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 145 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Chellappa: Big tech hires showed no performance difference compared to startup hires
“I've hired people from Salesforce, Zendesk, I've hired people from big brand companies, and I've seen no difference in performance from somebody who might have just worked for a smaller startup or run their own mom and pop business in the past.”
Assaraf: Salesforce, Confluent, and Snowflake will enter observability
“I actually mentioned that Salesforce, I think, will get in our space some way, somehow, and I think I'm fluent. We'll also step into the observability space. I think also Snowflake will get there because it's just that makes no sense for companies that control…”
SuiteCRM matches all Salesforce features without licensing fees
“The alternative is to take a, an open source CRM like SweetCRM that SalesJilish provides. It does everything that Salesforce does, but the code is open.”
Salesforce churns 3% to 9% of annual revenue, estimates John Lee
“Salesforce is churning anywhere from three to nine percent of the revenue a year on a twelve billion dollar business.”
Unlike competitors using Twilio, Dial Source built its own proprietary carrier network
“Because other technologies have integrated the telephony and a large component of that is whether they're using something like Twilio to integrate the telephony into Salesforce. They can't control the actual ecosystem since we designed our own hardware and our…”
Tillman claims he would reject a $250 million acquisition offer
“They would only be upset if I took it.”
Erickson: Free features are cheaper than maintaining a sales team
“If I give away something like free recording, that's a lot cheaper than having a Salesforce. And a sales force, right? Goes out and sells your stuff because you don't give free, free recording.”
Barrett: Expense management SaaS is underpriced and should be 10x higher
“Candidly, I view our entire space is vastly underpriced. Like the idea that you can get full expense management, mobile apps, all this automation for nine bucks for active and a third of your company's active. It's really like three bucks for head. That's like…”
HubSpot steals Salesforce market share by starting downmarket
“I'm observing our HubSpot is taking market share away from Salesforce, and they take them from the bottom, and then from Marketo and from the other, they take them from the bottom, because when you start with a product that can serve the bottom efficiently, an…”
Zoho customers are significantly less likely to buy software add-ons
“So if someone who's purchased Zoho is, is showing that they're more cost conscience, they're willing to take shortcuts. They want the cheaper thing. And so it, they're less likely to purchase add-ons of this nature.”
Campbell: Salesforce is built for manager reporting, not sales reps
“Salesforce isn't built for the sales rep. It's built for the VP or the director level, the reporting, making sure the AEs are doing their activities.”
Schneider: Enterprise customers utilize thousands of distinct business SaaS tools
“In reality, people will always talk to you about two, three, maybe four, one for CRM, one for finance, one for marketing, and maybe one for HR. But when we go and talk to customer, they have thousands of tools.”
Gordon: Salesforce rarely boots partner apps from AppExchange after acquisitions
“I don't know if that happens too often. I think within the ecosystem I mean, I'd love to hear your perspective, but I haven't heard those stories.”
Abel: Initiating an acquisition process never leads to a good outcome
“Good companies are bought, not sold. I think that's true with good strategic outcomes. If you initiate it, I don't think it's ever good.”
Abel: Initiating M&A talks as a founder never leads to good outcomes
“If you listen to Mark Benioff or John Smorjai at Salesforce, they always say good companies are bought, not sold. I think that's true with good strategic outcomes. If you initiate it, I don't think it's ever good.”
Anaplan Failed to Meet Salesforce's Sales Planning Needs
“So we had experience planning at Microsoft, which was a six month process, and Bala and myself, we were part of the sales planning customer for life team at Salesforce, dealing with 1500 sheets being sent to 400 managers August to February, and so we started l…”
Bhatia: Legacy SaaS persists because enterprise buyers face zero career risk
“These are like form written products. Like you have to fill out multiple, you know, pages of long forms. And it doesn't really help you do your job any better. It's just, you know, everyone's on there. So you have to be on there as well. And, you know, they've…”
Aubin: Salesforce AppExchange outperforms SAP AppCenter due to enterprise buyer mindset
“I would say the Salesforce channel is a lot better, right? So the problem with the SAP app ecosystem is that they're not necessarily socialized to be an app ecosystem as much as Salesforce is. Salesforce has done a really good job socializing their customers t…”
Salesforce buyers spend millions customizing the platform for their processes
“Most companies out there who buy Salesforce spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars modeling Salesforce to fit the business processes.”
Soper: Salesforce customers lack application ownership and on-premise flexibility
“With Salesforce, you don't own the application. You don't own the changes to the application. You can't move to on-premise. You don't own your own data.”
Klein: Salesforce beat SalesNexus by raising 'a shitload more money'
“Well, he raised a shitload more money than me.”
Reich: Salesforce and legacy CRMs feature painful 1990s-style user interfaces
“A problem with it and many like it is it's incredibly painful to use, right? Like you log into an interface that looks like it's from the nineties with a bunch of fields, forms, buttons, and boxes.”
Specialized SaaS point tools are overkill for day-one startups, says Roberts
“Ultimately at the very, very early stage of a SaaS startup, most of those tools are overkill. The actual need is for relatively basic functionality as you're trying to get your business off the ground and validate that you actually have something that's worth …”
Birnbaum: Salesforce relies on proprietary tech modern apps avoid
“The Salesforce platform is 20 years old, right? And if you ever had to use it, it's all built on Apex and Sokol and a whole bunch of very proprietary solutions that, that you know, modern apps don't really use it at this point anymore.”
Salesforce implementations cost 1-3x the license fee, says John Lee
“Unlike Salesforce, you're paying One to three times your license fee. You're spending anywhere from one to six months basically implementing Salesforce for your organization.”
Dial Source infrastructure prevents it from seeing or extracting client data
“We purposefully built unique security controllers into our ecosystem. So we cannot log into the client's org. We cannot see any of the client's data. And unlike an integration, we do not pull any of that data out of Salesforce and Microsoft.”
IBM, Salesforce, and SAP are bad at experience management, says Stamer
“So we have a very powerful content management platform, but the e-commerce platform from IBM, Salesforce, and SAP, they are pretty bad at experience management. So they basically give you the transactional capabilities to sell stuff and pay for it, but they re…”
Smith: Major tech incumbents are currently out-executing agile startups
“What's happening in tech is you're watching for the first time ever the biggest companies execute better than the smaller companies in a lot of different ways with Amazon and everything else where we haven't seen this kind of juice since probably the Microsoft…”
Raanani: Salesforce is a lagging system reliant on subjective rep updates
“Salesforce is a lagging, it's a lagging system, right? It requires sales reps to go in and update certain fields, and it's based on the reps Interpretation of what happened in that meeting.”
LeanData Has Zero Hosting Costs by Running Natively Inside Salesforce
“I have no hosting bandwidth storage costs because I am an app that natively Salesforce, the customers have already paid for that.”
Brandon Bruce argues Salesforce is not a CRM or sales tool
“I think our key kind of learning over the last few years is Salesforce is not a sales tool. Salesforce is not actually a CRM. It's kind of a misnomer. It's called the customer relationship management platform, but you know, as well as anybody, no customer rela…”
Ferrara: Sales and marketing software should never have been separated
“Because I believe, Nathan, that sales and marketing should have never been split apart. Goldmine did all that in one single unit, and I think today, people don't want to go buy MailChimp to Marketo, HubSpot to Salesforce, and then go out and buy Yesware and To…”
Shanbhag: Salesforce's Data.com Is 85% Inaccurate
“One of the things that we tried was to get our prospects from data.com, which is owned by Salesforce. And we quickly realized that the data is, you know, 85% inaccurate.”
Collin: 100% of acquired email startups get shut down
“But also a hundred percent of those companies who have been acquired shut down.”
Eyal says Salesforce acquired API startup GoInstant for approximately $75 million
“A friend of mine, Jevin McDonald sold GoInstant for around seventy-five million dollars to Salesforce. SaaS-based model and you know, actually it was kind of a, it was kind of an API play, but it's still SaaS-based model. And they only had one customer, but ye…”
Sam Jacobs: Early Salesforce retention was driven by emailed dashboards, not data migration
“And that the thing that led to retention most closely and the clearest time to value within Salesforce wasn't getting the data in. It was building a dashboard that, you know, those beautiful visualized dashboards that I first saw them through Salesforce. Sugar…”
Hoppe: 40% of sales prospecting contact data is inaccurate
“40%, we're finding about 40% of contact data that reps use to prospect is inaccurate. It's a shocking statistic, but it's real.”
Customer success was not an accepted profession when Gainsight launched
“Customer success managers didn't have a platform of choice, they didn't have, they weren't empowered to actually make a lot of purchasing decisions at the time, and just that name, customer success, there was like,
Handful of them at Salesforce, But it wasn't…”
Sales Tech Stacks Are Useless Without Accurate Contact Data
“What we're saying is the most essential tool is overlooked, is, is the, if I don't have the right contact information to reach my likely buyer,
None of the tech stack matters.”
Grant: SMBs do not care about multi-system data integrations, enterprises do
“From a technical standpoint, we can integrate into multiple data systems, and we can create apps that have data from Oracle and SAP and Salesforce and Zendesk, and the minute you say that, you realize, like, No SMB gives a crap. They just want their one thing.…”
Campbell: Paddle will do for subscription revenue what Salesforce did for CRM
“We're going to do for The subscription dollar, what Salesforce did for the customer record where a dollar through paddle is going to be worth, you know, a lot more coming out of paddle than using infrastructure that, you know, is currently on the market basica…”
Abel: The best acquisition strategy is partnering before buying
“I also think the best way to make acquisitions happen is to partner first, and certainly that's what Salesforce does, you get to know each other, you actually make sure your products work together, do customers love them together, and then it can lead to very …”
Godard Abel scaled SteelBrick from $1M to $60M ARR in two years.
“But then, and at the time Max's original product had about a million ARR.
And then in two years we scaled it.
Actually we beat that plan.
That was a plan, but we scaled it to sixty million in two years and got acquired by Salesforce.”
Sastrify relies on process efficiency over bulk purchasing leverage
“Yeah, we actually don't do that on a bulk level because we see that there's actually more in the, more of what we do comes from the efficiency of just doing it more often than once.”
Abel: SteelBrick reached a $360M exit to Salesforce in seven quarters
“Because there in seven quarters, we achieved, you know, a three hundred sixty million dollar exit to Salesforce.”
Bendov: Gong raised $200M Series D, reaching nearly $340M total funding
“The most recent round is the Series D two hundred million. Dollars led by Code Two, Thrive, Salesforce, and Index. This is the fourth round, so the total to date is like 300, almost three hundred and forty million dollars. The last round was led by Sequoia in …”