Salesforce, Inc.

Marc Benioff founded Salesforce in a rented apartment in San Francisco in 1999 with a radical idea: software should not be installed on company servers — it should be delivered over the internet and accessed through a browser. The concept — Software as a Service (SaaS) — was not new theoretically, but nobody had built a major enterprise software company around it. Benioff's former employer, Oracle's Larry Ellison, invested in Salesforce. Benioff later joked that Ellison had funded the company that would cannabilise Oracle's business model.

Salesforce hired actors to stand outside a Siebel Systems user conference in 2000 carrying protest signs reading "The End of Software." Some carried placards depicting Siebel software as a villain. The stunt generated press coverage that no advertising budget could have bought. Siebel Systems was the dominant CRM software company at the time. Salesforce was positioning itself as the revolutionary alternative. The guerrilla marketing campaign established Salesforce's identity as an irreverent disruptor and was one of the most effective B2B marketing stunts in technology history.

Salesforce went public in June 2004 at $11 per share. The company subsequently launched the AppExchange in 2005 — a marketplace for third-party applications built on the Salesforce platform. The AppExchange transformed Salesforce from a CRM company into a platform business: the more applications were built on Salesforce, the more valuable the platform became to customers, and the harder it was to leave. The ecosystem strategy, borrowed from Microsoft's Windows playbook, became the foundation of Salesforce's competitive moat.

Salesforce acquired Slack — the workplace messaging platform — for $27.7 billion in July 2021, the largest acquisition in Salesforce's history. The deal was driven by the desire to create a competitor to Microsoft Teams, which had grown dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. The acquisition was controversial: many analysts questioned whether Salesforce had overpaid for a product that Microsoft was effectively giving away to its Office 365 customers. Slack founder Stewart Butterfield left the company within two years of the acquisition.

Salesforce faced pressure from multiple activist investors in 2023, including Elliott Management and Starboard Value, who argued the company had over-invested in growth at the expense of profitability. Salesforce had $26 billion in revenue but relatively modest profit margins for a software company. Benioff responded by cutting 10% of the workforce — 7,000 people — and reducing real estate costs. The stock rose substantially. The episode highlighted the tension between Benioff's expansionist instincts and investors' demand for financial discipline.