David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Let me come in with mine. Packy, great three points. The one other point that I would make that's the thing I've been doodling on that we didn't really talk about is this notion of growing by acquisition, which is something that we've talked about especially on the LP Show with Will Thorndike, author of The Outsiders. It's a famous move by media companies and other outsiders, CEOs, where the core business has growth but not insane growth and you grow the company by acquiring high-growth assets. Again, we can debate whether Slack is a high-growth asset relative to some of these other SaaS companies these days, but they're a large enough enterprise company where if what Salesforce wants to do is meaningfully grow their enterprise revenue quarter-over-quarter, they got to acquire their way in the new revenue streams to do that. Where are there possibly large feature revenue streams that they could acquire? Slacks. If I had to describe why would you do this deal if there's not real product integration to be done but you sure as heck can increase their growth through your own Salesforce, but because the market is relatively underpenetrated with this Slack product, that's how I would describe what Salesforce is up to here. David, anything else? I think the only thing is we could do a quick what would've happened otherwise on other potential interested acquirers, probably namely Google. We touched on Zoom a little bit. Maybe we can circle back to that, too. Let's do Google and Zoom. Actually some months ago, I wrote about a Google-Slack acquisition. I think that one. Part of the press around this is that it's now Salesforce versus Microsoft. I don't think that's really the case unless people start using Quick Documents to replace Word or whatever else. I do think that a Google plus a Slack, with Google's distribution, really is a powerful combination. When you have G-Suite, you have Gmail as your Outlook competitor. You have Google Sheets. Maybe the finance team still needs Excel, but most of the rest of the company can use Google Sheets, Google Docs and all those things. You really have the suite that you can onboard a new company by just signing up for Google+, Slack plus Looker, which I like better than Tableau. It feels like they're building this new wave Office bundle versus even Tableau. I love Looker, and my brother loves Looker, and my dad loves Tableau, and so I think that it does make a little bit more sense in that Google Suite, a product which is what I thought they're building. Google's actually (to me) been maybe the most disappointing thing in terms of their innovation or their growth unless one of the other bets pays off, but they have this ad business which, for now, is spinning off a ton of cash. The idea that they wouldn't play in this, I don't even know how to read that, but it just seems like such an obvious move for Google to come in. And then, Amazon is the other one. They had a partnership where they powered Slack's video product and Slack used AWS and all of that. That's another one but Google (to me) makes a ton of sense.…

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