Salesforce

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 cannibilise 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." The stunt generated press coverage that no advertising budget could have bought. Siebel Systems was the dominant CRM software company at the time. 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.

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: Microsoft was effectively giving Teams away to its Office 365 customers. Slack founder Stewart Butterfield left within two years of the acquisition.

Salesforce reported revenues of $34.9 billion for fiscal year 2024, making it one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. Following pressure from activist investors Elliott Management and Starboard Value in 2023, Salesforce cut 10% of its workforce and dramatically improved profitability — operating income rose 80% in a single year. The company subsequently pivoted to AI with "Agentforce" — an AI agent platform designed to automate sales, service, and marketing workflows. By late 2025, Salesforce was signing large Agentforce deals and positioning the platform as the AI layer for enterprise CRM. The company that had invented SaaS was now racing to define the next generation: AI agents running on top of SaaS.