← The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Salesforce Founder Marc Benioff on The Future of LLMs | The Future of Agents | The Future of Labour | Management Lessons from Steve Jobs
00:43:44
Marc Benioff is one of the iconic founders and visionaries of our time. From the founding of Salesforce 25 years ago, Marc has in many ways created an entire industry. He has scaled the company to a market cap of $346BN, $38BN in revenue and over...
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- [00:00]
Marc Benioff
We're doing our business plan for next year for 2025 right now we're not adding any more software engineers next year. We have increased the productivity this year with AgentForce and with other AI technology that we're using for our engineering teams by more than 30% to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. And then we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer. But these current large language models, there's a lot of folks building those today and they're crapidly becoming a commodity. Everything needs to be about agent force at Salesforce. This is the only thing that really matters today.
- [00:35]
Harry Stebbings
This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and the story of me and Marc Benioff is pretty special. He is one of my all time heroes and I emailed him 53 times before he agreed to do a show with me. He did it. It crushed all records and it was his first ever podcast. Today he is back on the show to discuss the future of agents, the future of LLMs Lab and the United States. This was such an honor for me to do. To have Mark back was incredible. But before we dive in today, we're excited to ignite your curiosity with a journey into the world of transformative ideas. If you're driven by the pursuit of knowledge and personal growth, you'll love exploring the vast collection of insightful book summaries on the Blinkist app. So with Blinkist, you can access expertly crafted summaries that distill the essence of thousands of influential books, allowing you to read or listen to each in just 15 minutes. I know they beat 20 TVC being recommended by the New York Times and Apple CEO Tim Cook. It's no surprise that 82% of Blinkist users see themselves as self optimizers and 65% say it's essential for business and career growth. And speaking of business, Blinkist is also a trusted LD partner for industry leaders like Amazon, Hyundai and KPMG UK, empowering over 32 million users since 2012 as a 20VC listener. Even better, you get 25% exclusive discount on Blinkist. That's bli n k I s t. Just visit blinkist.com 20VC to claim your discount and transform the way you learn. And while you're optimizing your learning, let's also optimize your finances with Brex, the financial stack founders can bank on. Brex knows that nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash, so they built a banking experience that takes every dollar. Further, it's such a difference from traditional banking options that leave your cash sitting idle while chipping away at it with fees to help you protect your cash and ext extend your Runway. Brex Combine the best things about checking treasury and FDIC insurance in one powerhouse account. You can send and receive money worldwide at lightning speed. You can get 20x the standard FDIC protection through program banks and you can earn industry leading yield from your first dollar while still being able to access your funds anytime. Brex is a top choice for startups. In fact, hey, it's used by one in every three startups in the US. Just check them out now. Brex.com and talking about Building Trust Secure Frame provides incredible levels of trust to your customers through automation. Secure Frame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation. Thousands of fast growing businesses including NASDAQ, AngelList, Doodle and Coda Trust Secure Frame to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards such as SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPA, GDPR and more. Backed by top tier investors and corporations such as Google and Kleiner Perkins, the company is among Forbes list of top 100 startup employers for 2023 and Business Insider's list of the 34 most promising AI startups for 2023. Learn more today@secureframe.com it is a must.
- [04:00]
Marc Benioff
You have now arrived at your destination.
- [04:03]
Harry Stebbings
Mark, I am so excited for this, our second time. Thank you so much for joining me once again.
- [04:08]
Marc Benioff
Great to be with you Harry, and glad that we have a slightly better video set up this time.
- [04:12]
Harry Stebbings
We've got a fantastic video set up. You look younger and younger Mark, which is terrible.
- [04:16]
Marc Benioff
I have my two dogs here underneath the desk so hopefully I'm petting one and I hope that they don't start barking. But just giving you the heads up on that.
- [04:24]
Harry Stebbings
Well, fingers crossed. Listen, I've interviewed many VCs so it makes more sense than what they say. So don't worry about it. My question to you to start, actually.
- [04:32]
Marc Benioff
You'Re saying that VSTs are like barking.
- [04:33]
Harry Stebbings
Dogs which, you know what, at least barking dog stop. But yes, my question to you is I hear that you've actually got quite an interest in podcasts now and I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you think about.
- [04:45]
Marc Benioff
You were my first, Harry, and you'll always be my first. And you know, you never forget your first Harry.
- [04:52]
Harry Stebbings
Mark, it's not something I ever thought I'd be really proud to, but it fills Me. How do you think about the changing importance of a CEO brand when you think about that today? How do you think about that when you listen to podcasts?
- [05:07]
Marc Benioff
Well, I listen to more podcasts than ever myself, which is what all of a sudden, it occurred to me I should be doing more podcasts. I. You know, we'll just tell you this, which is that I listen to more podcasts myself. I enjoy podcasts. I realize I need to learn how to be on a podcast. Like, I don't know the snappy things to say. I don't know how to, like, get people's attention right away that I haven't been on a podcast. So I may see some crazy things or terrible things. So get ready for something crazy to happen, because I don't know how to do the podcast very well. A lot of my friends are really good. They're scripted. They're reading. They say these really punchy things. I'm like, wow, they really, like, priming themselves. I'm like, I've got my dogs, two golden retrievers under my desk. I'm like, crazy things are happening. And no, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to pan out a podcast.
- [05:57]
Harry Stebbings
So I've done 3,000, and I can give just two bits of advice. The best are art and science. The art is telling a story, making someone feel. Feel like they're a part of the journey. Bring them into those early moments of Salesforce magic. And then the science is. And I learned three lessons from that. You need the combination of resonance with the consumer and learning, and the two together makes for magic.
- [06:21]
Marc Benioff
Fantastic. Well, that must have been an example right there of the Made for Magic podcast.
- [06:25]
Harry Stebbings
You said that you, you know, you love other podcasts and shows. I saw your tweet last night where you said, no mud, no lotus with regards to Janssen and his talk with Patrick Collison where he said, nothing great is achieved without pain and suffering. And so I wish upon you plenty of pain and suffering. Wonderfully charming of Jensen. Why did you tweet it and how did you feel when you heard that?
- [06:48]
Marc Benioff
Well, that was an inspiring talk from Jensen, which is why I tweeted it. And no mud, no lotus. Well, that came from one of my teachers and good friends, Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh was an amazing influence on my life. He is someone who really brought mindfulness to the west. And I learned, really how to meditate from him and what meditation was all about. I learned that I could cultivate my beginner's mind, or what the Japanese called shoshin. You know, in the beginner's mind, you have every possibility, but in the expert's mind, you have few or none. When I think about Thich Nhat Hanh, he would always say to me, no mud, no lotus. And what he meant by that was, yeah, you have to go through difficulty and you have to go through suffering to get to beauty and love. And this is an incredibly important part of my life and how I think about it, and that's why I meditate every day. We talked about that the first time we had a podcast. I spend every day in mindfulness and meditation and try to come back to my breath and clear my mind because there's so many difficult things happening all the time. Yesterday I spent the whole time doing my old. The whole day doing my earnings. So by the time it turns out, you know, for this morning, I need to get a few minutes to clear. Clear my head.
- [08:00]
Harry Stebbings
When we think about pain and suffering that has led to the greatest lessons, what pain and suffering that you've been through, maybe with the salesforce journey, has led to the greatest outcomes in terms of learning.
- [08:12]
Marc Benioff
I think yesterday is a great example. We had a great quarter, Harry. We delivered clear guidance to 38 billion in revenue this year, 12.9 billion in cash flow, 32.9% margins. This was our guidance. And the numbers were so far ahead, the market advanced our stock today, I think about 9%. It was adding another large tech company onto our company. So we ended up in the mid $300 billion in market cap. You know, when I think back, I think our stock was about one third this value two years ago. One third. What does that say to me? Well, two years ago, we had a really difficult moment. We were like flying an airplane as a good example, and we found out the two pilots were gone in the front and the one guy with a parachute jumped out the door. And we had these unusual resignations that happened that kind of blindsided us. We had a lot of unusual things. The financials were not what we wanted, and we had to start making changes. We had to make financial changes and technology changes. We had to rewrite our product. We had to create new products. You probably know, we've introduced this incredible new platform, AgentForce, that we can talk about. We also rebuilt our financial model and addressed financial issues in the company that we had not been willing to address up to that point. And then what that resulted in was two years of really hard, difficult work. But it resulted in yesterday, where after two years, the stock has tripled. We have delivered a financial transformation. We have delivered probably the most exciting new AI product in the history of enterprise software and a level of customer success we just have never seen before. So this is a great example of no Mud, no Lotus, because if we hadn't gone through that two years ago, we probably would not be where we are today.
- [09:58]
Harry Stebbings
So this is our second conversation and so I feel like I can be more direct. Why? When you look at the guidance that you have, when you look at the results, when you look at the amazing product, why is it that people say, I don't know how Salesforce will fare in a next generation of AI? Do agents really help Salesforce?
- [10:17]
Marc Benioff
Yeah, we're. We're in a really competitive industry, number one. And number two, when you think about Salesforce and AI, we are the number one enterprise AI supplier in the world today. We'll do more than 2 trillion enterprise transactions this week. No one is delivering AI at this scale to more companies globally than we are. And now we've delivered the first scaled secure, trusted enterprise agentic platform, which we call AgentForce. This is the way that so many companies right now are deploying agents. One great example is, you know, your favorite airport there, Heathrow, is one of our lodge customers, one of the busiest airports in the world, where customers really have a lot of complex issues happening all the time, where they've evolved, you know, into really starting to focus more on customer success at Heathrow because people have had so many challenging situations. And we're building an agentic layer completely around the airport with Heathrow so that from the beginning of your journey to your end, you're going to be partnered with an agent to make sure you have an absolutely great experience at Heathrow. I think this is going to be pretty awesome.
- [11:23]
Harry Stebbings
Do you have to own that agentic layer? Because if you don't own that agentic layer, don't agents just pull and summarize data and Salesforce becomes a database? And is that a bad thing?
- [11:33]
Marc Benioff
Well, let's talk about what we're doing and what we can do that others cannot do because of the nature of our platform, which we've now delivered this platform to 135,000 customers. The next version of Agent Force is coming. We're going to announce that December 17th. I hope you could come to San Francisco and we can talk about it then. We have an incredible new Agent Force 2.0 about to ship on Agent Force 1.0. The first thing to know is that we automate every customer touchpoint this is one thing that's really unique about Salesforce. So for Heathrow, of course we have our sales cloud and they're selling, you know, B2B. And to all these companies, number two is customer service and support. Our service cloud, our marketing cloud, we're the most scaled enterprise email system in the world. Our commerce cloud, our analytics tableau, Slack Mulesoft for integration. All of these key components together is the Salesforce platform. This we've been doing for the last 25 years. And for the last two years or so we've been focused on building our data cloud, which is the amalgamation of all of our customers data so they can take all of their Salesforce implementations and all of their data and bring it all together. And then the third layer is the agentic layer on top of that. And those three things are not three products. It's actually one piece of code, one integrated piece of code. And why that's important, Harry, is this. For AI to work really well and to get the level of accuracy and low hallucinat, low, low hallucinogenics that you need in enterprise AI today, you have to have as much access to the data and metadata and workflow as possible. And we have over 230 petabytes of that data in our platform. That makes it very unique. And it's not just the data, it has to be the metadata as well. That's how you get the real accuracy.
- [13:17]
Harry Stebbings
What is the biggest challenge that Salesforce will have to overcome to achieve the dominance in the next generation of AI? As you outlined that this idea that.
- [13:26]
Marc Benioff
We are going to build not just a sales force and a service force or a marketing force, but an agent force for our customers. We shipped it October 25th in the quarter which closed at the end of October. We already sold 200 deals. We'll do thousands of agent force deals this quarter. And what we have to do is really show each and every customer what the magic of agent force is and how it can provide tremendous value to them. And as an example is Salesforce this week? I think I already told you, we turned on help. I stripped out my previous support infrastructure. I've plugged in a new support infrastructure. It's all 100% agent based. And we're going to be able to rebalance our headcount based on that. We have a digital workforce and a human workforce now. We have digital labor in our company and human labor now. I need to bring that to every single company. And to explain that is extremely difficult because this is a new horizon for business. This is the most exciting thing that's ever happened for business because we are going to start to bring in digital labor into business for the first time.
- [14:33]
Harry Stebbings
You said there about kind of digital labor and human labor. Will Salesforce have more employees or less employees in five years time?
- [14:41]
Marc Benioff
I think we'll probably be larger. It's a good question. Number one, we're doing our business plan for next year for 2025 right now. We're not adding any more software engineers next year. We have increased the productivity this year with AgentForce and with other AI technology that we're using for our engineering teams by more than 30% to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. And then we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer. We'll have more salespeople next year because we need to really explain to everybody exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So we will add another probably 1 to 2000 salespeople in the short term.
- [15:19]
Harry Stebbings
Mark, you're the master of sales. When you think about this agentic layer and when what you're serving digital and human workers, how does pricing in SaaS change when you are pricing digital labor? Do we sell by seat or does.
- [15:33]
Marc Benioff
That change agent force is consumption pricing. So you're being charging per conversation. The starting price is about 2 bucks per conversation and then it's negotiated based on volumes for customers. It's basically per user for humans and it's per conversation for agents.
- [15:49]
Harry Stebbings
I was surprised when I heard you say though that we're near the upper limits in LLM use. When I heard that, I was like, huh, what made him say that?
- [15:56]
Marc Benioff
So I will just say that we look at what's happening with LLMs. That is very exciting. We've all had these great experiences with LLMs and what's happened, but we've had a lot of great experience with artificial intelligence in the last 60 years. And in the last 60 years the history of AI is a new model or a new technology will come along and a bunch of folks will kind of get to the point where it becomes a commodity. And then we kind of hold until we wait to the next one and then it goes on. And we've moved from machine intelligent machine intelligence and machine learning to deep learning to the advanced aspects of AI to where we are today. And we're kind of waiting for even some of the new models to emerge after this. Generative AI models, but these current large language models, there's a lot of folks building those today and they're rapidly becoming a commodity. And they're rapidly maturing, they're cresting. That's not unusual in AI. AI kind of you get a model and then you start to hit the upper limits of what's possible in that model. We have some of the best people in the industry working on these LLMs. But you can see that the growth rate and the maturation rate, plate maturation rate of those models has slowed because we're starting to commoditize them.
- [17:09]
Harry Stebbings
Can you take me inside the internal discussion that you had at Salesforce of whether you should really invest in building out your own LLMs versus leveraging others in the commoditization of LLMs that we're seeing now?
- [17:20]
Marc Benioff
Well, two out of the top five models in the industry are Salesforce models. We also use a lot of other models. We change that on a regular basis. And we've invested in a lot of model companies, including Anthropic and Mistral and Cohere and many, many of them. Even personally, I've invested in many amazing models. I've invested in an incredible new next gen model company from Fei, Fei Li, who ran AI at Stanford. Her husband runs research for me at Salesforce. He's amazing. We have really a selection of capabilities today. So really it's really fit for purpose what the model is that you want for the tasks that you're trying to accomplish.
- [17:59]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think that will continue to be the same future that we look at, which is a world of many models and you simply go to different models for the different use cases that you need?
- [18:08]
Marc Benioff
Yes. And that is a great place to be.
- [18:11]
Harry Stebbings
I'm going to ask a really unfair question, but as I said, I can just phrase everything as a second.
- [18:15]
Marc Benioff
There's no unfair questions.
- [18:17]
Harry Stebbings
Okay. You've got open AI, you've got OpenAI at 160, anthropic@40 or x.com@50. Which one would you rather invest in?
- [18:24]
Marc Benioff
I don't know if I'd really want to invest in any of them right now. In those cases, we're seeing all of them to being about the same kind of product. A lot of them are really becoming the same technology. So this is the moment where each of them needs to kind of pick their poison and go out and become their own company. I don't think being just a generic company is the right move anymore. You need to decide what vertical you're going to be in or what your best specialty is. And I think we're starting to see that. Like for example, we saw perplexity go off and try to be something truly unique in financial services. This idea that different models are going to really operate for different industries differently is where the models are going to start to really shine.
- [19:06]
Harry Stebbings
What is an unknown question mark that you have about the future of AI and Salesforce in the next 12 to 36 months that you are spending a lot of time thinking about?
- [19:16]
Marc Benioff
The number one thing that I think about every single day is how to explain to customers the huge value that they can get from AgentForce. That's why I felt it was so important that I. I'm eating my own dog food. Sorry to my dogs here. You know that I've moved my whole support infrastructure to the agentic platform. I will move my whole sales platform to the agentic platform as well. I'll move my whole company onto AgentForce for no other reason, to show my customers what is possible. We are in such a new world right now in terms of what is possible today versus even just six months ago that customers do not understand this and what it can mean for them. That is really all I am focused on. My number one focus is Agent Force and my second one is how do I find as much fuel in my company to drive the first? That is key. And we mentioned also expanding distribution. These three things are on my mind continuously.
- [20:14]
Harry Stebbings
How do you think it's most likely that you will find the fuel?
- [20:17]
Marc Benioff
The way I'm going to find the fuel is by using Agent Force. I mean, Agent Force is going to let me rebalance my workforce. I have 9,000 people in support today. I will not have as many people in support in the future because I'll be able to move more of those folks into sales or into other functions in the company where I'm looking to hire people. And that is a big opportunity for me as a CEO.
- [20:38]
Harry Stebbings
Respectfully, Mark, do you move them or do you just do the logical thing, which is remove the cost and actually have higher margins, which is a perfectly logical thing for any business leader to do. How do you think about that?
- [20:50]
Marc Benioff
A lot of them will get moved. We have a lot of opportunity at Salesforce and we have a lot of growth happening. So for the vast majority of those, we're going to be able to move them and find new opportunities for them and we'll be very excited about that. Even in the layoffs that we had, which were very dramatic in the company two years ago, we have hired a lot of those employees back into the company.
- [21:09]
Harry Stebbings
How do you reflect on those layoffs?
- [21:11]
Marc Benioff
Well, I think that when you think about kind of no mud, no lotus. We went through this two years ago. It was a moment where I don't want to do layoffs. I hated it. Everybody then looks at you as you're doing this terrible thing. Nobody likes the word. It's a horrible thing. But the company had to be restructured. I had no choice. I was up against the wall. I had a clear vision of what the future was. But the current reality did not match the potential for the company for where it could be, as evidenced by today's financials and what's possible today. So layoff is an important tool for CEOs to be able to use, to be able to prepare for a company for the future. And nobody wants to hit the button. Nobody wants to take the action. No employee wants to hear the words. It sends chills down everybody's spine, including my own. But sometimes it's very important for us to do that. I mean, you can see that organizations that need to get rebuilt, this is a. This is a good tool for them to use. And CEOs should not be afraid. And I think that that example that Salesforce went through for the last 24 months is a good one.
- [22:15]
Harry Stebbings
We mentioned at the beginning the art telling the story and the science, the learnings that come from it. I do want to discuss two amazing decisions and two tough decisions, or bluntly, mistakes. If I were to ask you, what are the two most strategic decisions you made with Salesforce that worked out and what did you learn from them? What would be the first that come to mind?
- [22:34]
Marc Benioff
Well, I think something I just did is very important. I had a great relationship with Steve Jobs. I worked for him in 1984 in the Macintosh division when I was writing assembly language code. And later when I started Salesforce, he was very generous and would say, hey, come down and see me. And we would have talks about different moments or challenges that I was going through. And one time I got a call and said, hey, just come down. I want to show you something. And I went down. And he was working on the iPad. And he's like, here's two iPads. And I'm like, wow, I love both these sizes. He goes, no, we're only going to do one size. And then I'm like, well, this is really awesome that you can work on the iPhone and the iPad and you got your Mac and you have all these products you're working on. Your day is probably really full. No, Mark, that's not how I do things at Apple. What do you do, Steve? I only do one thing at one Time I have the A team at Apple. We only focus on one thing. So I'm just going to focus on the iPad. And that was a very impactful meeting for me because up to that point, I think I was doing too many different things. And so when I just rolled out AgentForce, you'll notice that we're not going to talk a lot about all of Salesforce's products, which are amazing. You know, on the podcast, I'm going to keep coming back to AgentForce because that's all I'm focused on right now. That's his advice to me. Focus on that. Put your best people on that. Make that happen.
- [23:56]
Harry Stebbings
Is that difficult as a leader to not make other divisions feel less important? If you're just pumping one, absolutely.
- [24:04]
Marc Benioff
And you have to find ways to be able to constantly bring it back around to everybody. Even like we reviewed our marketing cloud and our commerce cloud yesterday, both amazing products that we have. We just went through Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We delivered more emails and more transactions and more GMV than I've ever seen in my career to our customers. We did it with 24.7perfect accuracy. But a lot of the conversations that I have with those two organizations is, what is your Agent first future? What is your agentic layer? How are you going to make your products even better through the power of AI and agents? Now when we look at and we have, you know, we have our examples and we're showing customers today the future of an agent First Marketing cloud or an Agent first commerce cloud, how will that transform you? How is that going to transform your customers? Everything needs to be about agent force at Salesforce. This is the only thing that really matters today. All of our 75,000 employees, our tens of thousands of salespeople, and our 135,000 customers, we need to really boot them into the present moment of what is possible with this incredible breakthrough.
- [25:10]
Harry Stebbings
I love that story of Steve and the lessons there. On the flip side of like the worst decision or the worst mistake, when I asked that, what's the time that comes to mind and what did you learn from that?
- [25:20]
Marc Benioff
Well, I think that what I've really learned over 25 years of leading Salesforce is I think that when you look at AgentForce, when you look at everything that we've just gone through, I think that for CEOs, the most important thing, and this is what I try to remind myself constantly, is you've got to cultivate your beginner's mind. You have to be ready in today's day where everything is Changing by the minute. Whether it's technology or political or economic, you've got to be ready to cultivate your beginner's mind where you have every possibility. And in the expert's mind, there is few. The Japanese word is shoshin. Shoshin, Beginner's mind. That idea. How do I get back to clearing my mind so I can really see what the possibility is? Let me tell you a story. I was getting ready for Dreamforce and, you know, we just had 50,000 people to San Francisco in September. What I do for two months beforehand is I go on the road and I do all these focus groups and meeting with all these customers. The big demo that we were doing was not for Louis Vuitton, it was for Gucci. And we run a lot of work for caring. And we even met with Francois, the CEO of Carrying, and it was an awesome meeting. And the whole demo for Dreamforce, everything was Gucci. And we were so excited about Gucci and what we had done with our new point of sale system, Harry, which is amazing. All the changes we've made at the customer touchpoint layer, the data cloud was incredible. And things were going along. I was very satiated with how the Gucci demo looked. I felt it was very visionary. Gucci loved it. They even came to our headquarters and saw it. And then about a week or two before Dreamforce, I got the first customer feedback on AgentForce. We had delivered it to the first five customers, which included companies like Wiley, the Bookseller, OpenTable, the Restaurant Company, ADP, Disney, et cetera. And when I was reading through the feedback from the customers, I'm like, wow, this product is a lot farther along than I realized. And I don't think any more anything is more significant for Salesforce than agentforce. And I hit my Steve Jobs button and I pivoted the entire company over a period of two weeks, brought everybody in and said everything. And all the messaging for Dreamforce is now officially going to change. We are going 100% on AgentForce. And the question at that point was, what is agentforce? And a lot of employees had not been brought into what we had been building. We had an incredible effort underway to deliver this agentic layer. It just happened a lot faster than we expected. And then we delivered at production October 24th. So we pivoted the company. We launched it at Dreamforce. We delivered it on October 24th. And in that first last five days of the quarter, we closed about 200 agent force deals. We'll do thousands more this quarter. That was the moment where I was like, yes, you have to cultivate your beginner's mind. And then you have to do one more thing. You have to trust yourself. You have to trust yourself to know. You have to hit that Steve Jobs button and go and say, no, this is. Now I'm only going to focus on the one thing, and this is my one thing. So all of a sudden, Astro, you can see him behind me here, went from being regular old Astro to agent Astro. Here we are today talking about this.
- [28:33]
Harry Stebbings
Mark, are you knackered at the end of Dreamforce or Agent Force? It is an intense period for you. You are on stage, we see you crush it. Are you knackered at the end?
- [28:44]
Marc Benioff
Well, I would just say it's exhaustive. I mean, yesterday was also exhaustive. Earnings is exhaustive. Dreamforce is exhaustive. When you're the CEO of a large company, you better be ready to have a lot of exhaustive moments. You got to leave it all in the field. You know, you've got to be ready to do everything to make it totally successful. I'm constantly asking myself this question, am I doing everything? Do I have all the ideas, concepts, notions. People do have everything necessary to make AgentForce totally successful right now. I ask myself that question every single day. Is everything happening correctly? Am I doing everything? It has to be exhaustive. And there are moments like Dreamforce or earnings or product launches or, you know, international travel is one, you know, where you do. You have to leave it all in the field. And that's an important part of success. After 25 years of being the CEO of Salesforce, from growing it, from an idea like you see with a lot of the venture capitalists and that you do, or entrepreneurship that you do. You know, I was right there at ground zero. To growing it as the singular CEO all the way to today at 38 billion in revenue. Whoa. You have to be ready to leave it on the field each and every moment or you're not going to get to where you're where you want to go. So you got to put it behind you and really go.
- [30:05]
Harry Stebbings
Jensen Huang said if he'd known how hard it was going to be, he wouldn't have done it. You look at 38 billion in revenue, Mark, probably 38 billion. If I asked you the same, would you have done it?
- [30:17]
Marc Benioff
You know, it's funny, my neighbor here is David Kirk, who led the creation of the GPU for Jensen, probably the most important piece of technology that he has at Nvidia as the chief scientist, he led the group and the team and at the end of the effort, he had built the best chip that they had ever seen. It became the heart of the game machines that became the heart of AI. And then he retired and said, I did it. And he said, but I'm not going to keep doing it. And instead he became the chairman of his kids school and he invested in his community and incredible person. I have a huge amount of respect for David Kirk and Jensen, who I also have a huge amount of respect for, then had that technology. It was going into these game machines and incredible things were happening. A few years later he was at Stanford and he saw this incredible innovation with Deep Learning. And he was the only large company CEO in tech who said, you know what, Deep learning is such a big idea and this technology is pretty darn close the GPU to what you need. I'm going to pivot my whole company and I'm just going to be about Deep Learning. And he did that in 2013, right when it came. He saw the Vision models, he saw all these incredible models. I saw all those models too. And while I added it into Salesforce, I didn't pivot Salesforce entirely around Deep Learning. He was the only one in our industry to do that. He deserves a lot of credit for having the vision and the insight, but also hitting his own Steve Jobs button to pivot his company because he did a hard pivot at that point. And he said, no, I'm just about AI. That's why a couple years later, when OpenAI started, he was ready to bring them those boards and say, hey, build OpenAI using this, not the CPU, the GPU. And that again was about David Kirk, but also a bow to his focus on artificial intelligence. This idea that you have to be ready to pivot, to put it all behind you, to go, to leave it all in the field. But ultimately it only works if you have a beginner's mind. In all of those cases, those pivots are only working if you're ready to really go. And you might not be, you might not know that you're at that moment if you're not in that flow. And I think sometimes CEOs are so in that cycle, they're going like this, they're going like this, that they don't have the opportunity to slow, stop, break, split, and just get back into the present moment right now, breathe, realize what it is that you need to achieve right now to achieve your greatest, most amazing success. What are those values that will guide you? This is something we all need to kind of take A thought about final.
- [32:49]
Harry Stebbings
One before we do a quick fire. You tweeted that you loved the Marc Andreessen conversation with Joe Rogan.
- [32:54]
Marc Benioff
I really did, yeah.
- [32:55]
Harry Stebbings
And there was one element in there that I was really intrigued to hear your thoughts on, where he said, tech companies didn't just cave to censorship, they were coerced, especially big tech. Did you agree with that statement?
- [33:07]
Marc Benioff
Well, I was shocked by a lot of the revelations that have come that the government has been so involved in some of these social media companies and their operations. And he revealed a lot of that in that podcast. I think a lot of people should listen to it. And a lot of things I had never heard before, whether it was involving banking or social media. I thought that's one reason I should actually retweeted. I was surprised how viral that went.
- [33:31]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think that's true, though, in terms of big tech being censored and coerced in the way that it was?
- [33:36]
Marc Benioff
I haven't seen it in my own company. That's why I've been so surprised that. But I don't run a social media company, so I don't really know what the government does with these big consumer platforms. We almost bought one. You probably remember we almost bought Twitter. I guess there's been a lot of moments now where I thought, do you.
- [33:51]
Harry Stebbings
Think about what would have happened if you had a bought Twitter?
- [33:54]
Marc Benioff
I think about that a lot. And I guess in a lot of ways, I'm happy I didn't, because I don't think I would have enjoyed that part of it at all.
- [34:02]
Harry Stebbings
Why?
- [34:03]
Marc Benioff
Because that's not kind of exactly the reason that I was buying it. I was buying it because I thought Twitter. And this is kind of a funny thing, because I thought Twitter is like one of the greatest vehicles for distributing not just content, but also applications. As you know, Harry, we've talked about this several times. I worked at Apple in 1984, and when we had the Macintosh, we had this great APTV system called HyperCard. And HyperCard is an incredible technology model. When I look at those little frames or those little photos inside those Twitter feeds, they look like this. Sometimes they're filled with a video, sometimes they're filled with a photo. But for me, what I saw in my mind's eye was an app. And I thought it was a card, actually. And a card and an app were the same thing in HyperCard. And I thought we could build a kind of a WYSIWYG tool to build apps and run them in those card frames and that, you could have photos, you could have videos, but you could have apps. And I was going to build an app store and an app tool and I was going to deliver apps in frame and that's why I liked it. You know, I'm just an app dev person at heart and I've always loved application development deployment from my very earliest days in software. You know, when I was 15 years old, my first product that I wrote was how to Juggle. Then I wrote 10 software adventure games. But in my heart I just love this idea that, you know, you could build these things with tools. And when I went to work with Oracle in 86, that's what I really enjoyed doing was building application development deployment tools. And that's what Salesforce has become for so many customers. The ability to easily build these amazing next generation applications. Today we call them agents.
- [35:40]
Harry Stebbings
Another Tweet why are you so excited for Elon and Doge? What would you like to see happen?
- [35:45]
Marc Benioff
Well, I think that we kind of. It's funny we hit this point, I think quite a few times in the podcast. How important is to have fiscal responsibility in your company? I think it's important to have fiscal responsibility in your country also. And I think we've gotten away from that in the United States and I hope it gets back. I hope we get back to a balanced budget. I think that should be a bipartisan issue. I think that's probably true in every country that we need to have more fiscal responsibility and that that would be a great thing for us.
- [36:10]
Harry Stebbings
We're going to do a quick fire and then I'm going to let you go. So I'm going to ask you five quick questions. What is your favorite consumer brand today and why?
- [36:17]
Marc Benioff
Oh, you mentioned Louis Vuitton. I love Louis Vuitton. I just got a windbreaker yesterday. They make my size size 60. I love Louis Vuitton. I love the experience online. I love in the store. I love the luxurious. I also love their Salesforce customers. So I'm constantly testing to make sure my product is working correctly. But I do love Louis Vuitton.
- [36:36]
Harry Stebbings
What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
- [36:39]
Marc Benioff
What I've changed my mind on in the last 12 months is how impactful AI can be for customers. When I saw the breakthrough with AgentForce, I didn't expect it to happen as quickly as it was. I didn't realize the power was at our fingertips. And I did the hard pivot at Dreamforce to make agentforce something real for all of our customers. And now it has been delivered into all 135,000 customers. And it's ready for them to turn it on now.
- [37:06]
Harry Stebbings
What do agents not do today that they need to do in the future?
- [37:09]
Marc Benioff
Agents need today to be multimodal. They aren't. They're mostly text based because that's kind of the generation of capability. And they need to rapidly become a multimodal experience. And that will be extremely important.
- [37:22]
Harry Stebbings
Penultimate one, what concerns you most in the world today? Mark?
- [37:26]
Marc Benioff
I think one thing that does, and coming back to the AI theme is that there's a lot of good parts of AI and there's a lot of parts that could become dark. And I think we all need to get educated about AI. All the good parts and all the bad parts. We've seen this, we've seen the movies. You know, we saw Minority Report and we saw War Games and her and Terminator. But we need to realize AI is not there yet, but it's going to get there, and that we need to be spending more time looking at what all of the potential of AI is. Look, technology is not good or bad. It's what we do with it, with technology that matters. You know, we should look at that very closely. That AI is probably the most powerful technology we've ever seen, and how are we going to use it for the betterment of our society?
- [38:09]
Harry Stebbings
Do you believe, Sam Altman, that we'll hit AGI in 2025?
- [38:13]
Marc Benioff
I don't think we are hitting AGI in 2025, so I think that's an optimistic thought. I think the we're going to hit the maturation of the LLM in 2025. So I'll say that I believe that LLMs are becoming commodities and that we're cresting the LLMs, that they're getting incrementally more successful, but not exponentially more successful. So we'll see the full maturation and commoditization of the LM capability in 2025.
- [38:37]
Harry Stebbings
Final one for you. You are asked so many questions by everyone. What question has no one asked you that you lie in bed and go, God, why does no one ask me this?
- [38:47]
Marc Benioff
I would say people don't really reflect on a very simple thought about Salesforce. When Salesforce started 25 years ago, we put 1% of our equity, profit and time into a 501c3 public charity, a foundation here in the United States. It was easy at the time, Harry, because we had no equity, we had no profit, we had no people, we had no venture capital. So we just carved out a piece of our company. Now, 25 years later, we've given away about a billion dollars. We run 50,000 nonprofits and NGOs for free on our service. We've done over 10 million hours of volunteerism. This is where business is really the greatest platform for change. To see the impact that Salesforce has had. Now more than 20,000 companies have also copied us in doing that. We even have a foundation called pledge1percent.org to advocate companies. And it's created billions of dollars of philanthropic aid to local communities. Even Salesforce has been able to give more than $150 million to its local public schools in San Francisco and Oakland. There's no question, Harry, this simple fact. Business can be used for good. Why is it that most more people aren't asking me how can they use their businesses to improve the state of the world?
- [39:57]
Harry Stebbings
That's your pithy statement. Mark. You said at the beginning you need a statement. That's the statement.
- [40:02]
Marc Benioff
I guess I'll need one. Harry, thank you for that. I hope it. I hope it influences you and your own companies and your investments.
- [40:07]
Harry Stebbings
Honestly, Mark, it's such a joy. Thank you so much for doing this again.
- [40:10]
Marc Benioff
It's great to be with you always. I hope we'll do a third and fourth and fifth podcast as well.
- [40:15]
Harry Stebbings
I have to say, it is shows like that that just make me so thankful to do what I do. I mean, the man created Salesforce. $38 billion in revenue next year. What an incredible 25 year journey. I want to say huge thank you to Mark for being such a fantastic guest friend. What a fantastic dude. If you want to see more, you can of course watch it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC. Now before I leave you, we're excited to ignite your curiosity with a journey into the world of transformative ideas. If you're driven by the pursuit of knowledge and personal growth, you'll love exploring the vast collection of insightful book summaries on the Blinkist app. So with Blinkist, you can access expertly crafted summaries that distill the essence of thousands of influential books, allowing you to read or listen to each in just 15 minutes. I know they beat 20 VC being recommended by the New York Times and Apple CEO Tim Cook. It's no surprise that 82% of Blinkist users users see themselves as self optimizers and 65% say it's essential for business and career growth. And speaking of business, Blinkist is also a trusted LD partner for industry leaders like Amazon, Hyundai and KPMG. UK empowering over 32 million users since 2012 as a 20 VC listener. Even better, you get 25% exclusive discount on Blinkist. That's blind Kist. Just visit blink linkist.com 20vc to claim your discount and transform the way you learn. And while you're optimizing your learning, let's also optimize your finances with Brex the Financial stack founders can bank on Brex knows that nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash, so they built a banking experience that takes every dollar further. It's such a difference from traditional banking options that leave your cash sitting idle while chipping away at it with fees to help you protect your cash and extend your Runway. Brex combined the best things about checking treasury and FDIC insurance in one powerhouse account. You can send and receive money worldwide at lightning speed. You can get 20x the standard FDIC protection through program banks and you can earn industry leading yield from your first dollar while still being able to access your funds anytime. Brex is a top choice for startups. In fact, hey, it's used by one in every three startups in the US. Just check them out now. Brex.com startups and talking about Building Trust Secure Frame provides incredible levels of trust to your customers through automation. Secure Frame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation. Thousands of fast growing businesses including NASDAQ, AngelList, Doodle and Coda trust Secure Frame to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards such as SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR and more. Backed by top tier investors and corporations such as Google and Kleiner Perkins, the company is among Forbes list of top 100 startup employers for 2023 and business insiders list of the 34 most promising AI startups for 2023. Learn more today@secureframe.com it is a must. As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for a whopping episode with T.S. anil, a CEO at Monzo on the show on Wednesday.