Salesforce decisions heavily relied on spreadsheet guesses ten years ago
Rob Woollen · He went 7 years with no revenue— then grew to $100M ARR. | Rob Woollen, Co-Founder of Sigma · PMF Show · Jun 30, 2025 · at 6:59
Rob Woollen, co-founder of Sigma Computing and former Salesforce platform CTO, describes how decisions were made internally at Salesforce.
0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“At least 10 years ago when I was there, the company was still largely run on hypotheses, you know, spreadsheets with some guesses in it. Like they couldn't, the vast majority of people that were making the important decisions couldn't really leverage all of this data that they had.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Rob Woollen
Big tech acquisitions inevitably slowed down Looker and Tableau product development
“I think big company acquisitions like that, just, it's really hard to do anything but slow down the team. And frankly, that's what we've seen in both those cases.”
Looker only satisfies LookML developers and ignores everyday business users
“Looker is a very, very heavy in the other direction. It's very focused on you're going to have a very small number of people that write in this made up programming language, LookML, and essentially those are the only people that love that product. And then eve…”
Woollen: Prototypes must look polished to get meaningful product feedback
“You have to make things that people aesthetically like, and they feel like, you know, it looks polished enough that they don't focus on that. They focus on the actual product feedback”
Product-market fit arrives when major deals close without any founder involvement
“I think for me, the first, like, sort of sign of Product Market Fit was, we were signing customers that were paying us, you know, as much or more than all these ones that I had personally, like, spent all these, you know, hours on hand-holding, And I'd never e…”
Woollen: Centralized cloud data systems are the natural base for internal apps
“So one of the sort of key insights we've had over time with the company is that if you're putting, you know, your company's data into this Centralized system. It then becomes kind of a natural place for you to build all of your internal applications because th…”
Prospective founders easily talked out of starting should definitely not start
“People ask me, should they start a company? And my answer very quickly is no. And the And the reason I say that is actually related to your question. I say that because if just talking to me and I tell, you know, you're convinced that like, oh, maybe I shouldn…”