Alex, thank you for coming, by the way, to Dreamforce. Exciting to have you here. Is this your first Dreamforce?
Wow. Amazing. Congratulations. Um, a lot of things to talk about, but first I've got to ask you, Mark, do you know what frame mogging is?
Well, I didn't know it as well as I do right now.
You know it now. You're a meme.
Actually, every year I'm a slightly different meme.
A slightly different one. I've been enjoying the frame mog memes.
Yeah, those have been big this year. I would say the other one is you and Jensen where you say we're all following you, bro.
Yeah, that's been a big one.
And I think that actually speaks to the moment we're in. These weren't planned, by the way.
That's what I was going to ask you. Like when you do the frame mogging, like are you thinking through like people are going to meme this?
I was just mentioning to a member of my team, I'm like, you know, a year ago we had a whole different set of memes and now we have a whole different set of memes and like the memes from a year ago are forgotten and gone.
And I'm like, you don't know what's next. You know, I couldn't have told you five days ago that this would be the funniest thing coming out of Dreamforce, but that's the nature of the world we're in in social media right now.
My favorite one is there's one of you and Sam and it says ARR meets AGI.
And I've been reading about people trying to describe this year's Dreamforce on X. And my favorite one was it feels like a mix between a megachurch sermon and science camp but for B2B SaaS. And when you see you walking through doing that keynote. I mean you've always kind of done it that way, right? Where did you have the idea because it's become such an iconic part of the conference.
It's a huge nod to John Chambers who was the CEO of Cisco who hated to stay on the stage. And so we would all be facing towards the stage and John would walk off the stage and walk into the audience and I was like whoa. And I'm like, I have to learn how to do this and train everybody to be a John Chambers. And one of his key executives who I was very close with who since passed on, Rick Justice, then became kind of the second acolyte to kind of come off the stage with John. And I'm like, whoa, if he can do that, we can get everyone to do that. And then the one pivot is you may see we do more of a theater in the round because we don't really want to be a patriarchal structure in the room. It tries to be a little more democratic.
People up and yeah. Well, there's like 12,000 people in the keynote room. So, and then it's all set in the round. But when we go on the road, we're about to go on the road.
Oh, yeah. And we're going to do, you know, what we call the world tour. So, we'll hit all the major cities. We'll go to Tokyo, we'll go to New York, we'll go to London, we'll go to Paris, we'll take this show on the road, Chicago, on and on. When we do that, it's the same thing, just slightly smaller, right? You know, where we'll set it in the round and we'll always walk with everybody and try to be with our customers. It's a metaphor for being with your customer.
You don't have a prompter, right? You're just walking around.
No. So many people ask me that question. They're like, 'Did you memorize you?' But the, you know, the presentation is different every single time because of that.
Yeah. Well, Jensen does that, too. If you go see Jensen speak, there's no prompter. I'm always amazed by that the density of information that you're putting out.
Yeah. He knows what he wants to say.
Yeah. And he was there and you said that we're all following you, bro. And I do feel like that's true. Like I think it's true. I'm asking that too to say where do you think we are in the AI hype cycle right now? Do you think there's a little bit of like nervousness? Kind of what you said there, I think, was maybe speaking to a little bit of the nervousness that people feel.
If I said it like that, I didn't mean to. I think we're in this incredible transformation of our industry and of many industries and we're in the middle of it. It's exciting, you know, but we're still very much in the beginning of the beginning of what can be an incredible new, you know, chapter of the world. But you probably already heard me say this, you know, I just spent two full months in Europe and I met with hundreds of our customers and, you know, things are different in Europe than they are here in San Francisco, than they are in Shanghai. You know, if you're here in San Francisco, you probably know there's more than a thousand Waymos driving around autonomously. And that's not the only autonomous company here in San Francisco. If you go to Europe, I didn't see one autonomous vehicle in two months. Not one. Not in any country. So that's kind of a metaphor though for me that everyone is on a slightly different place in AI as an individual, maybe as a company, maybe as a country. We're in a continuum and we're all on that.
I'm glad you brought up San Francisco because you and the company represent San Francisco in such a big way. I mean, the tower behind us literally, but what this conference is and all the people you bring here for this. I've been dying to hear you just talk about the state of San Francisco because it feels like it's been back for a minute. And now it's becoming I mean, I spend a lot of my time in LA and I'm like, I want LA to have a San Francisco moment now. And I wonder if you think there's anything that could stop this train if it feels like San Francisco is very much resurgent.
I'm so glad you asked that. You know, I think that it's a funny thing. San Francisco, it's a spirit. It's not just a city and you have to appreciate that to understand what has happened here over a long period of time. People are like, 'Wow, this is an incredible opportunity in AI. Look at all these companies. They're all going to go public.' I mean, I can think now multiple times in our industry whether that cycle is happening. But you need to realize something, Alex. This is not our first gold rush in San Francisco. We've had many gold rushes.
This might be the biggest.
It could be our biggest, but it's not our first.
And I think that, you know, we have our moments in San Francisco that this is the city of the Summer of Love. You know, this is the city of Haight-Ashbury. You know, this is the city of the gold rush. This is the city of Levi's jeans. Even, you know, I love the family of the Gap, you know, and Salesforce. This is a special city. Now OpenAI, Anthropic, all birthed in San Francisco. And even, you know, Dario is a native San Franciscan, comes from San Francisco, educated in San Francisco. So, it's a special city. The spirit of the city can come through you and do some amazing things. It's doing itself again. And a few years ago, everyone was kind of second-guessing San Francisco. But my opinion had never changed, which was, don't worry, it just keeps going through this same cycle over and over and over again.
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You had Sam and Dario here, which I think you might deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for. But there's going to be so much wealth that's unlocked by those two IPOs in San Francisco. I mean, a record amount. And you and the company really pioneered a way to do philanthropy, right, with your 1-1-1 concept and it's still obviously a big part of what you do. And I'm curious if you've had conversations with some of, you know, Dario, some of these other AI leaders about what you've learned from philanthropy and how you would like to see them give back because I mean we are talking about a record amount of wealth that's about to be generated.
Well, telling entrepreneurs anything is extremely difficult. Yeah. So, and especially those entrepreneurs, but I would just say that you're right. We put 1% of our equity, profit, and time into our foundation, you know, so many years ago, and that has unlocked this incredible capability, you know, our ability to give back at scale. We've done 11 million hours of volunteerism, a billion in grants. We run 65,000 nonprofits and NGOs for free. Many of them are here. That is very important to us, you know, that we didn't just do it, but we did it the right way. We didn't have to kind of go back and say, 'Oh, I wish I had done it like that.' We're older than these companies, 27 years, but we don't have to look backwards and say, 'Well, I guess we should have, would have, could have done it.' You know, we've done, you know, millions of hours of volunteerism in the schools. That is really important to me. I came from public schools that, you know, we're rebuilding playgrounds, painting schools. We give $100,000 every year to every middle school principal in San Francisco and Oakland to make sure that they have what they need to be successful. That is very important to us. That we're not just building another company that we're trying to give back. And also we're not going to be like a hundred years old and now we're gonna give back because the power in giving is actually through yes you have this ability to write checks because you're public but no your greatest power is that you have your company so your company, the relationships and the employees and all of that is the ability to really make change.
Yeah. I had Sam on my podcast recently and I asked him about this and I said could you give back more? Could you build libraries? You know, lessons from the industrial revolution, right? And he said, well, I think the main way to get people to like AI is to build great products, which no question there, but I haven't heard any of the current leaders of this AI boom talk about it in the way you just talked about it. I don't know if you agree with me, but I would like to see more of that in terms of what practically are you doing in the community? Because as you know, people have a very strong feeling about AI right now and if these companies were to be playing more integral roles in their communities, I wonder if that would shift.
Entrepreneurs always get dropped into different buckets in this category and one bucket is a good friend of mine who's a great entrepreneur said, 'Hey, Mark, I don't think you're right at all. Who's done more for the world, the Ford Foundation or the Ford Corporation?' And I said to him, I think this is a false choice. Both. You know, why can you not do both? That's my whole perspective. When you start to actually try to separate these two things, you're doing I think everyone a disservice. When you put it together, you're doing everybody a great service. And you have so much power in your capability as a CEO of a company or as an entrepreneur. If you actually decide to not only build great products or have great customers but also have great impact, you can do it all. And so, you know, this has been our message for a long time. But not everyone is going to buy in because entrepreneurs are very opinionated. Doesn't matter who they are. They have strong philosophical statements and they'll either buy into that or they won't. But 20,000 companies have joined our 1-1-1 model through pledge1percent.org. And if you do go to pledge1percent.org, you can learn all about how to do this with your company. And I think it adds to your culture, makes for a great company, helps you to, you know, set the right values. Also, I think it helps in the employee behavior that it sets the right tone from the top. We call it in business that our employees know you need to really, you know, behave this way. And I think it's benefited us in so many ways.
Something else I've heard you talk about and it's been the theme throughout Dreamforce this year is how people are feeling about AI and the risks and regulation. You were very early saying social media should, you know, it's like cigarettes and calling for regulation. And I wonder what you think about AI and regulation and what you would advocate for, how you want our politicians, our leaders to be thinking about it.
Yeah, I think I'm going to pivot back to what I said about CEOs need to make the right decisions and kind of we just had a good conversation about all right, CEOs are you going to put philanthropy and giving back into your culture? Now we have to kind of ask this question, okay, hey CEOs are you going to put responsibility into your culture? You know, that you really are trying to build the right kind of company, steer it with the right capability, as I said before, the right values. I think that is the question. I think that when we get to regulatory conversations or regulatory changes, especially as they need to happen on a global basis, we have to look back over the last decade or more of social media. So in social media we can ask ourselves the question how many kids have been hurt, how many countries have been hurt, why is it taking us so long for there to be some kind of come to terms with aspect of social media. It's been a shock to me and you're right. I've been talking about this ad nauseum for quite a long time because I believe that if you are a CEO and you're an entrepreneur, you have a responsibility to build a great company, to build great products, and to have a great impact on society and do it the right way. And I think that that's the basis of ethics in our society. And if we're going to have ethical companies, we're going to have to start with our ethical leadership. And ethics start with responsibility. And it's that simple. And I'm sure a lot of people will take me apart for saying such a thing. But it also becomes very prophylactic around regulatory issues as well because when you have companies that are behaving at that level, it's not an issue. I hope that liability, basic concept of liability can help here, right? Luckily, you know, when OpenAI hacked HuggingFace, Clem is great. It wasn't too damaging to HuggingFace. Imagine if that was a large bank. I wonder the reaction in that case what it would have been. And I do think, you know, we rush to regulation often, right, as the public, but you know, there are private market incentives at play. You are on the right conversation, you know, and I talked about those Sam Altman. If you haven't seen the video yet, it's worth seeing, but Clem came to see me after this happened.
And it's actually where the whole acquisition conversation really started in August. Absolutely. It was clear that here's this company, a great company actually, Hugging Face. We invested in the company aggressively, a very important company for our whole industry because it's holding the jewels of the open-source movement. And I said, Clem, this is actually pretty serious. You only have 200 employees. You can only do so much and maybe you don't have all the security and capability that you need to defend yourself when an OpenAI model has turned its sights on you and attacked. And I said, you also have the ability to do all these other critical things to create a very important company right now. And I think that's when he realized and I realized kind of together maybe this was the opportunity for it to move from being an independent company to being part of something else.
Oh wow. I didn't realize you played such a role in that.
Well, I don't know how big of a role I played. I don't want to overstate it but the conversation was very seminal and I called him back and I said to him whether it's Salesforce acquiring you or somebody else I think this is the time where you need to actually become part of something else. It was clear to me they are great entrepreneurs but they were subscale at a moment that they needed scale.
When you think about agents, you know, I remember 3 years ago you were talking about agents and here at Dreamforce and pivoting kind of the company towards this concept. No one was really talking about agents like that. And I know you're a prolific investor. You've got Salesforce Ventures. You've got the Anthropic partnership. And I wonder if that allows you sometimes to see around corners because I'm wondering what led you to see agents when you did because now is when they're starting to work I think at scale but you saw it seems like several years ago.
Well, I think that fortunately for us we're in a thriving ecosystem here in San Francisco. And so the dinner conversation might be around one of these new technologies. There's so many things happening. I'll also give a lot of credit to meditation practice over three, you know, four decades that having a few minutes every morning just to contemplate what is kind of going on I think has definitely served.
It's been an important part of my life and I'm very fortunate to have some great teachers who impacted me, you know, very aggressively in the early 90s and then I've been able to use that even this morning, you know, I made sure I took at least a few minutes to do that because so much is happening this week. I just let my mind relax a little bit. My grandfather, he didn't have a meditation practice, but he made sure that on a regular basis, especially like he was a great trial attorney. He only worked a couple blocks away from here at 690 Market Street. Now it's a Ritz Carlton residence. That was his office building. And he would say when he needed to relax his mind and have a great insight, he would go to the movies and he would get this revelation because it was the time where he could like stop working and like just let things happen. For me, it's just every morning a little bit of opportunity. And I think that it helps prioritize. Yeah, agents are very important. I think now we can see it's data is very important because if you don't have your data right, you can't get your AI right. Applications and analytics are more important than ever because if you don't have the applications and analytics foundation including all the APIs and the headless versions of these applications, it can't inform the AI. You do need the agentic layer. And the fourth thing is this incredible new interface that we showed at this show that the interface on the enterprise is going to radically transform.
Yeah, you've got Cloud Force, you've got the really it seems deep Anthropic partnership. Dario was here. You were an early investor. Actually would love to know, I'm not sure I've heard you tell the story of that investment, how why you wanted to back Anthropic when you did.
Well, it's been an exciting moment because you're right, we have Cloud Force now, but also we've taken Slack and we've built Slack Force, which is this new UI, and we have Slackbot. Both of those are powered by Claude. And we have Coworker now running in Lightning, also another amazing interface. And by the time we get back here a year from now, I bet we'll have a dozen interfaces all built on this AI force foundation and this headless capability. And you're right, 100%. It's because we have been pushed so close with Anthropic, but it was really an unusual story. You know, I knew Sam Altman very well and also had several moments with him and I was like, hey, I'd really like to be investing now in the company. And he's like unfortunately because of the Microsoft relationship we were not allowed to invest in OpenAI so that pushed us, you know, not because we were so smart, to Anthropic, to Mistral in France, to Sakana in Japan, to Cohere in Canada, like to many other model companies because we felt like whoa we can't go here we're going to have to go everywhere else. And so we ended up with Anthropic which will be a great investment. I mean we'll make not just billions but maybe tens of billions of dollars on it and it'll be fantastic for us.
You've had a lot of good investments. So that's saying something.
We have, you know, bought a lot of companies more than 100 but we've invested from Salesforce more than 700 companies and we've taken so many of those great companies public like Zoom, like Snowflake. There's been just some great we just sold Wiz to Google.
Yeah, you know these have been great investments for the company. What are you looking for now in terms of acquisitions?
Well, I think, you know, number one is we always look at customer. Customer is our word. We own a word and it's all about customer for us. Customer 360, the customer touch point, whether it's sales, service, marketing, commerce, customer analytics, customer data platform, the customer interface. Anything to do with customer, we're very, very interested in. Customer agents. Anything to do with customer, I'm very interested in. You have the word customer in your tagline, you're going to get a call from me. I'm going to be on your website. I'm going to be looking at what's going on. I'm looking at anything with the word customer. That is and I think that's been important having a point of focus. Very important.
I can't believe we haven't said this word yet. SaaS apocalypse. I never really got it. I'm going to be honest when it was at its peak forever because you know I just think people can rush to narratives. But it does seem I mean I saw you guys recently guided ahead of analysts expectations of the revenue you're going to do through 2030 by several billion and you've seen the stock start to come back and I'm curious what it was like leading the company through kind of the pit of SaaS apocalypse and how you navigated that.
Well, it was a strange 6 months. Yeah, there's no question all the SaaS apocalypse nonsense. We just had the best second quarter that we've ever had. That everybody saw the revenue was amazing, the margin, the cash flow, very low attrition, and also very high contract lengths from all of our customers. But I think that people don't realize that we are in a world today of misinformation. And on social media, you just don't know when you're watching a podcast like this or you're reading a tweet like that or you saw a post like this other thing which of these are real and which of them are not.
We are real audience. We are real. But yes, you're right.
And I find that to be a very important moment. And I myself get very confused. So I can understand why everyone else gets confused because I get confused. And that's why I mentioned this already. I'll mention it a second time. Why I just moved to Europe for 2 months just to be with customers in their offices because that's reality. What do you want? What are you doing with your company? Where are you making investments? What is important to you? How am I going to help you? What are the right things to support you? When we're looking at all of those things, that's real. And when we read a post about something that is trying to maybe get somebody to buy a stock or sell a stock because someone is trying to make money or a group of people have gotten together to buy a stock or sell a stock or to promote a private company or a private company investment theme that is not reality. And then nobody is held accountable for these things either. They go by so fast and there's so many of them. So you have to be more careful today than ever. Accountability may be losing money on your stocks that you know you bought at the wrong time or sold at the wrong time. But yes, I hear you. Listen, I just bought $25 billion of Salesforce stock in the public market and I had to thank all of these investors who are here today for selling, you know, to me at $150 and now it's $250.
So, you know, that was I was very confidence through all that. I mean you can see the numbers obviously but I mean I think there's some logic to people saying anyone can make software
Therefore a large software company like Salesforce is challenged, right? I see through the clouds, I see the logic of that, right? And you were saying like it's hard for you to make sense of when it's coming at you fast. Like, were there ever moments where you're like, man, like am I not seeing what everyone else is seeing here?
Well, of course you're going to get that kind of doubt. That's why I think ground yourself in the customer reality, get back to the customer, really pay attention to understand what is their need, what is their unarticulated need. I think this is really an important part of business, more important today than ever.
Do you think there's any SaaS apocalypse risk for any kind of company, or do you think it's all overblown?
Listen, we're in a world in business and technology where technology is always getting lower cost and easier to use, and companies are always succeeding and failing. There's no difference. You can see that across the whole stock market. Look at who the top 20 stocks are today and who were the top 20 stocks 10 years ago. It's a different set of stocks. So to all of a sudden say that you've got it exactly mapped out, you know, it's a very aggressive prediction frame.
So humility, just expect the unexpected, it sounds like.
I think it's a very key time to really ground yourself in reality. I think COVID really illuminated that for me. You know, we went through COVID and I think a lot of the things were kind of going, what's true, what's not true? And you might be reading something in social media and then six months later you went, wait a minute, that actually did not happen, or that is not real, or this is real. And I think that each one of us has to kind of take, you know, more personal time to say, 'Okay, let me just dig in a little bit and know what is really actually true.'
