Scott Dorsey: evaluation

Transcript context

…Moving to the next section, what would have happened otherwise? Sort of two alternate features here and I kind of want to post both questions to you. One is do you think ExactTarget, would’ve it made sense with any other acquirer? And then two, ExactTarget competed against responses and many other companies that started as email marketing solutions for a long time, do you think there was any one besides ExactTarget that could have made sense at Salesforce? I think yes to both questions. We certainly could have fit in well with a number of kind of the other larger software companies in the world that have been focused on going a lot deeper into marketing tech and saw it as a big growth area and then there’s no question that Salesforce looked at lots of different players over the course of time to potentially acquire. One element that’s interesting when you go through that evaluation process as a public company and really try to make the best decision for your shareholders is you really have to do a lot financial modeling and a lot of thinking about what does life as an independent company look like and we ultimately did come to the conclusion that being a part of Salesforce was a better outcome, higher probability outcome for our employees for our shareholders. But there are a number of different ways that our future could have played out, but we’re very, very happy the way it played out. I tell you the other interesting dimension as a public company, we would get an enormous amount of pressure around email. “When is the end of email coming? And these new channels are going to cannibalize email. ” Oh my gosh, it’s just kind of like if I had a nickel for every time I answered that question. But it was just a heavy theme and even sometimes I’d say a cloud over our company where we were thought of as such an email-centric company that even as we expanded around the world expanded into all these other adjacent technologies that you referenced, Ben, we were still thought of as an email company and I think often didn’t get credit for being a broad multichannel, omnichannel platform. But email was such a powerhouse for marketers that that line of business just kept booming. Our other lines were growing but they could never even get close to the email side of the business because it’s just the most powerful tool that a marketer has and as e-commerce has exploded with growth, emails become even more relevant. I’m curious when you’re forecasting what does life look like as an independent company. Let’s say you could continue to grow 40% year over year indefinitely or at least the top of some S-curve.…

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