The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 62 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Cohen: Nobody will use Concur, Amex GBT, or Salesforce by 2028
“In five years from now, nobody is using, going to use Conquer and Emacs. Nobody, by the way, nobody is going to use Salesforce.”
Benioff: Salesforce cut support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000 via AI agents
“And to that point, I've been able to reduce the number of human agents I have in support From about 9000 to about 5000.”
Benioff: Salesforce Will Not Hire Software Engineers in 2025 Due to AI
“We're not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with AgentForce and with other AI technology that we're using for our engineering teams by more than 30% to the point where our engineering velocity is …”
Benioff: Salesforce Will Reduce Support Engineer Headcount in 2025
“We will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer”
Mathrubootham: No enterprise software company has successfully transitioned down to SMB
“Oh, start high and go down never, never works. In the history of software, you can tell me which company has succeeded in starting at enterprise and actually winning in SMB. It's not happened. But if you look at many companies, including Salesforce and Freshwo…”
Salesforce Agreed to Shift Its LLM Spending to Anthropic
“Dario is showing up because Mark agreed to move Salesforce agreed to move
Their LLM spend to Anthropic.”
O'Driscoll: Cursor loses money despite generating $4M per employee
“Cursor does four million per employee. Salesforce does 700 per 700,000 per employee. Oh, Cursor must be more efficient. Well, it turns out Salesforce has 30% operating margins and Cursor's losing a lot of money. Why? Because they spend a whole ton on tokens, r…”
Lemkin: Salesforce has more Agentforce AI demand than it can service
“I'm long on Salesforce. The simple reason, and I know this being super deep on agent force and everything, is unlike a lot of folks on this list, they have more demand than they can service.”
Benioff: US Government is Salesforce's largest customer after beating Palantir on Army contract
“Because the US federal government is already my largest customer, right? That's our, you know, we run the Veterans Administration, the GSA, and we just won You probably read just, we just run a huge U S army contract. We beat Palantir.”
Lemkin: SaaS incumbents see no revenue boost from AI features yet
“So far the evidence is no. So far it says the incumbents are gonna, they're gonna do great things with AI, great, great things. The product's gonna be much better, but it's not clear they're gonna get any revenue boost from it. No one's saying that none of the…”
Lemkin: Demand environment is worsening for Salesforce, MongoDB, and Workday
“Yamini got on the last call a couple of weeks ago and said, yeah, we saw a little bounce at the end of the year and HubSpot had a great quarter, but it's not any easier. She said, it's not one lick easier right now. So HubSpot, not any easier Mongo worse. Sale…”
Benioff: Salesforce engineers are only required in-office 10 days per quarter
“Our engineers only have to come in the office 10 days a quarter.”
Benioff: Salesforce expects sales, marketing, and G&A staff in-office three days weekly
“I think that for our sales and marketing people, We tell them that four days a week we want to see them, you know, in person with a customer. For our sales and for our marketing people and our G&A people, we like to see them in person three days a week.”
Lemkin: Marc Benioff just repeated his biggest admitted mistake by cutting sales
“Mark Benioff in his book wrote his biggest mistake in the last downturns was cutting sales. And what did he just do? Cut sales.”
Salesforce Spends $6B on Engineering and $300M on Anthropic Annually
“Salesforce spends six billion a year on engineering, and that probably includes QA and all the rest of it, but that's the right comp. And they're going to spend three hundred million dollars this year on Anthropic.”
Stebbings: Salesforce spent $300M on Anthropic tokens for its developers
“And Mark Benioff said that he spent three hundred million dollars on Anthropic, which on specifically for the dev team, which equates to 3.8% of dev Salaries spent on tokens.”
Salesforce's $300M Anthropic Spend Equals 3.8% of Developer Salaries
“Right now, you know, if you look at Mark Benioff, he said they spent three hundred million on Anthropik. That's about 3.8% of developer salaries spent on tokens.”
O'Driscoll: Salesforce's $300M Anthropic spend is 4% of developer payroll
“Salesforce spends 5.8 billion dollars a year on engineers, right? It's, so it's roughly four percent of the spend. If you want it per head, they have twenty-k developers out of their total 83 k heads, so it's 15 k per head per year, which is 1.2 k per head per…”
Lemkin: Anthropic reached $30B valuation in five years versus Salesforce's 25 years
“Getting to thirty billion up from nine billion at the start of the year. I mean I think it took, I mean, Salesforce is the largest software company, right? Or at least cloud one. And it took them 25 years to get there. Anthropic got there in five, but maybe th…”
Stebbings: Salesforce deployed $850M of its $1B AI fund
“Salesforce invested eight hundred and fifty million of their new billion AI fund.”
Benioff: Salesforce Data Cloud and AI reached over $1B ARR
“The data cloud and AI together now is more than a billion in revenue. We talked about that on our last earnings call. It's our fastest growing Cloud product, whatever, ever, you know, in 26 years.”
O'Driscoll: Slack restricting customer data access will fail over the medium term
“I don't know if you can get away forever in a horizontal app like Salesforce with a channel like Slack denying access, the denying the customer access to their own content over the medium term. I don't think it stands.”
O'Driscoll: Dropbox lacks a significant enterprise customer base compared to incumbents
“Your right to win is predominantly in your existing customer base, and ServiceNow is a big one, and Salesforce has a big one, and brutally in the enterprise, Dropbox doesn't.”
Lemkin: Salesforce commits 20% of its code through AI
“Even Salesforce commits 20% of their code through AI.”
Dines: Salesforce and SAP Will Limit AI Agents to Own Platforms
“What's the interest of Salesforce to provide amazing connections to SAP and vice versa? No, it's not. So they will focus on building agents that work specifically for workloads that stay within their platforms.”
Benioff: Salesforce Agentforce Pricing Starts at $2 Per Conversation
“Agent force is consumption pricing. So you're being charging per conversation. The starting price is about two bucks per conversation, and then it's negotiated based on volumes for customers.”
Benioff: Salesforce Projects Thousands of Agentforce Deals in Q4
“We'll do thousands of agent force deals this quarter”
Lemkin: Salesforce reported permanent slowdown to single-digit growth
“The issue is that Salesforce said we have fallen to single digit growth, and we're not coming back.”
Lemkin: Salesforce now requires 3x pipeline coverage, up from 2x historically
“Salesforce also just said that now they need three X pipeline coverage versus two X historically. So in other words, if they want to close a billion dollars, they used to need two billion dollars of deal in flight. Now they need three because it's just 50% har…”
Ryan: Salesforce will incorporate AI and defend market share from startups
“Salesforce is going to incorporate that in and, you know, a large company with a thousand person Salesforce is not going to easily switch off. To a startup company. And so I have confidence that Salesforce will incorporate AI into their product. Maybe it's six…”
Quattrone: Salesforce submitted higher unsolicited bids during LinkedIn's exclusivity window with Microsoft
“So they went into like a 30 day exclusivity to try to get to definitive agreement. And during that period, Salesforce lobbed in Several offers that were higher. And that meant that towards the end of that period, we had to inform Microsoft, Hey, your deal is n…”
Quattrone: Microsoft and Salesforce submitted nearly identical bids at every stage for LinkedIn
“With LinkedIn, we had interest from several parties, but it really kind of came down to Microsoft and Salesforce. And I've never seen companies bid privately and come up with such close prices on every stage Like, 151 151 162 163. It was very, very close, and …”
Benioff: Salesforce is San Francisco's largest philanthropist, donating $250M+
“Salesforce is now San Francisco's largest philanthropist. And we've given more than a hundred million dollars to the children's hospital and more than a hundred and fifty million dollars to the public schools.”
Cohen: Salesforce and SAP revenues are currently declining, not growing
“If I look at the numbers, I think both Salesforce and SAP actually specifically now are not growing and in fact declining, right?”
Kurtz predicts CrowdStrike will mirror Salesforce's platform and revenue trajectory
“I think the next five years probably look a lot like, you know, Salesforce trajectory where you continue to build out your platform, you continue to scale your revenue, your annual recurring revenue, additional geographic expansion.”
CrowdStrike was the third fastest-growing enterprise software company to IPO
“I think we were the third fastest growth company to ever IPO behind like Zoom and Salesforce.”
Fireworks hired former Salesforce president George Hu
“Lin just hired George Hu. He was the former president of Salesforce.”
Mignano: Incumbent tech companies will constrain employee token spend budgets
“There's too many employees at a Salesforce or I don't know, a Microsoft such that every employee can just have an unlimited token spend budget. So I think we're going to see a lot of those companies start to constrain their spends.”
Lemkin: Core CRM accounts for only 14% of Salesforce revenue
“When most folks hear about Salesforce, they think it's CRM, it's 14% of their revenue, ok?”
Stebbings: US Army awarded Salesforce a $5.6B contract over 10 years
“I do think a hat tip deserves to be given to our friend of the show, Mr. Mark Benioff, who army just awarded sales. 5.6 billion. Billion dollar contract over 10 years.”
Stebbings: Gong has surpassed $400M ARR and a $7B valuation
“The company has raised over six hundred million dollars from some of the best, including Sequoia, Thrive, Salesforce, and more, and Gong has surpassed Four hundred million in ARR, and serves thousands of customers, including multiple Fortune hundreds, and is v…”
Halligan: Shopify is the only SaaS stock outperforming Oracle and SAP
“If you go from that date and you look at you look at Oracle and you look at SAP, they're both growing, like, 230%. The only SaaS company since August 22 It's growing faster. Shopify. They're growing 300%. So they're outpacing HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe Box, At…”
Lemkin: Slack and Tableau are growing faster than core Salesforce
“All of their, not all of them, but the light, so many of the acquisitions, Slack, even Tableau, which I think was founded in the fifties. They're actually all growing faster than the core Salesforce. So like, we can say, oh, Slack isn't what it was, which it i…”
Lemkin: Marc Benioff has hired three co-CEOs attempting to exit Salesforce
“Mark Benioff's tried four or five times to get out too. He's hired three other co-CEOs, right? It just hasn't worked.”
Benioff: Salesforce Guides to $38B Revenue and $12.9B Cash Flow
“We had a great quarter, Harry. We delivered, you know, clear guidance to thirty eight billion in revenue this year, 12.9 billion in cash flow 32.9% margins.”
Benioff: Salesforce Sold 200 Agentforce Deals in Q3 2024
“We shipped it October, and the quarter, which closed at the end of October, we already sold 200 deals.”