Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Absolutely. Mark likes his towers. Mark and the team, they love their towers, but it’s going to be so fantastic for our tech community that the tallest building in the city in the state is actually a tech building, so it’s going to be a big boost and accelerated our tech community which I’m very happy about. I always remember too there’s so many unique things about ExactTarget for the region. There’s this big drumbeat from, I think, maybe your first or second office that it was about being an urban company and that people needed to – We’re in Monument Circle which is like this really incredibly cool, historic center of downtown. Big statue. ExactTarget had a building with this cool roof deck that looked out over it. I remember thinking well, I never want to work in an office park again. And I think that a lot of ExactTarget employees got super spoiled in that way That’s exactly right, Ben. Our real estate strategy was to really build around this urban core and build a campus and a work environment that was super appealing really to the millennial, the younger generation and it’s been really fun over the last decade, downtown Indianapolis has had this huge resurgence of housing and amazing restaurants and kind of lots of arts and culture and sports. ExactTarget has been a part of that fabric of downtown Indianapolis and I really felt that to build a high growth category leading company in a market like Indianapolis. We had to be in the urban core to really take advantage of just the energy, the vitality, the ability to recruit topnotch people from all over the country and then even to bring in partners and VCs and customers that could fly in to Indianapolis and take a 15-20 minute cab ride to Downtown Indy and then be able to just enjoy all the benefits that that downtown setting has, and that’s been neat. I’ll tell you one of the neat legacy elements of ExactTarget is for years we’ve worked on getting a nonstop flight in place to Indianapolis to San Francisco and not having – It’s been a real barrier. Our west coast investors have to jump through lots of hoops to make it in Indy for a board meeting and makes just fundraising for all companies here in Indy more difficult. Right around the time of the acquisition, we actually got it done with United Airlines and have had a nonstop flight back and forth to San Francisco, which might seem trivial but it’s actually been a game changer for our tech community and Salesforce has appreciated it as well.…

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