Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
20 published records
01 / belief
“I think when I was finishing up my tenure there, we were launching the digital marketing hub and that included SMS and email marketing, micro sites; we had social; we had CoTweet.”
02 / belief
“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.”
03 / belief
“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.”
04 / belief
“I think a lot of credence is paid to Seattle’s proximity to San Francisco as a competitive advantage in fundraising and starting a company in general.”
05 / belief
“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.”
06 / belief
“Between that and then a later round you did in 2011, I think you raised more money than in the private markets than you ultimately did in your IPO.”
07 / belief
“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.”
08 / belief
“What started to really happen across the kind of software ecosystem is that marketing cloud solutions started really garnering more attention and I would say really the largest probably five or six software companies in the world were really all shifting to the cloud and publicly stating an intent to go a lot deeper into marketing.”
09 / commitment
“What do you look at as the payback period of that premium and say like well, they’re giving us 50% premium and we don’t think that we will reach that market cap for 20 years and we’re only looking at a 10-year time horizon or something like that.”
10 / belief
“One other topic that you asked me about, David, but I think I jumped into another category but it's kind of a fun story I’d love to tell you about.”
11 / evaluation
“On that front, we should say for our listeners too, this is I think really our first or one of our first pure enterprise technology companies that we’ve covered.”
12 / evaluation
“One, it’s just quite exceptional I think how young people are developing so quickly and when we look across our businesses at interns or contributions new college graduates can make, they are able to contribute to businesses in a way today that never existed in the past.”
13 / evaluation
“One of the big reasons why the ExactTarget acquisition has been successful is that Salesforce just has these amazing executive level relationships with the biggest companies around the world and they know Salesforce, they trust them. They want to buy more products that are tightly integrated and when you look at the Salesforce marketing cloud numbers, they’re booming and they’re really booming because they have all those trusted CEO and CIO relationships.”
14 / evaluation
“We started building more professional services capability and the fundamentals of the business started shifting and in addition to the equity markets not being very favorable, it actually was a huge blessing for us because it gave us a chance to stay private, bring more capital in the business, and kind of recalibrate toward the enterprise and it was much easier to do that as a private company.”
15 / evaluation
“I think why it didn’t happen is overlapping functionality that when you take a look at, and there was certainly a lot of conversations that ensued along the way could stack together some of these kind of large marketing tech companies become something bigger and something more meaningful.”
16 / evaluation
“net and really everything we built was on the Microsoft framework and we pushed Microsoft technology I think to the edge as we were building a super transactionally intensive multi-tenant platform.”
17 / evaluation
“We were 300 million in recurring revenue moving to 400 and for Salesforce with their size and their growth velocity, and now you see it with Demandware, they have to make large acquisitions that are meaningful, that are actually relevant and can contribute to that top line growth and we were able to do that in a big way. It's made me really proud that Mark on a number of occasions with Jim Cramer on Mad Money and other places and said that ExactTarget has been the most successful acquisition that Salesforce has ever completed, and I believe that to be true.”
18 / evaluation
“I think one of our real strong suits was being very close to the customer and being great listeners and really helping them shape our product. But we were incredibly sales driven and because of that kind of independent network of sales representatives that we built, we were very sales heavy early on.”
19 / evaluation
“Actually, a good number of the reasons why those early VCs said no is they just couldn’t picture that this could become a large business. And then over time through I think being a crafty and agile and very sales and customer oriented, we started to realize – Actually our first wave of expansion was to grab lots of small businesses at one time.”
20 / evaluation
“” 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.”