Greg Poirier

“One third of the stock was set aside for employees. Now, not every one of those shares was realized because, of course, there was a pool held for employees that had not yet been hired. So it was established that a third of the shares were available to employees for the stock option program. But what happens when you get acquired and there's a lot of math that goes into that, not all of the stock are consumed, so then the money is divvied out in a different way. But essentially, we'd always reserved about a third of the value of what the company would be sold for for the end employees.”

“But there's like a not insignificant portion of employees who were very, very surprised to find out this happened, which I think is super interesting in the construct of like, okay, well, maybe they just didn't believe that I could pull it off. I'm not really sure. But there was a portion of employees who were like, Oh, my God, we got acquired? Like, Did we expect this? And I was like, Yeah, you know, we did. And it's good news.”

“The biggest thing that is changing and is gonna change in the next year in the Salesforce ecosystem is the forced move. Salesforce is being forced by the market and Salesforce is therefore gonna force our customers. But the forced move from seat based licensing to consumption based pricing, that is definitely where the organization needs to go, but it is a very painful experience for the organization. It's a painful experience for the market and it's definitely going to be a painful experience for the customers.”

“When I look at it after the private equity, takeover of Marketo and then the subsequent Adobe acquisition, the roadmap on that product compared to the other competing platforms, it just stopped evolving at the same pace. And Adobe is a tough competitor on some of the CDP stuff for Salesforce, but Marketo is a marketing automation platform. We just do not see it raised in the market.”

“So we came up with this concept, that we called Maya, which essentially is, okay, we're gonna create a personality document for how all AI is gonna behave at our organization when it's interacting with a person. We wanna give it a singular personality, and we want to give it a backstory and we even gave it headshots, and some video and it has a voice. And that document is nine pages long and it is basically the founding document of someone named Maya and everything about Maya. So Maya has been with our organization for ten years. She is a specialist in B2B tech services. She is a Salesforce architect.”

“So we do a lot of work having, weekly, AI, all hands meetings where every employee can see other employees demo what they're doing with AI. There's a Slack channel called Everyday AI, and any employee who's got a use case for how they did something with AI can put it in there. In the weekly all hands meetings, the leadership team is discussing every week how we're using AI. Every manager asks every employee in their weekly every week how they used AI this week.”

“If you look at the first couple of years of the company, 90% of our revenue was US, and most of that was within like a very small orbit in Downtown San Francisco. And over time, that has really, really expanded. Originally, initially it was a lot of Bellevue, so outside Seattle. Then we saw that expand to Denver. Then we saw that expand further. Now we have like a surprising number of B2B SaaS clients who are based in the Midwest.”

“Biking is easily I I can't think of any other sport that provides as much of a data exhaust stream as by going between your power meter and your head unit and your GPS, your heart rate and everything else. It is like the perfect sport for data nerds.”