Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Absolutely. That’s exactly right. Then all these great cloud platforms where you can really quickly build technology, build MVPs, get it to market and really see if you've got product market fit and you got something that can be viable, and that’s what’s so fun I think then about what we're both doing and coming up with new ideas and launching ideas is you can go from idea to MVP and proof of concept really, really quickly. All right. We're going to move on to what was formerly the last part of our show, I think we have a couple of cool sections after, but grading the acquisition. Scott, you can choose to participate in this or not. I feel like you might be a little bit biased. But this is obviously an incredibly successful acquisition. You hear Mark preach it to the world time and time again in some of the biggest stages that he’s on. Obviously a success. We’ve given A’s to things that have ridiculous multiples. You can look at what Instagram did to Facebook, or you look at Pixar’s sort of reverse integration or reverse acquisition of Disney Pictures/Disney Animation. Those are A’s. So I’m going to land on this as an A- for ExactTarget. I think I’m similar. We can talk all about the reasons why this is a great outcome. One thing that we actually didn’t quite – It’s funny, we’re not super quantitative on this show. You know we’re about acquisitions. So, we went through this whole episode and we didn’t talk once about your revenue. But, some numbers I want to throw out. When ExactTarget in 2012 which was the final year, full year of being a single company, I believe you had about 294 million in revenue; and in Salesforce’s fiscal 2016 which ended January 31, 2016, so essentially the calendar year 2015, the marketing cloud division did 654 million in revenue, so over twice as much in less than 3 years. That’s a pretty great outcome and it speaks to the power of this there are many product things that I’m sure Salesforce has done with the acquisition and bolted on many things, but also just the power of these enterprise relationships that they have. I think this was a great deal. I’m also going to, you know, when I think about Instagram went from a billion dollar acquisition price to $3 billion in revenue in 3 years, I’m also A- but I’m on the fence here. Scott, any comment?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.