and caught consumer attention. These are amazingly difficult things to do to create habitual products.

So when you talk to great consumer founders, just take people like Jack Dorsey, you'll hear the depth of their opinions about the services that they're making. And I think it really reflects that kind of real intentionality about why their services are important. I remember being mystified in the early days of Snapchat and, you know, all the decisions Evan was making that turned out to be so prescient and so smart. And I think that really is, I think that discipline is really important as you're scaling your service, because as you scale it, how you stand apart from the crowd of adjacent competitors, which in that space are going to be a lot of them, really comes down to have a really strong perspective about what your service is and why and staying in that swim lane and being disciplined as you go through those growth moments.

Speaking of distinct points of view, I remember being at dinner with Evan Moore and some friends at dinner a decade ago and like, you know, him talking about the importance of ephemerality and like, how it would change interaction completely between people. And this is a very different idea a decade ago and thinking like, man, this guy's a weird, weird thinker. But it's distinct as a point of view, as you said. And it was deeply held and deeply thoughtful. One question that I think is like a little bit taboo for entrepreneurs is like, how to think about acquisitions. You've been on both sides, like, what advice would you have for people who are navigating that or looking at a set of options or deciding like, do I explore that path?

I sort of gave it to my background, but I sold friend feed and sort of a, we were for sale. So we were, I guess we sold our company in that case. And then with quip, we were bought, you know, it was. We had actually just raised our Series B from Greylock and we were definitely not for sale and it was just a different model. And I've acquired, between Facebook and, and Salesforce, I've acquired as many companies as probably most people meet at this stage just because we're so acquisitive at both firms. There's a lot of advice out here on this, so I'll answer like, you know, should you consider it? I think it's important to consider, but consider quickly. I'll just take quip as an example. We had been pursued a number of times in quip's history. Often I would either not engage or have one conversation and be very clear about like, no, now's not the right time. I think it's important to always know the market landscape because if something changes in your business, the relationships that you've developed prior to the moment where you might be open minded to acquisitions matter. So I think there's sort of a point of view, like it's a distraction, don't engage in the conversation. That's right, by the way. But it doesn't mean you shouldn't be polite. Develop those relationships and then just say no and move on. Because at the point where it is relevant, you want to have a, you know, a conversation you can pick back up. You want the relationship to have existed there. And I don't think these conversations hurt. So I think it's important to be realistic that you know, not every company is going to end up a scaled public company. And as much as that's like every entrepreneur's dream, it's not every entrepreneur's outcome. And so you should just recognize that and make sure that you're not arrogant, you know, in that respect. I do think though that you can end up in casual conversations with large companies indefinitely. So if you aren't just firm and about where you are, you can end up with a huge distracting process. And it can be insidious, it can infect your brain a little bit. It'll make you less confident in your organic path and also just mean you're not working on growing your product, growing your customer base, growing your team, which is what you should be working on if you do get to the point where you're thinking that an acquisition is like where you want to go. I think it's important to have good advice and I think it's important to have advice outside of your investors too, and not in any way a knock on Greylock or benchmark the firms. I've worked with a lot in the past. But you know, your investors have a portfolio of acquisitions, your incentives are sort of aligned, but not 100% in line. Put another way, if you know there's a 10% chance you're worth billions of dollars, your investors will probably take that chance. Whereas if you have a 90% chance at a $300 million or $400 million outcome, whatever you're considering, you might take that because the certainty may be worth more to you than it is to your investor. So whether it's your attorney, an entrepreneur is what I recommend. Someone who's been in the game before and done it have a trusted advisor outside of your board that can give you advice that's from an independent vantage point as you're considering the strategic outcomes. And then the last thing is the process matters. Probably too much for this conversation unless you want to go there, but I've seen a lot of people screw these up and overthink it or underthink it. And I think there's definitely an art form to deal making and I've been on both sides and seen a lot of things go well and go poorly. So I think it really just make sure you have people who have done this before around you and make sure that if you're going down this process, you can end up with material changes in valuation, material changes in just the likelihood. These things close and there's a lot more. No one writes about the acquisitions that didn't happen, but there's a big graveyard of those as well. And I think I've just seen some really crappy advice and entrepreneurs somewhat surprisingly following really bad advice. So just find the right people as you're considering and find the right mentors.

As someone who's been part of several acquisitions good and broken. Right. That that all resonates and squares with me. You've said that Salesforce had a very in office culture prior to the pandemic. You're clearly a believer in hybrid work as here to stay. Now you know, as somebody who's attended Dreamforce, that's also uniquely an in person experience. Like a lot of moving pieces for you as a leader and for Salesforce, what are you changing and learning?

Just for context, we're about 65,000 employees. We've onboarded 20,000 people since the pandemic started, none of whom have ever been in a Salesforce office. We typically have 200,000 people show up for Dreamforce. As everyone who lives in San Francisco knows because of the traffic, we had a digital Dreamforce last Year, this year we had a hybrid Dreamforce. We had about 1,000 people in person, but 100 million plus people watched online, which is really great. I joke that half the people who aren't in tech have no idea what Salesforce does except for our towers. So we're known for our towers, we're known for our events. And so we've gone through a digital transformation ourselves. So I'll tell you, we're really trying to embrace it. And I think, I believe that the companies that will thrive on the other side of the pandemic in this all digital work anywhere world are the companies that really lean into the changes from this past year. Because I think what's driving the great relocation and great resignation is just we have this free market of flexibility that employees are now, you know, both thinking about where do I want to live, what type of company do I work for, what type of flexibility would that afford? It's obviously a moment in time, but I think it really reflects how permanent these changes are. So we're really leaning into flexible work as a future. I mean, just as one example, every team at Salesforce has a flex team agreement where you say, what days are we going to be in the office? What days aren't we? So you basically, it's a part of like choosing your team at Salesforce is like, what is their working style? And there's like a free market of that Dreamforce. We had a thousand people in person, but most people experienced it online. It was really cool, actually. If you went down into the basement of Moscone, we had this truck and it was like, like you'd see for Monday Night Football to broadcast everything off over the Internet, we launched a streaming service called Salesforce Plus. We all get the latest episodes of Ted Lasso, but you'll get a bunch of content for CMOs and Chief Digital officers. And so it's pretty cool. We really leaned into this change. I have a strong thesis, obviously we made a $28 billion bet on Slack in this thesis, but I think this is the beginning of distributed work and the pandemic is not the year of distributed work. I think the pandemic is the seed that got planted that will define the next generation of white collar information work. And you know, I think if you look at the history of Silicon Valley and just the influence that, for example, Hewlett Packard had on the earliest days of just the office culture of tech companies, what Google had and what Facebook did with the Open Office floor plan, we now have every company in every country in the world doing this experiment on working digitally. And you have to know just intellectually we're not going back. But I think the real opportunity is we still don't know what it's going to be like when it's not imposed on us for health reasons. What is the true world of flexible work? When you can choose to be in person and how you be in person. And I think the entrepreneurs that can predict that future and build the tools and technologies to make companies successful in that new normal. I think there's a huge opportunity there that obviously we're investing in, but I think there will be multiple billion dollar companies created to make companies successful in this new normal.

It's actually just a really exciting time from like a, from a product or like a life configuration perspective because there's never been such openness to rethinking it. It's not just openness, it's demand. Right. I'm sure you see from Salesforce employees. We see in all our companies like the genie is not going back in the bottle. This is a time where there's increasing polarization across political, social, economic issues. Salesforce, unlike many companies, is quite outspoken here. How do you decide as a company what to be outspoken about?

One of the things that's always been a part of Salesforce company culture, long before I arrived at the company was Salesforce has always been a values driven company. Our values are more important than our mission and it's always been that way. Mark and Parker, you know, when they created the company, started the 1:1:1 model where 1% of the company's equity, employee time and software went to nonprofits and educational institutions, which is become a model that a lot of companies have adopted. I encourage everyone online to adopt that model too, because it's easy when your company is not worth a lot and by the time you go public, if you haven't set up this infrastructure to give back, it's a really challenging financial decision. And I think fundamentally, I think there's an area where I disagree with some very vocal CEOs and entrepreneurs out there. Like the idea that your business is there just to build a product, to me is not true. Business is a huge part of our culture and our society. And I think we believe in stakeholder capitalism that, you know, our business isn't here just to serve our shareholders. It's here to serve our employees, our communities. It's why every senior vice president and above at Salesforce is has to sponsor a local middle school. You know, we don't want to be the Tech company that's here to extract value from our communities. We want to be a tech company that's there that makes our communities better. You can see it if you just look at the headlines right now. Tech is beyond the like, oh, cool, when's the next iPhone coming out? People are worried about job displacement with things like automation and intelligence. People are worried about the impact of tech and communities and rising real estate prices. And you can sit there and resent it, or you can recognize that this is what it means to be a part of a society and lean into that. And I think similarly, if you look at particularly younger employees, when they choose where they work, the values matter, right? This is where you spend a huge percentage of your time, particularly at a startup. And if you think you can be there and only talk about your product, fine. But again, speaking of your competitors, if they show up and say this was a place where you can actually grow as a person and identify with the values and give back, that's a more competitive position, particularly for employees that want to derive meaning from their work, which is a very important part of choosing where you want to have an impact on the world. So we lead with our values. That starts with trust, and that means developing trust with our customers, with our employees, with our communities. It also means that we stand up for our employees. So, like somewhat now, famously, our policy around offering relocation expenses to people who want to leave Texas became public. The algorithm, if you will, is simple. Which is, are employees at risk? And if they are, we're going to stand up for them. And I think it's one of the things that makes Salesforce a great company.

I hope more companies follow that path, Brett, that you and Mark and others at Salesforce are charging ahead on. You know, this last 18 months has been an era of exploration and learning for all of us. What did you discover about yourself or your work style or anything else trapped in your house?

I've realized how important in person interactions are. I remember the first time we got together as a management team. A lot of PCR tests going into it and this sense of almost like euphoria when we finally got together. And so it was interesting because I was both realizing how efficient things are. I have three kids under the age of 12, and it's been so amazing to spend more time with them and have family dinners every night and spend less time on the road. And so that's all great. But it's also made me realize that as we work in this new digital forum, just how important those in person interactions are. I obviously knew that. But the actual emotional response when we all reconnected was like, it felt just like oxygen. And so kind of for me that made me reflect on myself a little bit. I'm the classic introvert in some ways like many tech folks are. But it's sort of like figuring out, okay, like it made me realize that I don't really know what this new normal is going to be like, you know, like what is that right? Balance between in person and digital and also reflecting to myself that like you really need to balance it. So yeah, that's probably what I learned that resonates.

I feel a little bit like what do I want? Because you know, not driving to East Bay for an hour long meeting is a real joy. But we definitely have been starting to do hybrid partner meetings and it's a different experience. Experience. It's great to see colleagues beyond Slack. What's like an experience or an interaction? You're an interaction guy like that you can picture in the future that you think is going to be different and better than what we have today.

I think we've under invested in new asynchronous workflows. One of the features that Slack just introduced, which is called clips, which is asynchronous video so kind of can replace like the morning standup. I've also as a big topic I mentioned Matt Woollenweg, you know, is a close friend of mine in Automattic which makes WordPress and you know, their whole culture is focused on asynchronous. And obviously at QUIP we invested a lot in documents and I remember for our board meetings we would use documents rather than slides. And part of the culture of the QUIP board meeting was everyone would read the board document but actually comment digitally like inside the QUIP document. And it met. Our board meeting was a strategic discussion like the all the numbers, you know, all the product announcements, everything had been read, commented. None of the tactical stuff was in there and it meant we'd have. John Lilly could tell you, I think it was only like a few hour board meeting but we would be the densest strategic discussion ever because all the tactical stuff was done. So when I look at the future of work, I think a lot of people have been. I've seen a lot of stuff around like virtual reality and I've seen a lot of stuff around in person, sort of video experiences and I think that's all great and there's probably some real innovation to be had there. But I think when I think about the opportunities of Distributed work and digital work. It's like, can you be productive across time zones? Can you enable people to have more flexibility and freedom, which means you can consume information on your own time rather than in real time? And I know it's a huge area of investment for Slack, but it's clear that there's just tons of investment here because, you know, if you just look at the percentage of your time you spend in meetings and, or, and if you don't, you're probably at a very small company and most, you know, companies of scale, you end up in this treadmill of synchronous meetings. I think there is a real opportunity to innovate here and enable. And I think asynchronous communication and collaboration I think unlocks a lot of the value of flexible work because it translates to flexibility for individuals and translates to more flexibility about where and how you hire, which I think are the big levers for the future of distributed work. And then if you figure it out, the other big trend is how do you actually transform cultures to get there? There's lots of great ideas that if you started from day one with this company culture, it's easy to adopt and the harder bet, and particularly in the future of work and enterprise software, is the change management. So I think that's where the magic is going to be in terms of investment is new modes of asynchronous work and then the product that sort of helps the product itself helps people on board to that new experience, I think is going to be a bit of an art form and a really huge opportunity.

Brett, we're out of time. Thank you so much for being here and sharing with us. It's been such a pleasure.

That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. If you enjoyed this interview and would like to hear more like it, please subscribe to grey matter at SoundCloud, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. For more content, you can also check out our website, greylock.com blog and you can follow us on our YouTube channel or on Twitter reylockvc. I'm Heather Mack and thanks for listening.