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 36 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
Lemkin: Marc Benioff Is Repeating His Past Mistake by Cutting Sales
“I mean, Mark Benioff in his book wrote his biggest mistake in the last downturns was cutting sales. And what did he just do? Cut sales. So we're all, he's making them, he's making the same mistake three times.”
Lemkin: Salesforce Replaced Up to 4,000 Support Staff With Internal AI
“You know, Mark Benioff said, even at Salesforce, they're growing, they're adding more headcount in sales and marketing, but I think he's, I know the numbers, I think three or 4000 folks in support, they already replaced with AI and their own AI and support Cog…”
Benioff: Salesforce Will Demonstrate AI Agents Integrating Into Physical Robots
“And that fourth layer is going to be the robotic layer, but it needs the other three layers to operate because the agents are going to get manifested into these robots. So that will be a keep next step. And we'll see that by dream force. I'm sure.”
Lemkin: SaaS vendors promise AI can cut 30% to 50% of staff
“Everyone in post sales, Salesforce, Intercom, Zendesk, Gorgeous, on and on. They are promising you can eliminate. 30 to 50% of your humans in support with AI. They're promising it today.”
Bedecarre: Apple, Meta, Salesforce, and Slack back in offices by April 2022
“Big tech, you know, that Apple, Salesforce, Facebook, Meta you know, Slack all of these companies are kind of targeting over the next couple months, but by April, they will all be back.”
Lemkin: Benioff Stated Envy of Palantir's Deal Size and FDE Model
“When Mark Benioff came on the TwentyVC with me and Maureen Harry, he said, my number one wish, my number one thing I'm jealous of Palantir's is one, their deal size. But two, I wish I could give everyone an FDE before I had to charge them.”
Lemkin: Marc Benioff has 2,000 Salesforce employees building Agentforce
“That's why Asian force has to win. That's why Mark has 2000 people working on it.”
Lemkin: Sierra grew from $1M to $100M revenue in a year
“Sierra just said they went from one to a hundred million in a year. Brett Taylor, ex, you know, ex CTO of Facebook, co-CO of Salesforce, just going out to people and saying, you can replace a lot of your support teams with AI.”
Marc Benioff Is Envious of Palantir's Forward Deployed Engineering Model
“He said, this is the number one thing he was jealous of Palantir was one of it was how, how, how, how well they charge their customers, but he was most jealous of what they've done in forward deployed engineers. He said, what I would love at Salesforce is that…”
Lemkin: Drift security breach leaked Salesforce data from Cloudflare and Zscaler
“Poor drift, which sales off bot and Clary bot had a massive security breach and leaked cloudflare security data Z scalers, I mean, Salesforce data, cloudflare, Salesforce data, Z scalers, Salesforce data, tons of the cloud leader Salesforce data was all leaked…”
Lemkin: Per-seat pricing was under 50% of SaaS revenue historically
“And it turns out going back to the beginning per seat was less than 50% of the SaaS revenue. When you add in API pricing, other pricing, just because we think everyone talks about blah, blah, blah, Salesforce, it doesn't mean it's most of software. And so it's…”
Lemkin: 70% of Salesforce's new bookings come from existing base
“70%. 70%. That's the whole story. Think about that.”
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.”
Lemkin: Salesforce is acquiring pipeline generation platform Qualified
“Qualified, which Salesforce is buying.”
Benioff: Data Cloud is Salesforce's fastest-growing product ever
“Don't underestimate data cloud. It's been our fastest growing product ever.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Lemkin: CRM Is Salesforce's Third or Fourth Largest Category
“I think at Salesforce, depending on how you look at it, CRM is either their fourth or third largest category now.”
Forbes Data: Salespeople Spend Only 35% of Their Day Selling
“Like, Forbes says, 35% of a sales person's day is actually spent selling, because they're filling out all those 10 extra sales force fields for me, so I can do great segmentation.”
Salesforce spent over $8M across three years fixing compensation disparities
“We did the equal pay audit the first year, and we found about a three million dollar issue. And then we did it the second year, and we found another three million dollar issue. And then we did it the third year, and we found another, I mean, it's north of eigh…”
Benioff regrets not prioritizing equal pay from Salesforce's inception
“He will openly say, if I'd known, I would have done this in the beginning too. I would have done equal pay and equality, and I would have had a chief equality officer. The second I hired the chief philanthropy officer, like he, Miss Mark Benioff, like the lege…”
Lemkin: Revenue Per Employee Up 2.6x at HubSpot Since 2021
“Since 2021, this is their efficiency ratio, their revenue per employee. HubSpot up 2.6 X, even Salesforce up 2.2 X.”
Benioff: Salesforce is Japan's second-largest software company
“We're the second largest software company in Japan.”
Benioff: Salesforce Guided to Around $40.9 Billion for the Year
“I think we did give guidance at about 40.9 billion for this year.”
Lemkin: MongoDB, Salesforce, And UiPath All Suffered Severe Growth Deceleration
“We talked about the shock to the system of Mongo going from 40 to 17%, Salesforce shrinking to single digit growth, UiPath cutting its guidance in half.”
Kayyal: Salesforce listed a $6B TAM in its 2004 IPO filing
“When Salesforce went public in our S-one, our TAM listed was six billion in 2004. That was what we said the TAM was for Salesforce. You know, Jason called it out. It's now a thirty billion revenue company. You look at the TAM, you know, over three hundred bill…”
Kayyal: Salesforce Grew Over 20% in 2009 Despite Global Financial Crisis
“Salesforce's growth in 2009 you know, in what was the doom and gloom era, as we can all remember of, you know, the world felt, you know, sort of financial markets were about to collapse and Salesforce still grew north of 20% in that period.”
Lemkin: Early Salesforce was a rudimentary SMB app with four tabs
“Salesforce was a very rudimentary SMB app for a brief period of time, but it was. It sold to very small companies. It didn't even have custom tabs. It just had four tabs out of the box, and even compared to, like, where Pipedrive was in 2013, it did less. It w…”
Bedecarre: Sephora leased major portion of Salesforce's 350 Mission space
“Salesforce themselves put up one of their half of their building at three 50 mission. Sephora took a huge chunk of that.”