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 148 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Lemkin: Founders Should Pass on Sales Leaders Who Avoid Customer Meetings
“Salesforce is coming up on thirty billion, and Mark Benioff's still out there hustling and meeting with customers. If you're a VP of sales and gunner or CRO, pass. Don't matter what else you like them.”
Okta halted feature development for eight months to engineer zero-downtime upgrades
“I remember we spent seven or eight months just engineering the fact that we didn't have to take it down for maintenance. And before I came from Salesforce and we had to take the service down for four hours every three months for maintenance to upgrade it. And …”
Whalen: Big-tech hires at startups struggle with resource constraints, not work ethic
“The thing that actually is that people struggle with when they lose, when they leave a place like that is when you work for a company that's really well run and you have first party experience of things being done right. And then you go to a startup where thin…”
Lemkin: Platform apps struggle unless they have day-one high attach rates
“There's these day one high attached vendors that make these applications blow up and the rest struggle, which doesn't mean you shouldn't do them, but it does mean it probably can't be everything for you.”
Çilingir: Top reps from Adobe or Salesforce often fail at startups
“Being able to sell this product of Adobe or Salesforce type companies doesn't mean that they can be also successful salespeople in your own organization, because every single product is different.”
At massive scale, Salesforce employee quality maps to society's average
“Don't look at just like certain companies and certain brands and say, I want someone from Salesforce, right? Because Salesforce has how many employees now? At that scale, you start mapping to the average of society.”
Box CRO: Salesforce remains the best-operated software company on Earth
“I'd strongly argue it was the best, you know, operated software company on earth and probably still is today.”
Lemkin: 70% of Salesforce's new bookings come from existing base
“70%. 70%. That's the whole story. Think about that.”
Lemkin: Almost 100% of SaaS founders under-invest in customer success
“But if Salesforce at twenty billion in ARR and a three hundred billion market cap can get 70% of revenue from its base, that means who, any founder, CEO that is listening to this, It's under-investing in customer success. Almost by definition, almost a hundred…”
Lemkin: Product-led growth is useless without real-time data instrumentation
“You can't have product-led growth Isn't actionable unless you have instrumentation around it, right? What is actionable, right? What is the difference between product-led growth and classic freemium self-service viral word of mouth, which we've been doing for …”
Bonnici: Salesforce Marketing Is Not the Most ROI-Focused
“Realized that I wouldn't have a hundred million dollars to throw an event like I did when I was in Salesforce. Amazing company, but obviously not the most ROI focused marketing,”
Lemkin: Sales VPs from giants like Salesforce do not work at startups
“We know that the Oracle VP doesn't work. Salesforce is the same as Oracle today, right?”
Benioff initially dismissed pay gap claims before approving compensation audit
“Cindy had a one-on-one with Mark, and she invited me, and we got all ready, and we went to the one-on-one, and we sat there, and you know, the crux of the conversation was about equal pay and it really was us sort of saying to him, hey, you know, we think ther…”
First Salesforce equal pay audit adjusted salaries for almost as many men
“That first year we did the audit, we almost paid as many men as we did women to balance the salaries, and no one actually gets a pay cut.”
Schnaars: Series B Startups Should Avoid Long-Tenured Big-Company Sales Reps
“You can't just bring on that person that's been at Salesforce for the last 15 years, and because they've done really well at Salesforce, they, you know, there's oftentimes this perception that You know, somebody else is gonna make white papers for me. They're …”
Lemkin: SaaStr migrated off two of its three primary systems of record
“In fact, until recently at Sastr, we basically had two and a half, three systems of record. We had Salesforce, we had Marketo, and we had Notion. We left two.”
Lemkin: It took Adobe five years to fully go live on Salesforce
“Like when I was at Adobe, it took them five years to go live in Salesforce.”
Persson: Soft skills and adaptability now outweigh tool certifications in marketing hiring
“Now more and more, the soft skills are becoming more important. Are you, things are changing so fast. So are you someone who can really adapt with the speed? Do you have that kind of sense of fire within from a curiosity standpoint, adaptability, you know, sel…”
Lemkin: Salesforce Migrated SaaStr in Weeks via LLMs vs. HubSpot's One-Year Quote
“As we're trying to figure out what to do when we leave our worst at Marketo, you know, Salesforce migrated us in a matter of weeks too. It was very simple, right? Versus, you know, a couple, you know, a year and a half ago, we got a quote from HubSpot. It woul…”
Lemkin: Salesforce Agentforce is hard to deploy but wins on data integration
“It's probably the hardest to deploy are the ones we've deployed successfully. And we were not positive because we use it for every possible use case. We are positive because it has one thing that crosses the 60% level, which is native integration with Salesfor…”
Lemkin: Salesforce is acquiring pipeline generation platform Qualified
“Qualified, which Salesforce is buying.”
Benioff: Meaningful Enterprise Brands Trade Only Once, Forcing Decisive M&A
“There's only certain brands that really are meaningful in our industry. And that's one. And look, it's going to trade once. So you have to decide, is this going to be part of your solution?”
Benioff: Data Cloud is Salesforce's fastest-growing product ever
“Don't underestimate data cloud. It's been our fastest growing product ever.”
Benioff: Salesforce Completed Over 500,000 Support Interactions Using AI Agents
“Salesforce has helped at salesforce.com. We have 9000 support agents. We've already done more than a half a million Of these interactions with customers and agents.”
Benioff Accelerated Slack by Giving Quota Credit to Entire Sales Force
“We changed our distribution model for Slack last year. Nobody really saw that, which is that we allow all of our sales force to sell it, get quota credit for it, to basically made a peer product with the rest of our products. And it was A huge supercharge for …”
Kennedy confirms Google Cloud's Salesforce partnership is worth multi-billions
“In the big B's. Yes.”
Halligan: Enterprise SaaS incumbents demonstrate exceptional durability over decades
“These SaaS companies They last. You look at Adobe and Salesforce, both were, I don't know, I haven't looked recently, but three, I call it three or fifty billion. Oracle, you gotta take your hat off to them. It was like, oh, they're gonna die. They're gonna sl…”
Blond: Salesforce and Outreach Are Merely Reactive Data Repositories
“My experience with these systems is I would describe them as like reactive data repositories where when you buy Salesforce or when you buy Golong or when you buy outreach, it really requires the user to input data and instruct the system what to do. And much o…”
Tunguz: Software usage is compressing as companies cut major SaaS vendors
“What we've seen in the last six or seven months, most notably with Klarna announced cutting Salesforce and other major software products as a way of reducing costs is in fact the opposite. There's been a real compression in the use of overall software.”
Lemkin: Salesforce's Support Cloud Is Bigger Than Core CRM
“You might not realize that Salesforce
The support post sales is actually bigger than CRM.
It's actually a bigger cloud than CRM.”
Lemkin: Salesforce growth has dropped to single digits for first time
“Salesforce is, is profoundly struggling for the first it's fallen to single digit growth for the first time.”
Lemkin: WebEx reached $1B ARR before Salesforce
“You know, WebEx was the first billion dollar ARR SaaS company that blew up even before Salesforce.”
Lemkin: Shopify and Salesforce app ecosystems are dominated by the top 10
“When you look at partner ecosystems and we could flip it around and talk about Klaviyo's partner ecosystem too, it's almost always a long tail distribution. You could have a thousand apps on Shopify or Salesforce, but it's probably 10 that get half the install…”
Incumbents like Salesforce prioritize their own products over helping startup partners
“It turns out that like a lot of companies, Salesforce is more into selling their own product than your product. So it did end up being a, it did not end up being that helpful to have that relationship, but like a lot of things, you gotta do it on your own and …”
Lemkin: Salesforce's self-serve products never exceeded 0.5% of total revenue
“Salesforce every couple of years comes out with a PLG product at the low end. 11 times in our history, Adam and I, there's a new self-serve version of Salesforce that I don't think has ever been more than half a percent of revenue because it's not their DNA.”
Thomas: Pre-seed investors pressured Loom to verticalize for a Salesforce acquisition
“From our pre-seed investors, they wanted us to verticalize specifically with the sales persona, because they're like, you need to build this set of features, and then you do it over the course of the next couple of years, you get to this ARR, and you get acqui…”
Lemkin: SaaS Revenue in Tight Markets Requires Stealing Vendor Budgets
“CIOs, small businesses do not have unlimited money. There's a fixed amount, and if you disrupt something, if you do something better than Salesforce or Zoom or HubSpot or Slack or even UiPath, if you do something that is 10 times better, you will get money, bu…”
Lerman: Salesforce nixed Slack's monthly active user pricing model
“We went with monthly active users, which by the way is how Slack got started, But after the Salesforce acquisition, they nixed it. And so now you have to pay up front for the year and the kind of Salesforce more traditional sales model.”
Braverman: Headcount-dependent SaaS models will struggle in a recession
“If you are in one of these businesses that is dependent on other businesses to grow in order for you to sell licenses. This potential recession we're heading into, it's just going to be super tough to thrive.”
Lemkin: Salesforce Experienced Zero Customer Churn During the 2008 Financial Crisis
“There was no churn in 2008, 2009. There was none. But there, but NRR shrunk, right? But there was no churn. There was no churn in the worst downturn of my lifetime.”
Zocchetto: Expanding PayFit internationally without a CRM like Salesforce was a mistake
“So we opened Spain. We opened Germany from France without having Salesforce. You know, we were we had our own in-house Salesforce, and that was a mistake”
Schuck: Startups must develop talent internally rather than hiring from tech giants
“Because you're not going to go out and get the best people from Salesforce or Bill.com or wherever. You're going to get people who are not those people who have an aspiration for the future of being those people, the same way we all do in our startup, and you'…”
Lemkin: First enterprise customers must get a dedicated CS hire
“When you close your first enterprise customer, and maybe that's 50 K to start, maybe it's a hundred K later, it's a million or ten million or a hundred million if your Salesforce, that first 50 K to make, maybe it's 20 K if your product's 200 dollars a year an…”
Lemkin: Salesforce's share of total cloud market cap halved in five years
“If you look at revenue or market cap, Salesforce has grown incredibly, right? Almost two hundred billion, but its share of, Total revenue and total market cap is half of what it was five years ago, just because the rest of the cloud got so big, right?”
Wolan: Only Salesforce mattered among Talkdesk's 20 revenue-driving integrations
“We had something like 20 different integrations that were actually driving revenue. And really all that mattered was one of those integrations. And it was Salesforce.”
Nottebohm: Top-down sales drove most software companies to $5B revenue
“By the way, this is how SAP and Salesforce made it all the way up and over to the five billion mark, and if you remember that list, the majority of the companies who got to five billion actually got there this way.”
Deeter: Salesforce paid record 35x multiple for Slack acquisition
“35 X revenue multiple paid for what is a fantastic business by one of the leaders of cloud with Salesforce really showing that this was the second largest enterprise software acquisition in history after only IBM's purchase a red hat, but also the largest mult…”