Diving into data has never been more critical for businesses in order to make fast, accurate decisions about customer behaviors and needs and drive holistic business knowledge.
Wearable technology is not just for consumers. It creates a tremendous opportunity for businesses, too.
I think the legacy is really the company that we built. That's what makes me happy. I'm a very simple person, so that's all I really need.
I grew up loving computers and math, actually. I also loved English literature and French, but I became obsessed with computers when the Apple II was coming out.
I remember my school had some of the first Apple IIs in North Carolina. I remember, when I first started using them, we were using a cassette tape to store programs because we didn't have floppy disk drives.
My favourite moments at Dreamforce are when people come up and thank me randomly. It's a selfish time for me, as I get lots of positive feedback.
Our output and continued success is all about our culture. Ours has to be highly collaborative, and we have company-wide events and processes to make sure everyone stays aligned.
Businesses can't afford to react to what their customers want; they need to anticipate their needs.
One of our first jobs was at Saba Software. We were helping them build their products for the cloud. We wanted to build our own product and move away from consulting. We were looking for a change. The CEO of Saba introduced me to Marc Benioff.
When you come to San Francisco, we want you to know where Salesforce is.
After the dotcom boom blew up, it increased the focus on questions like, 'Why should I trust you to help run my business? How do I know you're not going to go away like every other company?' That was hard. We had to keep proving ourselves.
Phones are a big deal, but tablets are an even bigger deal. So we're doing a lot of design work and experimentation around the tablet experience.
I still believe heavily that we have to be careful about having this ego and hubris as a successful corporation, that we should do it all. Because then I think we start to fail our customers and we're too focused on taking over the world.
I was lucky enough to go see Steve Jobs with Marc Benioff. We were talking about the iPad, and one of the things Jobs said - and it was a little self-serving - was go and build your iPad app, and that is going to change the way you think about your online app, and you will go back, and you will redo your online app. I believe that.
Many people have said we just need to add more products. Look at Oracle, look at SAP. Add ERP and inventory or compensation. Add all this stuff. What we realized is we're the customer company. We're the front office solution, and our customers would be really upset if we just added a whole bunch of stuff and lost focus.
Looking at the trends that we have gone through as a company, where we started the company, it's all about cloud computing, and we're still cloud computing. And then we went through this space on social. When Facebook came out, that was amazing.
What I'll take credit for is finding visionary people in the company, or bringing them in, and then empowering them to help me.
I took a detour to France in my senior year in high school. So that's part of what ended up sending me, actually, to Middlebury because I went to school with people who were more from the Northeast.
I grew up in North Carolina. My father was a salesperson; he sold textiles.
Social computing is doing what agile methodology is doing to our process - it's breaking down our visibility.
