Benioff: "It Turned Out Anthropic Was Right" | All-In #273 Breakdown

What is going on here? Yeah.

I love him, but let's just upscale this conversation just 1 second. Listen, what has happened? What happened is we have these LLMs, they're starting to come out. Every company's kind of chosen a slightly different path. You had Elon, he went out, he had Grok, and he kind of started building these companions and sex bots and all this kind of stuff going on and that was a huge focus of his, the sex bot focus. Then you kind of had Open AI and they're doing the Sora video thing and they're also doing ad networks and crazy stuff like that. Then you had Gemini and they had the nano banana. And then finally, you've got Anthropic and they go, 'Well, we don't know about those sex bots and we don't know about nano banana, but we're going to do coding agents.' And it turned out Anthropic was right and all of a sudden the rocket ship took off and now everybody's like, 'Whoa, where did Anthropic go? Oh, whoa, they're way up there.' And then they're all like, 'We're all going to do coding agents, too.' And now they're all resetting and going to hitting their buttons and going, 'Coding agents, everybody focus, focus. Kill Sarah. Kill this. Get rid of that. Sex bots off. You know, cursor on.' Yeah. And that's where we are right now. And so everybody, look, this is what's cool about right now is that everybody, it's such a dynamic moment in our industry. It's like so exciting that people have to pivot and you have to be ready to focus and refocus and constantly ask the question like, 'What do you want right now?' And everyone is changing what they really want. And if you looked at where everybody was a year ago and where they are now, they're in a totally different place because we all know that when Anthropic 46 hit, boom, everyone could code in their companies. And before that, they really couldn't. It was a little bit of a productivity improvement, but not as much as we wanted. Now, everybody's

Um I mean, it's not my first SaaS-pocalypse, honestly, but it's the current SaaS-pocalypse. So, we are all now drinking the Salesforce SaaS-pritas. And uh we actually have a pet SaaS-squatch, as well. Yeah. We're all a little more sassy. That's what I would say. That's number one. You bring the sass to SaaS? We got to bring the sass to SaaS-y, you know? And then

And then number two is, look, the market has re-rated. It's not a mystery. Everybody knows, you know, you guys have been talking about it for a while. I've been living it. So, the market software market's re-rated. It happens every now and then. There are cycles. You know, I've been doing Salesforce for 27 years, enterprise software for 40. And the market's re-rated. So, you mentioned HubSpot, they're trading at two times sales. I've never seen that before. They just had a great quarter. We saw a lot of great quarters. I looked at the top 10 major enterprise software companies. They all had great quarters and they're all trading at two times sales. So, why? Because of everything you just said. There's like, you know, a hypnosis around AI and you know, we haven't seen it show up in the numbers yet. If it shows up in the numbers, maybe people will be right. Right now, all we know is there's still a lot of enterprise software being sold in the world. So, you've been through this. It's pointing out, 'Hey, how durable are these revenues?' So, what's your take? I think the low end of the market is basically finished. I think there there is no safe space. I think the high end of the market where Mark operates, where the large monoliths operate, is quite safe. And the tell was this week. The the deployment company deal basically shows you what OpenAI is running into. So, you know, you have to put in $4 billion, you get all of these folks, you gave them a 17 and 1/2% preferred guaranteed return. For what? Essentially, to stand up a competitor to Ernst & Young, Anderson, Deloitte, PWC, Cognizant, et cetera. If you just look at that, that doesn't actually mathematically make that much sense if you look at what those companies are actually trading at. But why is OpenAI doing this? I think why is because at the high end of the market where all the action is what people are finding is, 'Hey, hold on a second. This is a lot harder than we thought.' It's not like boop beep boop, put in a prompt and beep bap boop, it all works. It's not how it works. Mhm. And so, I think I think we're a little

And I now I think this consolidation and the re-rating can happen in the opposite direction. So, what is the opposite trade? The opposite trade is who has constructive net dollar retention, who has negative churn that's been really predictable, which is a way of saying who has the best relationships? Meaning, they're inside the CXOs and the C-suite. They have relationships with the CEOs and they're trusted. And they've been around for 20 years. Those guys, I think are positioned to crush. Because eventually, Jason, the next trade that has to happen is when the public markets become a little bit less breathless about AI and they ask one simple question. Okay, guys, you've spent $3 trillion in the last 4 years. What is the ROI of these tokens? possible by this AI automation linking it then to the apps, you can go to another level.

I just disgraziato with this product. How do you get there first and you remain worst?

100% 100% I agree.

I think it's irrelevant at this point. I think that the Chinese models are as competitive as these US models, and they've learned to make these models without having the highest end chips. I think the highest end chips is kind of more of a ego gratification for us. We have Blackwell, we have this, we have that. But when you look at their models, their models are excellent. They fast follow us, you know, the best models we had. So, in that way,

We probably should just sell whatever we can at this point.

And I think that as I said, I think the more economic cooperation and collaboration is better, and if you want peace, I think that this. I think Taiwan it's kind of an another