Behind the founder: Marc Benioff

I want to zoom back to the beginning of Salesforce. One of the most legendary launch events in startup history. Just looking back at that, any lessons.

From what you did right to get people to pay attention? I'm throwing everything against the wall and looking at what's going to stick. I am looking to try to find.

The winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy. Your stock is at an all time high. I'm curious just what you believe is.

Most contributed to you being able to stay on top and continue to grow. I actually never look at the stock. I find the stock to be very distracting.

The stock isn't the goal. That's not why we're doing this. AI is the defining technology of our lifetime and probably any lifetime. When was kind of the moment for you where you started to realize this?

I keep having these kind of existential freak out moments about AI. This is really moving fast. As a founder, you're just like, God.

Damn, I just got used to AI and everyone's wanting to work on AI at my company. Now we got to freaking figure out agents.

No, no, no, no, no. That's a mistake. You want the mindset of, oh, the next thing is coming. I can't wait for the next thing.

[Speaking of] Today, my guest is Marc Benioff. He's co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, which is the second largest B2B SaaS company in the world, worth around $350 billion at the time of this recording, making $35 billion a year in revenue, and 25 years later is still growing like crazy and dominating the market. In our conversation, we talk about leadership, AI, domain names, beginner's mind, marketing, product, sales, the hardest moment in Mark's journey of building Salesforce, also what exactly is an agent, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Mark Benioff. This episode is brought to you by Cloudinary, the foundational technology for all images and video on the internet. Trusted by over 2 million developers and many of the world's leading brands, Cloudinary is the API-first image and video management platform built for product leaders who rely on visual storytelling to express their unique product value, who are building engaging web and app experiences, and who understand that harnessing the power of AI to automate is the only way forward. Gil Grosso, engineering team lead at Fiverr, says that our users share billions of images, video, and audio files Cloudinary's ability to automate our post-production work at scale amounts to a savings of up to 92,000 workdays per month. Think bold, build big, ship fast. Let Cloudinary handle your media needs. Start your free plan today at cloudinary.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all your customer interactions from Gong calls to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads, to App Store reviews, and makes it available for analysis. It's trusted by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, Monday.com, and Strava to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process, helping you build best-in-class products faster. What makes Interpret special is its ability to build and update customer-specific AI models that provide the most granular and accurate insights into your business, connect customer insights to revenue and operational data in your CRM or data warehouse, to map the business impact of each customer need and prioritize confidently, and empower your entire team to easily take action on use cases like win-loss analysis, critical bug detection, and identifying drivers of churn with Interpret's AI assistant, wisdom. Looking to automate your feedback loops and prioritize your roadmap with confidence like Notion, Canva, and Linear, visit eneterpret.com/lenny to connect with the team and you get two free months when you sign up for an annual plan. This is a limited time offer. That's interpret.com/Lenny. Mark, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Excited to finally get connected with you and excited to do this podcast with you too.

I'm even more excited. And I actually wanna start with something that I think most people don't know about you, but to me is almost like a microcosm of how far ahead you look and almost how basically how visionary you are and that's that you've owned a number of epic domain names for example bill.com u.com code.com appstore.com first of all are there others I don't.

Know about there's a lot salesforce.com that all came from you know i'll tell you it's a good story actually because you know what happened was I was working at Oracle for 10 years from 1986 and 1996 rolled around like it was a snap of the fingers. And all of a sudden I realized, whoa, what has just happened to the last decade? It just, this decade just flew by. It was crazy. And it was a big moment for me in my career. And I had a, you know, it was a huge acceleration. I went from being, you know, a kid right out of college to working for Larry Ellison. And, but after 10 years, I was pretty trashed. And so I said to Larry, hey, I need to go. and take some time off. And so I went to Hawaii and rented a little house on the beach. And I had done some angel investing and it was kind of a cool moment where some of my companies started to go public, including Siebel Systems and others and Saba Software and people I had met at Oracle like Tom Siebel and Bobby Yazdani. And then I was just fascinated at that point with the internet. I had been working on it at Oracle for a couple years. So I started buying a bunch of domain names of companies that I thought companies, not, they weren't companies yet. Now they are companies, but ideas that I thought the names would be great companies one day and reflected where I thought things were going. And yeah, it's a long time ago now, you know, it's a really long, long time ago, I think almost 30 years.

And so one of the domain names you owned with appstore.com, which I know you gifted to Steve Jobs. I read in your book, is there a story there that you could share? Because that's an epic domain just to give.

It's a great story, but it's really a story about my relationship with Steve Jobs. And when I was, you know, in college in 1984, I would have the opportunity to be an intern at Apple. And I wrote the first native assembly language on the Macintosh. It's kind of a crazy thing to be able to say, but it's true that I was writing these example programs for this Macintosh 68000 development system. on these Apple headquarter buildings in Bandley, on Bandley Road in Cupertino, and started to have a relationship with Steve Jobs in that, not that I was actually talking to him, I was like this snot-nosed 19-year-old kid, but he's running around the building and like, you know, we have this refrigerator over here with all these fruit juices. There's a masseuse over here doing Shiatsu massages. There's a motorcycle in the in the lobby, there's a pirate flag on the roof, and there's Steve Jobs running around yelling at everybody. And it was freaking cool. Okay, so you can just imagine, like, you're like, whoa, this is like I'm in a movie. And there's a lot of other cool parts of the movie, too, that were going on, and it kind of started my relationship with him. And then I kind of actually kind of got to know him then. as I eventually got to Oracle and then eventually started Salesforce. And I had this moment at Salesforce and it was, I think, 2000-2001. I cannot remember exactly what it was. And we were at the opening of one of his movies for Pixar and we were having dinner. There's a lot of details around the dinner. It'll be a hugely long story if I go forever. and he says to me, well, Mark, now listen to me. You're doing so great. You've got your company, Salesforce. If you need any help, you make sure you call me, okay? And I'm like, Yes, sir, I will do that. And he took out his, he had just introduced the iPod. And he's like, you, know, I got a thousand songs in my pocket here. Look at this and that and all that. And it's this cool device. And he's like, I'm like, that's such a cool screen. Steve goes, oh, thanks so much. and I go, Steve, you know, you could do movies on there, too, not just. Or photos. You didn't have to do songs. No, Mark, I will never do a device like that. Absolutely not. And that's a little insight into his personality that he would never, ever exactly, like, say, oh, yeah, I'm gonna do the movie device. The eye, the photo, the phone, the this. So anyway, things were kind of moving along at Salesforce, and so I. kind of was like, kind of stuck. And I kind of need to kind of get through my block, writer's block, entrepreneur's block. I'm gonna reach out to him. And he's like, come down here right away. So literally, I got in my car, brought a few of my team with me, and we go down and he's like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, you're blocked. There's three things you need to do right now. And I'm like, okay, what are they? your company, it better get 10 times larger than it is now or in 24 months or it's over. Okay, yes, sir. Yes, sir. Number two, you better sign a huge customer for the Salesforce automation product like Avon. They're a great Salesforce. And the CEO of Avon was on his board at the time, so that was on his mind. And one last thing I'm going to tell you you must do. I'm like, yes, sir, what is it? You better go build an application An application economy? Yes. What does that mean? I don't know, but you're going to go figure it out. And it was like, you know, meeting with your guru and, you know, getting a Zen coon or something where you're, now you have a puzzle I have to solve. And I literally went away and I had all the notes from the meeting, you know, I went through it over and over and again. And then finally, I'm like, I think he wants me to build an app store. And at that moment, I went to the domain registry and I bought appstore.com, and then I started working on it at Salesforce so that we would have the ability with our platform to build apps and then sell them and that you could do all these things. So I did all that and launched AppExchange in 2005 or 2006, and We didn't call it App Store because when we tested the App Store name and focus groups, customers were like, this is not an App Store, this is an app exchange. We're all going to exchange apps and capabilities with each other. Anyway, it rolled out, iPhone rolled out, and then he basically said to me one day, Hey, come down and see me. This is maybe like a year after iPhone. I'm like, I'll be right down. and I get down there and I have some team members with me and they'd heard this story before, et cetera. And then we're sitting there, like I said, the Apple Auditorium, it was not like at a hotel or anything. I remember it very clearly, like it was yesterday. And he said, I brought you all down here today. And, you know, he's just very, very good theatrical performance. I could never do what he does. It's incredible. You know, he's got the thing. And then he says, And I'm here to reveal to you the App Store. And all of our people go, they think this is a break breath and they're all like, no, white. Because they're like, oh, Mark has been talking about App Store for years and how could Steve even, no. And then at the end of it, it's all over. Everyone leaves the auditorium. They're all going out to play with the App Store and all these things. And I walk down and he's sitting down there by himself, you know, working on something. and he's like in the corner of the stage. I go, Hey Steve, can I talk to you for a second? He goes, Of course. Very generous of me, very kind with me. He goes, Steve, I'm going to give you a gift. Wow, but Mark, what are you going to give me? Steve, I'm going to give you something you don't have, but maybe you'll need, which is the appstore.com URL, appstore.com, and the trademark for App Store because after that meeting we had like six years ago, I ended up trademarking these things and buying this URL and he's like, oh, it's very nice, but you know, this App Store thing isn't going to be very big and you know, whatever, but thank you very much. And that was the story of App Store. It's kind of amazing. It's kind of a, it was kind of a very amazing relationship that I had with him. Very grateful to have that relationship and dramatically influenced me in my career and my whole life.

There's one thread that I love about everything you shared here is how generosity was at the center of so much of this, him helping you, you helping him, just wanting to help each other.

He's a very generous person. And I'll tell you that he never turned down anything that I asked him to do. And I have so many stories, but one story was I was thinking about buying this house and I wasn't sure, should I buy this house, should I not buy this house, whatever. And so he went, he said, I'll go look at it for you, you know. And so he went and he's looking at this house and then he calls me and he goes, well, I don't know if you should do this or that, but this might be good. Maybe it is good, maybe it is a good idea. And then I'm, you know, emailing with him after that and, you know, he's very sick and it's all very sad. And then he sends me an email and the last email he sent to me was, he said, I said, Wow.

Well.

This has worked out better than I thought. And he goes, Mark, everything has worked out so much better than we could have ever imagined. And it was just a beautiful thought and incredibly sad all at the same moment. And that was my last correspondence with him.

I feel like we could do Steve Jobs stories all day.

Yeah. Oh, I know. I have hours. I have a lot of Steve Jobs stories. Oh man, but yeah, anyway, those are a couple of them.

By the way, I also love that he had like B2B SaaS advice. Like here, you need a big customer.

You need to hide the ACV. Oh, he hated the market. He hated those, he hated SaaS and he hated that I was doing enterprise software. He's trying to talk me out of being an enterprise software executive. He's like, now Mark, what are you gonna do? You're gonna go home and tell your kids that you're working on enterprise software? Who do you sell to? CIOs? Have you had met them? How can you be doing this? What I can't imagine a more horrible career. I'm like, I love it, Steve. No, Mark, you cannot love this. This is not great. It was really a funny thing. He really disliked that, but yet he was incredibly supportive of me. He would call me all the time. It was really, it was really amazing, actually.

Yeah. Feels like a place he was wrong in the end here, which is cool, cool to know. I want to go in a different direction.

He was rarely wrong.

He was rarely wrong. For you to be SAS, $350 billion of value, he would have existed. Speaking of that, so I want to zoom back to the beginning of Salesforce and when you launched Salesforce, it's crazy to think back to that when basically you had to, you were trying to convince people the future of software was not desktop software, it was going to be in the cloud. It was SaaS. You had all these end of software logos, you had mascots walking around with this no software thing. You hired fake protesters at, I think.

It was Siebel's conference.

Like it was very hard. I think you read one of my books, Lenny. I know the history of a lot of these things. It's one of the most legendary launch events in startup history. So I've heard of it many times at this point.

It was a crazy moment. I mean, Siebel, who was really the enterprise software company doing CRM, was doing kind of a user conference. And I was looking for an opportunity to kind of launch our product. So we hired a bunch of actors. and they were doing this event in San Francisco and San Francisco is very woke so nobody, people expect a good protest. So we got some picket signs at Home Depot and made some signs that said the end of software is near and all kinds of other no software and all these things. We had a lot of funny things on signs. and we ran a protest outside of Siebel that they were in the software business, but we were like, oh no, you know, we've got to get out of software. We got to create the end of software. And so we have picketers outside of the streets. Anyway, he comes out himself out of the building and is really gets super upset. And right then we hit a button and we have other actors in a van who come out and they are staging themselves as news crew. So they are like K-NMS, no more K, no more software. And we're like, they're interviewing the protesters. So now he thinks that it's a media thing. He calls the police. He got very upset. He's a great guy, by the way. I love Thomas Hanks. I think he's also one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation. and he's just fuming and he doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't exactly know it's us. And we're just having the best time. And that night we had our huge launch event at one of the top theaters in San Francisco and we hired a great band and it was really, we just had so much fun. It was just a really great time. That was all happen. I remember very well. It was February 22nd. of 2001 or 2000, February 22nd, 2000.

I love this. I haven't heard that interview, the reporter part of that story before.

It was kind of crazy.

I love it. And it sounds frivolous potentially, but I think the genius of this that I want to touch on is frivolous.

This is a good word. It probably was frivolous.

So what I imagine is you were trying to get people to even know Salesforce exists, to differentiate, to get the name out. And I feel like that's something a lot of founders struggle with. They don't really know how to get their name out, how to get people to pay attention. Just looking back at that success, I guess just any lessons from what you did right to get the word Salesforce out, to get people to pay attention at all to what you were doing.

Well, it's a noisy world, Lenny, and you can see that. You can get on Twitter, it's like, I mean, there's a lot of noise. And how do you break through? And we have that challenge today. We're introducing a huge new product called Agent Force. And I've only been working on it for a couple months now. I introduced it at our Dreamforce conference. And that was one way, you know, to break through, which was I took our conference and said, it's just gonna be about Agent Force. And I really, you know, and I'm trying to think about what are all the things I need to do to get my company 100% on Agent Force, my customers, Everyone, because I know I have a window of opportunity here. And we're first, we're ahead. We have hundreds of customers on this now. We're on it, which is amazing. We've moved our whole help infrastructure to Agent Force. We're seeing incredible results. We've cut our human escalation from our support infrastructure down by 50%. We're resolving 83% of all of our inquiries robotically. It's incredible. So now, how do I get that message out? How do I do it globally? How do I find my KNMS moment, you know, where I can come up with something that's viral and exciting? And I'm trying lots of different things. I'm even having, I have Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, who are two friends of mine helping me. So they said, we'll cut ads for you. They've, they They have not been together in an ad ever and they haven't done anything together since True Detective and they're friends of mine. I'm like, again, very generous people to agree to do this. And we've shot three ads so far. I put them out on Twitter to get feedback from folks. Is this a good idea? I am running this help.salesforce.com to show what we can do with it. Is that a good idea? I'm training all my salespeople on how to sell it. Is that a good idea? and I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really a terrible product co-pilot that I have to position against and market against. So, and is that a good idea? Should I be marketing and positioned against them? I'm trying lots of things. And what I'm trying to do, Lenny, is when what I recommend to all entrepreneurs, and the message is really in the medium here, which is that I am looking to try to find the winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy. I don't know actually which one of those things is going to be the most important thing in launching this product. So I'm trying a lot of things, you know, with that old expression, I'm throwing everything against the wall and looking at what's going to stick. And then once I find that thing, I will then grow that as my strategy. And that is what I'm trying to do. I'm even expanding my distribution organization. I'm trying to hire an additional 1,000 to 2,000 account executives just to focus on Agent4. So I'm trying to do everything I can to get that light switch to go on where I can show customers, this is an incredible opportunity to lower your cost, to make things better, and to show that for the first time, we can have digital labor, that Salesforce isn't just managing your data, but we're a digital labor provider. So this is that moment.

There's so much there that I love, this idea of Trying a bunch of things, looking for the tactic that becomes your strategy. It feels like also there's this focus of just like go all in and focus on this one thing and then try a bunch of different ways for this one thing that you're focused on to win. There's also an element of I just had Seth Godin on the podcast and his, you know, one of his big lessons is be remarkable and be some, create something people remark about. So this celeb sort of oriented ad that you're working on, I think is.

A really good example of that. Well, that's a good, that is a key thought though that he's saying, which is you got to find it, but finding that is the hard part. So you got to be like, you have to be like, one of my friends is Chris Rock, the comedian. And so, you know, what he'll do is he just doesn't go out and do a Netflix special, right, with all of his jokes. He's out there testing his jokes in clubs and doing all kinds of crazy things. I won't go through all the crazy stuff he does to test his jokes. But by the time it gets to the big Netflix special, right, he knows what works and what doesn't work. So that is something that we all have to do as entrepreneurs. We need to be testing lots of things. We need a lot of experimentation and we can't be too arrogant. I think another thing that's extremely important is, you know, I have a pretty deep meditation practice for three, four decades, which is we have to be cultivating our beginner's mind. We have to kind of use our mindfulness in a way to kind of clear everything out. and then kind of get back to what is my beginner's mind. You know, in the beginner's mind, I have every possibility, but in the expert's mind, I have few, and in some cases, maybe none. So I'm been doing this a long time. I've been writing software since I'm 15. I'm now 60. That's 45 years. I don't want to have an expert's mind. I want to have a beginner's mind. And how do I have that beginner's mind? Because those ideas will come at me if I can go, what could work? Rather than saying, oh, I know what is going to work, or this is the one thing that is going to definitely work, or we have to do this. As soon as you start using words like that, you know that you're going to completely implode and fail. You have to say, here, we have to do all these things. Like in my company right now, like we just did this all hands call. I was like, there's six things I really want to get done, but One thing is I didn't get everybody focused on Agent Force and really watch the energy. Number two is I need to find more fuel in the company to fuel this idea because this is clearly a breakthrough product. So how do I get everyone focused on it? Number three, where I think it's really important, we need more distribution capability. We don't sell through franchises. We're not selling through dealers. resellers, we sell direct. So I know I need more account executives. And number four is I need to be telling lots of customer stories. So number one, customer zero, me. And number two is I need to tell you all the stories. Like you can see the story of Disney. I'm doing a huge amount of AI work for them and Agent Force work. Let me tell you the story about Disney. And I need to tell you that story. And then we have this whole ecosystem of people around the company called Trailblazers, millions of them. who know our platform, they all have to become agent blazers. And the last thing is I just shipped the product into all 135,000 Salesforce customers. So it's their nascent and they need to flick it on. I need to motivate them to turn it on. Like these are the six things I'm thinking about all the time. So it's not just one thing. I'm trying to figure out what it is and I need a beginner's mind to kind of assess, how do I move forward? How do, How do I evolve? How do I inspire? How do I motivate?

How do I energize? This episode is brought to you by Coda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests, to storing all my research, to managing my newsletter content calendar, Coda is my go-to app and has been for years. Coda combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help me get more done. Encoda can help your team to stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycle in just one location, set and measure OKRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders, map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas. You can also access hundreds of pressure-tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision-making frameworks. See for yourself why companies like DoorDash, Figma, and Qualtrics run on Coda. Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny and sign up to get six free months of the team plan. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan. Coda.io/lenny. I love this idea of beginner's mind. I imagine it's very difficult to operationalize, especially for a company at 25 years old at this point. other than, obviously you meditate, you put a lot of effort and focus into building this. It's hard to do that within a company. Is there anything you do with meetings, with leadership, with the way you operate that kind of spreads this way of thinking within the org?

Well, Salesforce is now the second largest software company in the world, but also the second largest software company in Japan. And that's a country that I put a lot of time and energy into. I love going there and I love going to Kyoto. and when I go to Kyoto, I like to go to some of these amazing Zen temples. And by the way, that's one of the things that Steve Jobs loved to do. And he used to go to these great sushi restaurants. There's a great one in Kyoto named Sushi Iwa. And if you go in there, you'll see he's signed something for them, says, All good things, Steve Jobs. And I said, what did he do over there? He would go to this great sushi restaurant and then he would go, to Ryoanji, the Rock Garden Temple, an incredible metaphysical temple. And I've gone there, I've gone there for decades. I've brought a lot of friends of mine there. And yeah, you got to clear your mind and let it come in. You know, you got to receive it. You need to listen. I remember I even brought Neil Young there, the musician, he is one of my favorite people in the world. And obviously, I love his music, his soundtrack. is the soundtrack of my entire life. And we were sitting there, and he was so deep in meditation that then he started walking around, and the temple was closing. And then, like, he was in the zone, and I didn't want to bother him. But I'm like, you know, I think we got to go. Anyway, it turned out he had written a whole album while we were there in his head. And he was, you know, basically transcribing it all. It's incredible creative process. Look, we're all writing an album in our head. We're all, you know, what album are you writing? what music are you writing? How are you getting into that zone yourself? If you're in a great, you want to be a great entrepreneur. You want to be a great CEO. You got to clear your mind and you got to be ready, okay, to write that music. And that music could be your business plan, your product plan, you know, your, your product launch plan, like we're talking about for my agent force product. But that, that's what, that's what we're all trying to do. And I use a place like Kyoto as, as as a place to do that also, 'cause geography is important. Where you are matters. I know you're in Marin, so Marin County, maybe you go out to the top of Mount Tam, maybe you go to Spirit Rock with Jack Kornfield and go kind of clear your mind there. But you gotta find the place to do that and create the location. It may not be in the office, it may be somewhere else.

By the way, you have the most amazing friends list, all these folks you mentioned. I don't know how long this goes.

They are cool. I am lucky that I've met a lot of cool people. Yeah. I don't know how I got so.

Lucky to meet some of these people. I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about every month or so I hear about a startup I do a bunch of angel investing that's trying to like basically disrupt Salesforce, come after Salesforce. They bash your like, don't kill me for saying this. You're like user experience. They're like, oh, it's so complicated.

It's been around for 20 years.

We are too complicated. I agree. okay. I'm curious just what you believe is most contributed to you being able to stay on top and continue to grow. Like we're recording this today and your stock is at an all-time high, basically, even.

Wow. I didn't even know that.

Roughly.

I actually never look at the stock.

Okay.

I find the stock to be very distracting, and I encourage my employees also don't look at the stock because, you know, the stock is just a reflection. Money isn't the goal, right? The stock isn't the goal. It's coming at the end of the journey. It's like, that's not why we're doing this. The journey is the reward. That's also something Steve Jobs would say all the time. Another bow to Steve Jobs here. I think that this is really important. And I look at myself as a startup. I am a startup CEO. I am a startup entrepreneur. I'm still at the beginning of Salesforce. And no matter what I'm doing at Salesforce, whether I'm the CO, I'm sometimes the chairman of the board, like last week we had a board meeting, sometimes I'm a product manager. I'm just, you know, this is a startup and we're a 25 year old, 75,000 person, $38 billion, 300 something billion dollar market cap startup. But we're a startup nonetheless. and we have some great products, but we are just starting. And as an example, Lenny, we are just starting the digital labor industry, and we have a product called Agent Force, and we are just starting. We are just at the beginning. I want to bounce around a little.

Bit, but let's talk about Agent Force. I know this is, as you've said, the thing you're most focused on right now. It's a big bet you all are taking. When people hear this word agent, I think a lot of people are kind of embarrassed to even ask, like, what what does that even look like? Like, what does an agent other than, you know, beyond what LLMs are today? Is there an example you could give of something you've seen that maybe blew your mind of what an agent can do?

Yeah, I saw it in the movies. I saw it in Minority Report, which was a movie that was co-written by our futurist, Peter Schwartz. And, you know, the Tom Cruise runs into the Gap store and, you know, all of a sudden it says, hey, Hey, Tom, have you thought about this new shirt? Look at these jeans. You bought this last time. Now you could try this. You could try that. What about this? What about that? And it knew his history. It understood him. It knew what was going on this 20 years ago. And this whole store changes digitally to reflect his interest, his ideas, and is starting to talk to him and work with him. That is an agent. you know, it isn't just the agent that we saw in the Matrix, you know, Mr. Smith or whatever it is. It's someone that's working with you, someone. That's an interesting for you and slip. It's something that is working with you. Could be your piece of software in your phone. Could be a robot that's going to be in your home. Could be your car that is, you know, knows you, understands your preferences. has an institutional memory of you and now is helping to advise you. And I'll give you an example that, you know, I'm gonna have, I go into UCSF all the time as my, I'm actually just getting through an Achilles rupture right now. So I've had a lot of interactions and, you know, with the hospital or you're getting your health care, getting your labs done, getting your physical done, getting your scans done, whatever it is. And there's always these pre-operative and post-operative or pre procedure and post procedure things. And you're getting these phone calls. And every time I get a phone call, I'm like, oh, that probably just cost them a hundred bucks. And we probably could do that a lot cheaper and a lot easier with an agent. And then when I talk to my doctors and nurses at UCSF, they're all burnt out post pandemic because they're scheduling pajama time to go through all their digital messages at night. It's like a lot of this could be done a lot easier with agents and AI, and we're going to make their lives a lot better, a lot easier. easier, simpler. And some of those things that they're doing, they don't need to talk to me about what my cholesterol number is because I got my labs and the cholesterol number is this number or that number. You know, a lot of this can be done with technology and then save the parts that are important for them, like when I come to see them, or I want to have a real deeper, you know, more empathetic conversation face to face with, you know, a deeply experienced doctor. That's a whole nother. opportunity for me. That is an agent. Or the agent is like, here's an example. Like, I had a CT scan and you have to drink this contrast. And then all of a sudden, the con, you don't drink it, but they give it to you through an IV. And then they're taking better pictures, but then you have to drink water to flush the contrast out of your body. And do you think anyone called me and said, hey, do you drink the water? No, nobody calls me to drink the water. You know, you have to remember, you're on your own. in healthcare in the US. So the agent's gonna call you and say, Hey, did you drink the water? You take your meds? You know, do you need to have a repeat lab? You need to go see your doctor again. So the agent is gonna be there by your side. So that's an healthcare example. There's a lot of examples that we can probably have.

There was just a story in the New York Times, which isn't about agents specifically. It was about comparing ChatGPT to a doctor where they tested a doctor's ability to diagnose versus a ChatGPT directly or a doctor plus ChatGPT? And by far the best was just ChatGPT removing the doctor from the equation.

Yeah, they wrote up a clinical study where they actually did it kind of looked at in a semi kind of peer reviewed way that ChatGPT in many cases was giving more accurate diagnosis than a doctor because the doctor had a more bias coming in working with the patient. So that's super interesting and I think something that we should probably all look at that study and think about that. Speaking of the New York Times, there's.

Actually this quote I found. You did this op-ed talking about AI. So the quote is, Throughout my career in Silicon Valley, I've witnessed numerous waves of innovation, but none compared to the profound impact of AI. AI is the defining technology of our lifetime and probably any lifetime. When was kind of the moment for you where you started to realize this, where it's like, oh shit, this is not just another cool toy.

Well, I keep having these kind of existential freak out moments about AI, and it's happened over a series of decades. But for those of us who grew up with these movies like War Games and Minority Report, you know, or her or across the board, or read some of these books, you know, like one of my favorite books on AI is Ghost Fleet. you know, you think about where are we going with AI? Where are we going with AI? And, you know, with Salesforce, I think about, you know, our journey. And I've been waiting for this to happen and, you know, trying to bring us along, especially in the last decade with the development of our Einstein platform and now the development of our agent force platform. This week at Salesforce, we'll probably do about 2 trillion AI transactions, you know, with our you know, total now Einstein and Agent Force platforms were definitely the largest provider of enterprise AI transactions of the world, as far as I can tell. And I keep thinking, wow, this is going to get more and more, you know, intense. And one, one step was we had to automate all these customer touchpoints. So, like wearing my Disney Fanboy shirt here, yeah, we run the Disney Store and the Disney guides and there's Disney real estate and there's the Disney Plus call center and there's every aspect of Disney when you're a customer, you're interfacing with Salesforce. So that's what we've loved doing, automating all these customer touch points, sales, service, marketing, analytics, Slack, you know, integrating it all with MuleSoft. That's what we do. And then aggregating it all into a big database, or we call it data cloud, and then federating that data cloud to other data sources. So that's the two steps we've been doing, automate the customer touch points, aggregate the data. And then step three is the agentic platform on top of that. And when you think about what's happening now that you can go to help.salesforce.com and have your issues resolved with that on the agentic layer, that's amazing. And then the fourth layer that will come will be the robotic drone layer where those robots and drones will then feed off of the platform and all of these capabilities. and that vision of the future is something that we've all had in the industry, you know, for years. It's not my magic vision. This is a vision that's been around. It's been the, the fundamentals of computer science that we would move from having, we'd go from this kind of, from data to automation. And that is what we're all driving, and we're driving that industry. We're going lower cost, easier to use, and more automated constantly. And that's powerful. Like, this is really moving fast.

You mentioned Einstein briefly. I'll also mention my dog is named Einstein, and I got Einstein's swag once with the socks, and I love them. So, and also, that's also an example of you bought einstein.com or very early. That was another domain name that you owned.

Well, I just thought Einstein would be a great name to talk about artificial intelligence. And, It really has been there. You can see them behind me right on my shelf, on my bookshelf. I keep them back there. You see Einstein?

Mike, you here? Oh, I'll check it out. Here he is. Show and tell segment of the podcast. Oh, cute. Yeah, that was a big old guy.

That's a key part of our vision for Salesforce. Our Einstein platform was everything we're doing. We wouldn't get to Agent Force without getting to the good old Einstein here.

Very cute. As you talk about all this, I imagine many people are thinking, oh, shit, we're not gonna have as many people working. What are we gonna do with our jobs, AI's agents? I know anything you say could be taken way out of context and just like Mark Benioff says, everyone's not working. But I guess just, I know you've said you're not gonna be hiring as many engineers next year. I guess anything there to help people understand how the workforce will change in future.

Well, I can tell you about, like, my own company and what I'm telling my own employees, which is that, yeah, we're going to have to rebalance some of our Workforce because you can see it in the numbers I just gave you, which is we need less support Engineers because we have a robotic support layer, you know, with agent force. So that is, you know, very real, and we all need to adapt. And at the same time, I'm hiring a lot more account Executives and. folks to, you know, grow the company. So I just encouraged everybody on the all hands call to think about that. And then I just gave you the idea of health care. The interesting thing about health care, though, is that a lot of the jobs that I think they're going to get created just we don't have people for. And I think there's a lot of things that we need help with in the world that we don't have people for. So I think a lot of these jobs will not necessarily get replaced. And I think that, you know, I have a home in a small town and in this small town and, you know, it's very much a blue collar town and folks are, you know, still working in their restaurants, driving trucks, you know, working in the supermarket and, you know, working on their homes, building, construction, garden, look, it's going to be a long time before, you know, I think jobs in the small town where I have a home will ever get, you know, impacted. But in the large town where I have a home, San Francisco, well, then I just gave you an example where I think that jobs will get impacted. So it'll be a tale of two cities, literally. And I think you will see different impacts in different places.

So what I'm hearing there is support people trending down, account executive sales trending up.

Right now, that is Salesforce in a nutshell.

That touches on something I wanted to touch on also, which is that you're, a lot of founders today are very product minded, very product oriented founders, and they want to build product first companies, grow product led, all these things. Salesforce, I think very publicly is very sales led, very marketing led. not product-led, obviously product is a core part of it and it all works together and all these things. But I guess just any advice for founders that are very product oriented and maybe are hesitant to lean into sales.

Yeah, I would say we're not sales led. Well, I think let's just use AgentForces as an example, right? So we're running the year, we're running this year, this is our fiscal year 25, okay? It ends in the end of January next year and Lenny, you know, this is the year of Data Cloud. This was not supposed to be the year of Agent4. So it's the year of Data Cloud. I just gave you the pitch. We've automated all the customer touch points. Now we're adding the Data Cloud to all of our customer implementations. We have 135,000 customers. We've implemented Data Cloud into all of them. They all need to turn it on. Our teams need to show our customers how to build Data Cloud and how it's going to help our customers have better data, if better data structure. You almost combine data and data together. So they need a better data structure, data architectures, data cultures. And then we had our breakthrough. And I can tell you the story where all of a sudden, I'm like, wow, this agent technology is happening much faster than I thought it was going to, and we are going to market now. And by the time we get to Dreamforce, We are going to take this incredible technology. We accelerated it radically because we bought this company called Airkit, which is one of our Ohana. It's a great story. Great entrepreneur had this company, fantastic company called RelateIQ that we bought many years ago, about 10 years ago, stayed with us for many years, like six or seven years, wanted to leave and said, Great, we gave him the investment to leave, invested in the company through Salesforce Ventures. built this amazing platform and then we said, now we want to buy it back. And then he came back about a year ago and then it just accelerated the agent vision and then we delivered Agent Force production code at the end of October. So all of a sudden now we are releasing this product. I think it's very important if you're an entrepreneur to realize it's not just about the product, It's not just about sales. It's not just about marketing. It's not just about accounting. It's not just about your investors. It's not just about your employees. It's not just about your stakeholders. It's about everything. So you better be ready to be an orchestra leader. You can't just be playing the clarinet. And I think that's kind of what you're getting to, which is that there's entrepreneurs are like, I'm just going to play the clarinet. And for those, I don't think they're going to go as far as they could go. You want to be playing the whole symphony and you want to get everyone running. And that symphony is sales, service, marketing, product. You know, every part of your shareholders, your stakeholders, your customers, you have to be constantly playing the whole symphony. And you have to have a big mind to think about, whoa, I have a lot of stakeholders in my company, not just one stakeholder. It's not just about product and technology. And if you're gonna narrowcast yourself, you're doing a disservice not just to yourself.

But to everybody else as well. Speaking of big mind and beginner's mind, we have a recurring segment on this podcast that I call fail corner. And where it comes from is people come on this podcast, they share all these stories of everything's going great, we're killing it, I've had all these successes. And people get discouraged 'cause they hear just like all the people only succeeding when they often fail. And so I try to ask guests to share a story, and let me ask you this, is there a story you could share when it was a big struggle for you when you were struggling when something went super wrong that you worked through and learned something from? Sure.

Well, I mean, I'll just give this example. About two years ago, we went through this huge transformation in our company. And there were a lot of crazy things that were happening, but it was a little bit like we're all on this airplane and everything is going really well. And then something seems to be going really wrong. and we look up front and the two pilots seem to be missing. And then the one guy with the parachute jumped out of the plane. And then we're all like, whoa, what are we gonna do? And we had to do some really crazy and somewhat destructive things at the moment to basically get the regeneration of the company. And one of those things that we did two years ago was we did an architectural layoff. And we had never done a scaled layoff. or we had to lay off 10% of the company to save the company. And I didn't want to do it. I mean, it's the last thing I want to do as an entrepreneur, which is to kind of adjust our headcount. But we were coming out of the pandemic and we had just hired too many people. Now, it turned out that a lot of companies in Silicon Valley all did that same maneuver during the pandemic. Things were so robust in the pandemic that we were over hiring. And by the time the pandemic was over, we had too many people. I mean, what did I know? It was my first pandemic. And all of a sudden, my next pandemic, I'll know that there's an economic cycle associated with it and an inflation cycle too. So I learned a lot in the pandemic. And now we're here, now all of a sudden we're architecting two years ago this layoff. And then when we did the layoff, then I'm trying to over communicate, I'm having all employee meetings, It's a complete dumpster fire. It's a nightmare. I'm getting bashed in the press, on Twitter. Everyone's like shooting at me. You know, it's like, oh boy, you know, if I had a thick skin, it got a lot thicker during that moment because, you know, it just is not, it's never going to go well no matter what. And it didn't go well. And, but we got through it, you know, and like to the point where, you know, you're giving me these accolades, wonderful, on this podcast about where we are today financially and from a structural standpoint or now from product innovation standpoint. But that's not where we were two years ago. It was clear we had to go through a financial transformation, which included an adjustment of our headcount, and we had to go through a technology and a product and an innovation transformation. And those two things were going to require us to do a number of things. and they were going to be painful. And so we all had to go through some of that pain to get the gain that we have now. And that was not easy. But, you know, I, I was in shock that I was going through this two years ago because I had already been running the company for 23 years. Things were going pretty well. And, yes, there were a lot of failures during that period. I just didn't expect another massive issue to hit me, but guess what? they're constantly at massive issues coming at you, and there's more coming, and that's the nature. And my friend Michael Dell, who's probably the best entrepreneur I know, you know, he says there is no linear success. So what that means is that stock chart that you just referred to, there's no up and to the right perfect chart, you know, where it's just one line. I don't care who you are. Apple doesn't have one. No one has one. okay? And there's going to be changes. Could be economic changes, it could be societal changes, it could be the pandemic. There's no up and to the right. And if you think it's only going to be about up and to the right, you're in the wrong business or you have the wrong life, right? You want to, hey, the monastic life is maybe more for you where you're, you know, you're just now living in that more of that steady state, right? But if you want more variation where it's not steady state, The entrepreneur life is a rock and roll roller coaster and you get ready because it's going to be pounding you all the time.

One of these people they describe that jumped out of the airplane, kind of speaking on the roller coaster ride, is your co-CEO, Bret Taylor. And what's interesting to me is he's also all in on agents. And what it makes me think about is, like, there's this meme of what did Ilya see when he left and tried to kick out Sam Altman? I'm curious just like, what did you guys see about agents being the future that you're both so committed to this. So interesting.

Well, I just think that this idea that agents are one of the most important things that we're all going to work on. And I think everyone is going to go to agents. So, you know, I, I, look, I just heard about Google today has agent space, you know, and I, what I first, I was like, I guess they like the agent force name. I love Sundar. He's one of my favorite people in the world. you know, we heard Microsoft now has agents. I read Oracle has agents. SAP has agents. Everybody's got agents. And good, that's what we want. We don't want to be the only one. If you're the only one and no one else is working on it, you've got a problem, actually. So you don't want to be the only one. You want to be in a market. You don't want to be one company offering a solution. I'm the only one. You want to be in a competitive market where people are competing with you and you're selling against somebody else and you're getting better and you're moving, you know, forward. It's like the automobile industry. You know, one of my favorite people is Kira Toyota. Toyota-san was now the chairman of Toyota, was the CEO of Toyota's grandfather started Toyota. He says, better, better, better, never best. You know, it's, it's the Japanese motto of Kaizen. So we talked about Japanese shoshin, which means beginner's mind. Now we're learning another Japanese word here, kaizen. Kaizen is continuous improvement. And you need to be doing continuous improvement. And with where we are right now with agents, we're every software industry is going to move to agents. We have to, just like every software industry, well, at least in CRM or automating customer touch points, data, and managing data and data, data building that data infrastructure agents. It's all related. We're all moving in the same direction.

I'm just thinking as a founder, you're just like, God damn, I just got used to AI and everyone's wanting to work on AI at my company. Now we got to freaking figure out agents.

No, no, no, no, no. That's a mistake. So that's that is the mindset you want. You want that mindset. you want the mindset of, oh, the next thing is coming. I can't wait for the next thing. In some ways, you have to be saying, I can't wait for the next failure. I can't wait for the next success. I can't wait for the next Innovation. Oh, well, that's Innovation overall, right? See, we're in an industry where Technology is constantly getting lower cost, user to use and more automated. So if you're doing it for two and a half decades or four decades or four and a half decades now that I've been doing it, you know, when I started in this industry, I started on a computer called the TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K of RAM, you know? And I was doing a podcast recently, and they're like, well, who did you sell your first piece of software to? And I said, well, I sold it to CLOAD magazine in Vallejo, California, and- For $75. for $75. And they said, thank you for, and then they said, oh, that's great. And did you, you know, sell them to send them the disc? And I'm like, no, no, there was no disc. C-LOAD standard for cassette load in basic. That was the command in basic C-L-O-A-D, cassette load, CLOAD, that was the, that was the command. And so that was the name of their magazine. And then you would get the cassette every month with Five or six things that they had bought from people like me. I mean, they didn't know they were buying it from a 15 year old kid in high school and early game high school, California. But, you know, I had written the how to juggle thing and they bought it for $75. They sent me the one page agreement and I signed it. And then I told my parents and they're like, what? Huh? You're doing what? Oh, okay. That's nice, honey. Great job. So they didn't understand. Nobody knew. Like, it was crazy. It's like, it was like 1979 or 1978. So nobody knew, I was selling software, I was in high school, you know, it was just a moment in time. But I need to have that mindset all the way along, which is what is the next great thing? What is the next great success? What is the next great failure? And that you're growing, you're evolving, you're learning from that. That that's what you want. You want to have that growth mindset, right? you want to embrace that. Does it make sense what I said?

Absolutely.

I kind of jumped on that one little thought. Oh gee, yeah, I've got this now under control, but now I've got agents, so no, what am I gonna... It's like, no, that's what you want. And by the way, I want what's after that too, and what's after that and what's after that. That's what's really exciting about the future. It's coming. I want to be one of our customers said this, and people think I said it. It wasn't me. I want to be, you know, I want to get to the Future first and welcome our customers there.

That.

That's what I think is, by the way, that's what I think Elon Musk does so well. Like, he is like, I don't know what all the crazy things he's doing to see the future. He's clearly doing some unusual things, but then he's like, yeah, we're gonna have robots in the future and. brain, you know, brain machine interfaces and driving electric cars and all of these things are going to be happening in the future. And, you know, I'm going to have, I'm going to have 10 companies that are going to do all of them.

Wow. He's not only thinking about it, he's doing them each.

Amazing.

Amazing.

No one like this. Never seen anything like it. Don't understand how it is even possible.

Same. Mark, I know you have to run. This was incredible. I think this is a beautiful place to end it.

Oh, Lenny, it was so much fun. I've been looking forward to being on your podcast and talk about entrepreneurship. And thanks for everything you're doing for.

The industry and for entrepreneurs everywhere. Same, Mark Benioff. We're all so grateful to you. Goodbye, Lenny. Thank you. Bye, bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. see you in the next episode.