Why are the execs at Salesforce leaving?
Slack and Tableau founders besides Bret Taylor himself who orchestrated the $27 Slack deal. What's happening inside? https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/05/salesforce-exec-exits-push-stock-price-to-lowest-since-march-2020.html
Marc wants to be king
benioff's BDE is too strong
BDE?
Big Docker Energy
No amount of money can be enough to sing kumbayah to Benioff
Not sure what you have against him, but I think he treats us better than most CEOs would. We get great benefits and WLB.
Benioff is decent as far as CEOs go but he also feeds his employees a ton of Koolaid. Mostly he’s just a really good salesperson. I think there is a lot of internal propaganda and arguably brainwashing at Salesforce about how amazing their culture supposedly is when it’s really not that special. While SFDC is an alright company to work for its still a step below FAANG and I don’t think the benefits are really that amazing when you also factor in the fact that the TC and stock refreshers are on average lower than a lot of other tech companies. Probably the only benefit that’s pretty impressive is the paternity/maternity leave. Otherwise the other benefits are mostly run of the mill and they don’t even have free lunch (except on rare occasions). I used to work there and worked on a couple different teams over the years and I also believed a lot of that Koolaid. Now years later looking back I can say that by and large it’s a pretty run of the mill enterprise software company and there’s nothing that special about its benefits, culture or WLB, unless it’s your first job out of school or you’ve only worked at some stressful/low paying startups or something. There are teams with pretty good WLB and teams with not so good WLB which you will also find at many other companies. I will say, it sure was a really political place to work, with a lot of finger pointing and passive aggressiveness that’s a lot worse than what I’ve found in most other places. Even during scrum daily standup people would be blaming each other and verbally sparring when something didn’t go right.
I'm awaiting some juicy gossip like the time Nikesh left softbank
Is SalesForce cooking the books?
Cause they didn’t get to pee up from Salesforce tower or in other words they weren’t let to do ohana in Salesforce tower
If you’ve worked in the Valley for some time, you’d know the history of Steward Butterfield and Bret Taylor. Frankly, it’s more surprising they stayed at Salesforce than it is they’re leaving. Butterfield created Flickr, a photo sharing site that was really popular for its time. He wanted to share photos and most sites sucked at the time. It was different in that it was user friendly and had a nice UX/UI. After he made his money there, he built a gaming startup but that failed. He wanted to return investor money but realized the work chat tool had promise and that became slack. Bret Taylor was known for Google Maps but then became an entrepreneur and developed FriendFeed when Facebook was still at colleges and social networking was becoming popular. His company got acquired and he eventually became the CTO. But then he left and built a startup which took the feed paradigm and applied it to docs (Quip). They both ended up at Salesforce because of acquisition and became filthy rich. I’m not sure what Benioff did to make them stay but obviously he can be persuasive. Both of these guys are entrepreneurs at their roots and have a track record of building things for people when the current technology really sucked. I bet they consider these periods to be some of their most gratifying experiences. So why would a person like that use their skill for enterprise software? I bet they look at the current landscape of technology and think about what they can build that’s amazing and cool. In one week, for example, ChatGPT has taken over tech Twitter and reached a million users. That fun and exciting tech isn’t happening at enterprise software companies.
Why is enterprise software so broken. We’re trying to make an impact but things take forever.
Not about being broken but about wealthy tech entrepreneurs who don’t need to work for money but work to do big, cool, innovative things that are fun and challenging. What’s the reward for enterprise? I get that there’s a lot of money and profit but again these guys don’t need to worry about money. Apparently Butterfield quit on his 2 year vesting date. Not sure what kept Bret around for so long. Maybe vesting as well.
🤦
I suspect Salesforce may be going through some tough times soon and these guys don’t want to be around when shit hits the fan so they can keep their hands/image clean. They’ve hired a lot while their growth may be running out of steam soon if the economy continues to slowdown and businesses keep cutting back on spending. Also the fact that their equity grants have fallen in value by 50% in the past year doesn’t help either.
Just look at our stock price. Equity is a huge part of exec compensation.
I mean, they are already very rich and set for life. Do they really care about the stock price drop ?
They definitely still want more. If they were really content with their wealth then they would probably have retired a long time ago from these stressful positions.