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Episode: Behind the founder: Marc Benioff

Author: Lenny Rachitsky
Duration: 00:57:18

Episode Shownotes

Marc Benioff is the co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, the second-largest software company in the world. He started programming at age 15, selling his first program for $75, and went on to build Salesforce into a company worth more than $300 billion that also owns Slack, Tableau, Quip, and MuleSoft.

Marc is known as a marketing legend, and is now leading Salesforce into the era of AI agents. In our conversation, we discuss:• The importance of maintaining a beginner’s mind• His approach to product launches and marketing• Managing through tough times and layoffs• His relationship with Steve Jobs and lessons learned• Why Salesforce is betting big on AI agents• Many stories from his entrepreneurial roller coaster• Much more—Brought to you by:• Cloudinary—The foundational technology for all images and video on the internet• Enterpret—Transform customer feedback into product growth• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-founder-marc-benioff—Where to find Marc Benioff:• X: https://x.com/benioff• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbenioff—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Marc Benioff and Salesforce(03:54) Marc’s early career and domain names(05:59) The App Store story and lessons from Steve Jobs(15:18) Lessons from launching Salesforce(22:03) The importance of keeping a beginner’s mindset(29:53) Why Marc calls Salesforce the “25-year startup”(31:47) Agentforce(36:09) Why Marc says AI is the defining technology of our lifetime(40:12) AI’s impact on the workforce(42:31) Entrepreneurs need to be like conductors(46:02) Failure corner(50:32) The future of AI agents(56:34) Final thoughts and farewell—Referenced:• Bill.com: https://www.bill.com• App Store: https://www.apple.com/app-store/• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com• Oracle: https://www.oracle.com• Larry Ellison on X: https://x.com/larryellison• Siebel Systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siebel_Systems• Saba Software: https://talentedlearning.com/lms-vendor-directory/saba-software• Tom Siebel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomassiebel• Avon: https://www.avon.com• Salesforce Chief Has Pulled Some Crazy Stunts: https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-benioff-salesforcecom-chief-has-pulled-some-crazy-stunts-2012-3• Matthew McConaughey on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/officiallymcconaughey• Woody Harrelson on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/woodyharrelson• “Ask More of AI” with Matthew McConaughey: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnobS_RgN7JaxOsLD8WH0I9E6osK3UrfI• Marc’s tweet about the ad with McConaughey and Harrelson: https://x.com/Benioff/status/1866175950062239784• Chris Rock on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrisrock• Sushi Iwa: http://www.sushiiwa.jp/en/• Ryoanji Temple Rock Garden: https://www.japan.travel/en/spot/1145/• Neil Young Archives on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neilyoungarchives• Mount Tam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tamalpais• Spirit Rock: https://www.spiritrock.org• Jack Kornfield: https://www.spiritrock.org/teachers/jack-kornfield• Agentforce: https://www.salesforce.com/form/agentforce/demo• Minority Report on Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Minority-Report-Tom-Cruise/dp/B00A2FSSHK• Peter Schwartz on X: https://x.com/peterschwartz2• UCSF Health: https://www.ucsfhealth.org• A.I. Chatbots Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/health/chatgpt-ai-doctors-diagnosis.html• Does AI improve doctors’ diagnoses? Study puts it to the test: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241113123419.htm• A.I. Will Transform the Global Economy—if Humans Let It: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/special-series/ai-transform-global-economy.html• Wargames on Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Wargames-Dabney-Coleman/dp/B0011EQBOS• Her on Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Her-Joaquin-Phoenix/dp/B00KATY250• AI (Einstein) at Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/in/artificial-intelligence• Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Airkit.ai: https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/salesforce-signs-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-airkit-ai• Salesforce Buys Big Data Startup RelateIQ for Up to $390M: https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/11/salesforce-buys-big-data-startup-relateiq-for-up-to-390m• Salesforce to cut workforce by 10% after hiring ‘too many people’ during the pandemic: https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/04/salesforce-to-cut-workforce-by-10-after-hiring-too-many-people-during-the-pandemic• Michael Dell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdell• Bret Taylor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor• Akio Toyoda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akio_Toyoda• Kaizen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen• TRS-80: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80• CLOAD Magazine: https://archive.org/details/cload_newsletter—Recommended books:• Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War: https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Novel-Next-World/dp/054470505X• Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company—and Revolutionized an Industry: https://www.amazon.com/Behind-Cloud-Salesforce-com-Billion-Dollar-Company/dp/0470521163• Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change: https://www.amazon.com/Trailblazer-Business-Greatest-Platform-Change/dp/1984825194—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
I want to zoom back to the beginning of Salesforce, one of the most legendary launch events in startup history. Just looking back at that, any lessons from what you did right to get people to pay attention?

00:00:09 Speaker_00
I'm throwing everything against the wall and looking at what's going to stick. I am looking to try to find the winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy. Your stock is at an all-time high.

00:00:18 Speaker_01
I'm curious just what you believe has most contributed to you being able to stay on top and continue to grow.

00:00:24 Speaker_00
I actually never look at the stock. I find the stock to be very distracting. The stock isn't the goal. That's not why we're doing this.

00:00:30 Speaker_01
AI is the defining technology of our lifetime and probably any lifetime. When was kind of the moment for you where you started to realize this?

00:00:38 Speaker_00
I keep having these kind of existential freak out moments about AI. This is really moving fast.

00:00:44 Speaker_01
As a founder, you're just like, God damn, I just got used to AI and everyone wanting to work on AI at my company. Now we got to freaking figure out

00:00:50 Speaker_00
No, no, no, no, no. That's a mistake. You want the mindset of, oh, the next thing is coming. I can't wait for the next thing.

00:01:01 Speaker_01
Today, my guest is Mark Benioff.

00:01:03 Speaker_01
He's co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, which is the second largest B2B SaaS company in the world, worth around $350 billion at the time of this recording, making $35 billion a year in revenue, and 25 years later, is still growing like crazy and dominating the market.

00:01:21 Speaker_01
In our conversation, we talk about leadership, AI, domain names, beginner's mind, marketing, product, sales, the hardest moment in Mark's journey of building Salesforce, also what exactly is an agent, and so much more.

00:01:35 Speaker_01
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Mark Benioff.

00:01:49 Speaker_01
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00:01:57 Speaker_01
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00:02:19 Speaker_01
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00:02:33 Speaker_01
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00:02:46 Speaker_01
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00:02:55 Speaker_01
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00:03:07 Speaker_01
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00:03:35 Speaker_01
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00:03:49 Speaker_01
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00:03:57 Speaker_00
Mark, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Excited to finally get connected with you and excited to do this podcast with you too.

00:04:04 Speaker_01
I'm even more excited. And I actually want to start with something that I think most people don't know about you, but to me is almost like a microcosm of how far ahead you look and almost how basically how visionary you are.

00:04:15 Speaker_01
And that's that you've owned a number of epic domain names, for example, bill.com, u.com, code.com, appstore.com. First of all, are there others I don't know about? There's a lot. Salesforce.com.

00:04:31 Speaker_00
Salesforce.com. That all came from, you know, I'll tell you, it's a good story, actually, because, you know, what happened was I was working at Oracle for 10 years from 1986, and 1996 rolled around like it was a snap of the fingers.

00:04:45 Speaker_00
And all of a sudden I realized, whoa, what has just happened to the last decade? It just, this decade just flew by. It was crazy. And it was a big moment for me in my career, and I had a, you know, it was a huge acceleration. I went from being

00:05:00 Speaker_00
you know, a kid right out of college to working for Larry Ellison. But after 10 years, I was pretty trashed. And so I said to Larry, hey, I need to go and, you know, take some time off. And so I went to Hawaii and rented a little house on the beach.

00:05:17 Speaker_00
And I had done some agile investing, and it was kind of a cool moment where some of my companies started to go public, including Siebel Systems and others and Saba Software. and people I had met at Oracle, like Tom Siebel and Bobby Yazdani.

00:05:31 Speaker_00
And then I was just fascinated at that point with the internet. I had been working on it at Oracle for a couple of years. So I started buying a bunch of domain names of companies that I thought companies. They weren't companies yet.

00:05:44 Speaker_00
Now they are companies. But ideas that I thought the names would be great companies one day and reflected where I thought things were going. And yeah, it's a long time ago now. You know, it's a really long, long time ago, I think almost 30 years.

00:05:59 Speaker_01
And so one of the domain names you owned was AppStore.com, which I know you gifted to Steve Jobs, I read in your book. Is there a story there that you could share? Because that's an epic domain just to gift.

00:06:09 Speaker_00
It's a great story, but it's really a story about my relationship with Steve Jobs. When I was in college in 1984, I had the opportunity to be an intern at Apple, and I wrote the first native assembly language on the Macintosh.

00:06:25 Speaker_00
It's kind of a crazy thing to be able to say, but it's

00:06:28 Speaker_00
true that I was writing these example programs for this Macintosh 68000 development system on these Apple headquarter buildings on Banley Road in Cupertino and started to have a relationship with Steve Jobs in that, not that I was actually talking to him, I was like this snot-nosed 19-year-old kid,

00:06:50 Speaker_00
but he's running around the building, and we have this refrigerator over here with all these fruit juices, there's a masseuse over here doing shiatsu massages, there's a motorcycle in the lobby, there's a pirate flag on the roof, and there's Steve Jobs running around yelling at everybody, and it was

00:07:09 Speaker_00
Frickin cool.

00:07:10 Speaker_00
Okay, so you can just imagine like you're like, whoa, this is like I'm in a movie and There's a lot of other cool parts of the movie too that were going on And it kind of started my relationship with him and then I kind of actually kind of got to know him then you know as I eventually got to Oracle and

00:07:30 Speaker_00
Then eventually I started Salesforce, and I had this moment at Salesforce, and it was, I think, 2000, 2001. I cannot remember exactly what it was. And we were at the opening of one of his movies for Pixar, and we were having dinner.

00:07:50 Speaker_00
There's a lot of details around the dinner. It'll be a hugely long story if I go forever. And he says to me, well, Mark, now listen to me. You're doing so great. You've got your company, Salesforce. If you need any help, you make sure you call me, OK?

00:08:07 Speaker_00
And I'm like, yes, sir, I will do that. And he took out his, he had just introduced the iPod. And he's like, you know, I got 1,000 songs in my pocket here. Look at this and that and all that. And it's this cool device.

00:08:18 Speaker_00
And I'm like, that's such a cool screen, Steve. He goes, oh, thanks so much. And I go, Steve. You know, you could do movies on there, too, not just or photos. You didn't have to do something. No, Mark, I will never do a device like that. Absolutely not.

00:08:34 Speaker_00
And that's a little insight into his personality that he would never, ever exactly like say, oh, yeah, I'm going to do the movie device, the photo, the phone, the this. So.

00:08:45 Speaker_00
Anyway, things were kind of moving along at Salesforce, and so I kind of was like kind of stuck. And I kind of need to kind of get through my block, writer's block, entrepreneur's block. I'm going to reach out to him.

00:09:00 Speaker_00
And he's like, come down here right away. So literally guided by car, brought a few of my team with me and we go down and he's like, oh yeah, oh yeah, you're blocked. There's three things you need to do right now. And I'm like, okay, what are they?

00:09:17 Speaker_00
Your company, it better get 10 times larger than it is now or in 24 months or it's over. Okay. Okay. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Number two, you better sign a huge customer for the Salesforce automation product like Avon. They're a great Salesforce.

00:09:33 Speaker_00
And the CEO of Avon was on his board at the time. So that was, that was on his mind. And one last thing I'm going to tell you, you must do. I'm like, yes, sir. What, what is it? You better go build an application economy, an application economy. Yes.

00:09:48 Speaker_00
What does that mean? I don't know, but you're going to go figure it out. And it was like, you know, meeting with your guru and, you know, getting a Zen koan or something where you're like, now you have a puzzle I have to solve.

00:10:04 Speaker_00
And I literally went away and I had all the notes from the meeting, you know, I went through it over and over and again. And then finally I'm like, I think he wants me to build an app store.

00:10:17 Speaker_00
And at that moment I went to the domain registry and I bought appstore.com.

00:10:23 Speaker_00
And then I started working on it at Salesforce so that we would have the ability with our platform to build apps and then, you know, sell them, you know, and that you could do all these things.

00:10:34 Speaker_00
So I did all that and, you know, launched AppExchange in like 2005 or 2006. And we didn't call it AppStore because when we tested the AppStore name and the focus groups, customers were like, this is not an AppStore. This is an AppExchange.

00:10:49 Speaker_00
We're all going to exchange apps and capabilities. Anyway, it rolled out, iPhone rolled out, and then he basically said to me one day, hey, come down and see me. This is maybe like a year after iPhone. I'm like, oh, I'll be right down.

00:11:08 Speaker_00
And I get down there, and I have some team members with me, and they'd heard this story before, et cetera. We're sitting there like it's the Apple auditory. It was not like at a hotel or anything. I remember it very clearly like it was yesterday.

00:11:22 Speaker_00
And he said, I brought you all down here today. And, you know, he's just very, very good. The actual performance, I could never do what he does is incredible. You know, he's got the thing. And then he says, and I'm here to reveal to you the app store.

00:11:38 Speaker_00
And all of our people go. You know, they just break breath and they're all like, no white, because they're like, Oh, Mark has been talking about app store for years. And how, how could Steven know? And then at the end of it, it's all over.

00:11:53 Speaker_00
Everyone leaves the auditorium. They're all going out to play with the app store and all these things. And I walked down and he's sitting down there by himself, you know, working on something. And he's like the corner of the stage.

00:12:06 Speaker_00
I go, Hey Steve, can I talk to you for a second? Because of course. very generous with me, very kind with me. He goes, Steve, I'm going to give you a gift. Wow. But Mark, what are you going to give me?

00:12:20 Speaker_00
Steve, I'm going to give you something you don't have, but maybe you'll need, which is the appstore.com URL, appstore.com, and the trademark for App Store. Because after that meeting we had like six years ago,

00:12:35 Speaker_00
I ended up trademarking these things and buying this URL. And he's like, Oh, it's very nice. But you know, this app store thing isn't going to be very big and you know, whatever, but thank you very much. And that was the story of app stores.

00:12:48 Speaker_00
Kind of amazing. It's kind of a, it was kind of a very amazing relationship that I had with him. Very grateful to have that relationship and dramatically influenced me in my career and my, my whole life.

00:12:59 Speaker_01
There's one thread that I love about everything you shared here is how generosity was at the center of so much of this, him helping you, you helping him, just wanting to help each other.

00:13:06 Speaker_00
He's a very generous person, and I'll tell you that he never turned down anything that I asked him to do. And I have so many stories, but one story was I was thinking about

00:13:24 Speaker_00
buying this house and I wasn't sure, should I buy this house, should I not buy this house, whatever. And so he went, he said, I'll go look at it for you, you know?

00:13:32 Speaker_00
And so he went and he's looking at this house and then he calls me and he goes, well, I don't know if you should do this or that, but this might be good. Maybe it is good. Maybe it is a good idea. And then I'm, you know, emailing with him after that.

00:13:45 Speaker_00
And, you know, he's very sick and it's all very sad. And then he sends me an email and the last email he sent to me was, he said, I said, wow, well, this has worked out better than I thought.

00:13:58 Speaker_00
And he goes, Mark, everything has worked out so much better than we could have ever imagined. And it was just a beautiful thought and incredibly sad all at the same moment. And that was my last correspondence with him.

00:14:14 Speaker_01
I feel like we could do Steve Jobs stories all day.

00:14:16 Speaker_00
Oh, no, I have hours. I have a lot of Steve Jobs stories. Oh, man. But yeah, anyway, those are a couple of them.

00:14:24 Speaker_01
By the way, I also love that he had like B2B SAS advice, like here you need a big customer, you need high ACV.

00:14:30 Speaker_00
He hated those. He hated SAS and he hated that I was doing enterprise software. He's trying to talk me out of being an enterprise software executive. He's like, no, Mark. What are you going to do?

00:14:40 Speaker_00
You're going to go home and tell your kids that you're working on enterprise software. Who do you sell to CIOs? Have you had met them? How can you be doing this? What I can't imagine a more horrible career. I'm like, I love it, Steve.

00:14:52 Speaker_00
No, Mark, you cannot love this. This is not great. It was really a funny thing. He really disliked that, but yet he was incredibly supportive of me. He would call me all the time. It was really, it was really amazing actually.

00:15:06 Speaker_01
It feels like a place he was wrong in the end here, which is cool to know. I want to go in a different direction.

00:15:12 Speaker_00
He was rarely wrong.

00:15:13 Speaker_01
He was rarely wrong. If it'd be SaaS, $350 billion of value, he would have only existed. Speaking of that, so I want to zoom back to the beginning of Salesforce and when you launched Salesforce.

00:15:25 Speaker_01
It's crazy to think back to that when basically you were trying to convince people the future of software was not desktop software. It was going to be in the cloud. It was SaaS. You had all these end of software logos. You had mascots walking around.

00:15:37 Speaker_01
There's no software thing. You hired fake protesters at I think it was Siebel's conference. Like, it was very hard. I think you read one of my books, Lenny. I know the history of a lot of these things.

00:15:49 Speaker_01
It's one of the most legendary launch events in startup history. So I've heard of it many times at this point.

00:15:54 Speaker_00
It was a crazy moment. I mean, Siebel, who was really the enterprise software company doing CRM, was doing kind of a user conference. And I, you know, was looking for an opportunity to kind of launch our product. So we hired a bunch of actors.

00:16:13 Speaker_00
And they were doing this event in San Francisco and, you know, San Francisco is very woke. So, you know, nobody, you know, people expect a protest, a good protest. So we had it.

00:16:24 Speaker_00
got some picket signs at Home Depot and made some signs, you know, that said the end of software is near, you know, and all kinds of other, no software and all these things. We had a lot of funny things on signs.

00:16:38 Speaker_00
And we ran, we were running a protest outside of Siebel that they were in the software business, but we were like, oh no. You know, we've got to get out of software. We've got to create the end of software.

00:16:48 Speaker_00
And so we have picketers outside of the streets. Anyway, he comes out himself out of the building and is really gets super upset.

00:16:57 Speaker_00
And right then we hit a button and we have other actors in a van who come out and they are staging themselves as news crew. So they are like, K, NMS, no more K, no more software. And we're like, they're interviewing the protesters.

00:17:18 Speaker_00
So now he thinks that it's a media thing. He calls the police. He got very upset. He's a great guy, by the way. I love Tom Siebel. I think he's also one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation.

00:17:31 Speaker_00
And he's just fuming, and he doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't exactly know it's us. And we're just having the best time. And that night, we had our huge launch event at one of the top theaters in San Francisco, and we hired

00:17:48 Speaker_00
a great band, and it was really, we just had so much fun. It was just a really great time. That was all happened, I remember very well, it was February 22nd of 2001 or 2000, 2000, February 22nd, 2000.

00:18:06 Speaker_01
I love this. I haven't heard that interview. Uh, the, the reporter part of that story before it was kind of crazy. I love it. And it sounds frivolous potentially, but I think the genius of this that I want to touch on is a good word.

00:18:19 Speaker_00
It probably was frivolous.

00:18:21 Speaker_01
So what I imagine is you're trying to get people to even know Salesforce exists to differentiate, to get the name out. And I feel like that's something a lot of founders struggle with.

00:18:29 Speaker_01
They don't really know how to get their name out, how to get people to pay attention.

00:18:32 Speaker_01
Just looking back at that success, I guess, just any lessons from what you did right to get the word Salesforce out, to get people to pay attention at all to what you're doing.

00:18:42 Speaker_00
Well, it's a noisy world, Lenny, and you can see that you can get on Twitter. It's like, I mean, there's a lot of noise. And how do you break through? And we have a challenge today. We're introducing a huge new product called AgentForce.

00:18:56 Speaker_00
And I've only been working on it for a couple of months now. I introduced it at our Dreamforce conference. And that was one way, you know, to break through, which was I took our conference and said, it's just going to be about AgentForce.

00:19:08 Speaker_00
And I really, you know, and I, I, I'm trying to think about what are all the things I need to do to get my company a hundred percent on AgentForce, my customers. Everyone, because I know I have a window of opportunity here.

00:19:24 Speaker_00
And we're first, we're ahead. You know, we have hundreds of customers on this now. We're on it, which is amazing. You know, we've moved our whole help infrastructure. to agent force. We're seeing incredible results.

00:19:38 Speaker_00
We've cut our human escalation from our support infrastructure down by 50%. We're resolving 83% of all of our inquiries robotically. It's incredible. So now, how do I get that message out? How do I do it globally? How do I find my KNMS moment where I can

00:20:02 Speaker_00
come up with something that's viral and exciting. And I'm trying lots of different things. I'm even having, I have Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson who are two friends of mine helping me. So they said, we'll cut ads for you.

00:20:13 Speaker_00
They have not been together in an ad ever. And they haven't done anything together since True Detective. And they're friends of mine. I'm like, again, very generous people to agree to do this. And we've shot three ads so far.

00:20:29 Speaker_00
I put them out on Twitter to get feedback from folks. Is this a good idea? I am running this help.salesforce.com to show what we can do with it. Is that a good idea? I'm training all my salespeople on how to sell it. Is that a good idea?

00:20:45 Speaker_00
And I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really a terrible product co-pilot that I have to position against and market against. So and is that a good idea? Should I be marketing and positioning against them?

00:20:58 Speaker_00
I'm trying lots of things. And what I'm trying to do, Lenny, is what I recommend to all entrepreneurs, And the message is really in the medium here, which is that I am looking to try to find the winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy.

00:21:13 Speaker_00
I don't know actually which one of those things is going to be the most important thing in launching this product.

00:21:19 Speaker_00
So I'm trying a lot of things, you know, with that old expression, I'm throwing everything against the wall and looking at what's going to stick. And then once I find that thing, I will then grow that as my strategy. And that is what I'm trying to do.

00:21:33 Speaker_00
I'm even expanding my distribution organization. I'm trying to hire an additional 1,000 to 2,000 account executives just to focus on AgentForce.

00:21:41 Speaker_00
So I'm trying to do everything I can to get that light switch to go on where I can show customers this is an incredible opportunity to lower your costs, to make things better,

00:21:53 Speaker_00
And to show that for the first time we can have digital labor, that Salesforce isn't just managing your data, but we're a digital labor provider. So this is that moment.

00:22:03 Speaker_01
There's so much there that I love. This idea of trying a bunch of things, looking for the tactic that becomes your strategy.

00:22:10 Speaker_01
It feels like also there's a focus of just like go all in and focus on this one thing and then try a bunch of different ways for this one thing that you're focused on to win.

00:22:18 Speaker_01
There's also an element of, I just had Seth Godin on the podcast and his, you know, one of his big lessons is be remarkable and be some, create something people remark about.

00:22:26 Speaker_01
So this, uh, uh, celeb sort of oriented ad that you're working on, I think is a really good example of that.

00:22:31 Speaker_00
Well, that's a good, that is a key thought though, that he's saying, which is you've got to find it, but finding that is the hard part. So you gotta be like, you have to be like, um, one of my friends is Chris Rock, the comedian.

00:22:42 Speaker_00
And so, you know, what he'll do is he just doesn't go out and do a Netflix special, right, with all of his jokes. He's out there testing his jokes in clubs and doing all kinds of crazy things.

00:22:54 Speaker_00
I won't go through all the crazy stuff he does to test his jokes. But by the time it gets to the big Netflix special, right, he knows what works and what doesn't work. So that is something that we all have to do as entrepreneurs.

00:23:09 Speaker_00
We need to be testing lots of things. We need a lot of experimentation and we can't be too arrogant.

00:23:15 Speaker_00
I think another thing that's extremely important is, you know, I have a pretty deep meditation practice for three, four decades, which is we have to be cultivating our beginner's mind.

00:23:26 Speaker_00
We have to kind of use our mindfulness in a way to kind of clear everything out and then kind of get back to what is my beginner's mind?

00:23:36 Speaker_00
In the beginner's mind, I have every possibility, but in the expert's mind, I have few, and in some cases, maybe none. So I've been doing this a long time. I've been writing software since I was 15. I'm now 60. That's 45 years.

00:23:50 Speaker_00
I don't want to have an expert's mind. I want to have a beginner's mind. And how do I have that beginner's mind? Because those ideas will come at me if I can go, what could work?

00:24:02 Speaker_00
Rather than saying, oh, I know what is going to work, or this is the one thing that is going to definitely work, or we have to do this. As soon as you start using words like that, you know that you're going to completely implode and fail.

00:24:16 Speaker_00
You have to say, here, we have to do all these things. Like in my company right now, like we just did this all hands call. I was like, there's six things I really want to get done.

00:24:24 Speaker_00
But like one thing is I didn't get everybody focused on agent force and like really watch the energy. Number two is, I need to find more fuel in the company to fuel this idea, because this is clearly a breakthrough product.

00:24:39 Speaker_00
So how do I get everyone focused on it? Number three, where I think it's really important, we need more distribution capability. We don't sell through franchises. We're not selling through dealers, resellers. We sell direct.

00:24:53 Speaker_00
So I know I need more account executives. And number four is I need to be telling lots of customer stories. So number one, customer zero, me. And number two is I need to tell you all the stories like you can see the story of Disney.

00:25:07 Speaker_00
I'm doing a huge amount of AI work for them and agent force work. Let me tell you the story about Disney and I need to tell you that story.

00:25:14 Speaker_00
And then we have this whole ecosystem of people around the company called trailblazers, millions of them who know our platform. They all have to become agent blazers.

00:25:23 Speaker_00
And the last thing is I just shipped the product into all 135,000 Salesforce customers. So it's there nascent and they need to flick it on. I need to motivate them to turn it on. Like, these are the six things I'm thinking about all the time.

00:25:37 Speaker_00
So it's not just one thing. I'm trying to figure out what it is, and I need a beginner's mind to kind of assess, how do I move forward? How do I evolve? How do I inspire? How do I motivate? How do I energize?

00:25:51 Speaker_01
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00:25:58 Speaker_01
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00:26:57 Speaker_01
I love this idea of beginner's mind. I imagine it's very difficult to operationalize, especially for a company at 25 years old at this point, other than obviously you meditate, you put a lot of effort and focus into building this.

00:27:10 Speaker_01
It's hard to do that within a company. Is there anything you do with meetings, with leadership, with the way you operate that kind of spreads this way of thinking within the org?

00:27:18 Speaker_00
Well, Salesforce is now the second largest software company in the world, but also the second largest software company in Japan. And that's a country that I put a lot of time and energy into. I love going there and I love going to Kyoto.

00:27:30 Speaker_00
And when I go to Kyoto, I like to go to some of these amazing Zen temples. And by the way, that's one of the things that Steve Jobs loved to do. And he used to go to these great sushi restaurants. There's a great one in Kyoto named Sushi Iwa.

00:27:45 Speaker_00
And if you go in there, you'll see he's signed something for them. It says, all good things, Steve Jobs. And I said, what did he do?

00:27:56 Speaker_00
He would go to this great sushi restaurant, and then he would go to Ryoenji, the rock garden temple, an incredible metaphysical temple. And I've gone there, I've gone there for decades, I've brought a lot of friends of mine there.

00:28:09 Speaker_00
And yeah, you got to clear your mind and let it come in. You know, you got to receive it. You need to listen. I remember I even brought Neil Young there, the musician, you know, is one of my favorite people in the world. And obviously I love his music.

00:28:23 Speaker_00
This is his soundtrack is the soundtrack of my entire life. And we were sitting there and he was so deep in meditation that then he started walking around and the temple was closing.

00:28:33 Speaker_00
And then like he was in the zone and I didn't want to bother him, but I'm like, you know, I think we got to go. Anyway, it turned out he had written a whole album while we were there in his head, and he was basically transcribing it all.

00:28:46 Speaker_00
It was an incredible creative process. Look, we're all writing an album in our head. What album are you writing? What music are you writing? How are you getting into that zone yourself?

00:28:57 Speaker_00
If you want to be a great entrepreneur, you want to be a great CEO, you got to clear your mind and you got to be ready to write that music.

00:29:05 Speaker_00
And that music could be your business plan, your product plan, your product launch plan, like we're talking about for my AgentForce product.

00:29:14 Speaker_00
But that's what we're all trying to do, and I use a place like Kyoto as a place to do that also, because geography is important. Where you are matters.

00:29:23 Speaker_00
I know you're in Marin, so Marin County, maybe you go out to the top of Mount Tam, maybe you go to Spirit Rock with Jack Kornfield and go kind of clear your mind there. But you've got to find the place to do that and create the location.

00:29:37 Speaker_00
It may not be in the office, it may be somewhere else.

00:29:41 Speaker_01
By the way, you have the most amazing friends list, all these folks you mentioned. I don't know how long this goes.

00:29:46 Speaker_00
They are cool. I am lucky that I've met a lot of cool people. Yeah. I don't know how I got so lucky to meet some of these people.

00:29:53 Speaker_01
I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about. Every, every month or so I hear about a startup. I do a bunch of angel investing. That's trying to like basically disrupt Salesforce come after Salesforce. They bash.

00:30:05 Speaker_01
You're like, don't kill me for saying this. You're like user experience. They're like, Oh, so complicated. Let's been around.

00:30:10 Speaker_00
We are too complicated. I agree.

00:30:12 Speaker_01
Okay. I'm curious just what you believe has most contributed to you being able to stay on top and continue to grow. We're recording this today and your stock is at an all-time high basically even now. Wow, I didn't even know that. Roughly.

00:30:27 Speaker_00
I actually never look at the stock. I find the stock to be very distracting and I encourage my employees also don't look at the stock because the stock is just a reflection. Money isn't the goal, right? The stock isn't the goal.

00:30:46 Speaker_00
It's coming at the end of the journey. It's like, that's not why we're doing this. The journey is the reward. That's also something Steve Jobs would say all the time. another bout of Steve Jobs here. I think that this is really important.

00:31:02 Speaker_00
I look at myself as a startup. I am a startup CEO. I am a startup entrepreneur. I'm still at the beginning of Salesforce. No matter what I'm doing at Salesforce, whether I'm the CEO, I'm sometimes the chairman of the board.

00:31:17 Speaker_00
Last week, we had a board meeting. Sometimes I'm you know, product manager. I'm just, you know, this is a startup. And we're a 25-year-old, 75,000 person, $38 billion, $300 something billion market cap startup. But we're a startup nonetheless.

00:31:34 Speaker_00
And we have some great products, but we are just starting. And as an example, Lenny, we are just starting the digital labor industry. And we have a product called AgentForce, and we are just starting. We are just at the beginning.

00:31:47 Speaker_01
I want to bounce around a little bit, but let's talk about agent force. I know this is, as you've said, the thing you're most focused on right now. It's a big bet you all are taking.

00:31:54 Speaker_01
When people hear this word agent, I think a lot of people are kind of embarrassed to even ask, like, what does that even look like? Like, what is an agent other than, you know, beyond what LLMs are today?

00:32:04 Speaker_01
Is there an example you could give of something you've seen that maybe blew your mind of what an agent can do?

00:32:09 Speaker_00
Yeah, I saw it in the movies. I saw it in Minority Report, which was a movie that was co-written by our futurist, Peter Schwartz.

00:32:19 Speaker_00
And, you know, Tom Cruise runs into the Gap store and, you know, all of a sudden it says, hey, hey, Tom, you know, have you thought about this new shirt? Look at these jeans. You bought this last time. Now you could try this. You could try that.

00:32:33 Speaker_00
You know, what about this? What about that? And it knew his history. It understood him. It knew what was going on. This is 20 years ago.

00:32:42 Speaker_00
And, you know, this whole store changes digitally to reflect, you know, his interest, his ideas, and it's starting to talk to him and work with him. That is an agent.

00:32:53 Speaker_00
You know, it isn't just the agent that we saw in the matrix, you know, Mr. Smith or whatever it is. It's, it's someone that's working with you. Someone, that's an interesting Freudian slip. It's something that is working with you.

00:33:05 Speaker_00
Could be your piece of software on your phone. Could be a robot that's going to be in your home. could be your car that knows you, understands your preferences, has an institutional memory of you, and now is helping to advise you.

00:33:22 Speaker_00
And I'll give you an example. I go into UCSF all the time. I'm actually just getting through an Achilles rupture right now, so I've had a lot of interactions.

00:33:33 Speaker_00
And with the hospital, or getting your healthcare, getting your labs done, getting your physical done, getting your scans done, whatever it is, And there's always these pre-operative and post-operative or pre-procedure and post-procedure things.

00:33:46 Speaker_00
And you're getting these phone calls. And every time I get a phone call, I'm like, oh, that probably just cost them $100. And we probably could do that a lot cheaper and a lot easier with an agent.

00:33:58 Speaker_00
And then when I talk to my doctors and nurses at UCSF, they're all burnt out post-pandemic because they're scheduling pajama time to go through all their digital messages at night.

00:34:08 Speaker_00
It's like a lot of this could be done a lot easier with agents and AI, and we're going to make their lives a lot better, a lot easier, simpler.

00:34:17 Speaker_00
And some of those things that they're doing, they don't need to talk to me about what my cholesterol number is because I got my labs and the cholesterol number is this number or that number.

00:34:27 Speaker_00
You know, a lot of this can be done with technology and then save the parts that are important for them. Like when I come to see them.

00:34:35 Speaker_00
or I want to have a real deeper, you know, more empathetic conversation face to face with, you know, a deeply experienced doctor. That's a whole nother opportunity for me. That is an agent or the agent is like, here's an example.

00:34:48 Speaker_00
Like I had a CT scan and you have to drink this contrast. And then all of a sudden the contrary, you know, drink it, but they give it to you through an IV and then they're taking better pictures.

00:34:56 Speaker_00
But then you have to drink water to flush the contrast out of your body. And do you think anyone called me and said, Hey, do you drink the water? No, nobody calls me to drink the water.

00:35:06 Speaker_00
You know, you have to remember you're on your own in health care in the U.S. So the agent's going to call you and say, hey, did you drink the water? You take your meds. You know, do you need to have a repeat lab? You need to go see your doctor again.

00:35:18 Speaker_00
So the agent is going to be there by your side. So that's a health care example. There's a lot of examples that we can probably have.

00:35:25 Speaker_01
There was just a story in the New York Times, which isn't about agents specifically, it was about comparing CHAT-GPT to a doctor, where they tested a doctor's ability to diagnose versus a CHAT-GPT directly, or a doctor plus CHAT-GPT, and by far the best was just CHAT-GPT, removing the doctor from the equation.

00:35:43 Speaker_00
Yeah, they wrote up a clinical study where they actually did kind of looked at in a semi kind of peer-reviewed way that CHAT GPT in many cases was giving more accurate diagnoses than a doctor because the doctor had a more bias coming in working with the patient.

00:36:03 Speaker_00
So that's super interesting and I think something that we should probably all look at that study and think about that.

00:36:10 Speaker_01
Speaking of the New York Times, there's actually this quote I found. You did this op-ed talking about AI.

00:36:14 Speaker_01
So the quote is, throughout my career in Silicon Valley, I've witnessed numerous waves of innovation, but none compared to the profound impact of AI. AI is the defining technology of our lifetime, and probably any lifetime.

00:36:27 Speaker_01
When was kind of the moment for you where you started to realize this, where it's like, oh shit, this is not just another cool toy?

00:36:33 Speaker_00
Well, I keep having these kind of existential freak out moments about AI. It's happened over a series of decades.

00:36:41 Speaker_00
But for those of us who grew up with these movies, like War Games and Monori Ford, you know, or her or across the board, or read some of these books, you know, like one of my favorite books on AI is Ghost Fleet.

00:36:58 Speaker_00
You know, you think about where are we going with AI? Where are we going with AI? And, you know, with Salesforce, I think about

00:37:08 Speaker_00
you know, our journey, and I've been waiting for this to happen and, you know, trying to bring us along, especially in the last decade with the development of our Einstein platform and now the development of our AgentForce platform.

00:37:18 Speaker_00
This week at Salesforce, we'll probably do about 2 trillion AI transactions, you know, with our, you know, total now Einstein and AgentForce platforms.

00:37:29 Speaker_00
We're definitely the largest provider of enterprise AI transactions in the world, as far as I can tell. And I keep thinking, wow, this is going to get more and more, you know, intense.

00:37:41 Speaker_00
And one, one step was we had to automate all these customer touch points. So like wearing my Disney fan boy shirt here, you know, we run the Disney store and the Disney guides and there's Disney real estate and there's the Disney plus call center.

00:37:55 Speaker_00
And there's every aspect of Disney. When you're a customer, you're interfacing with Salesforce. So that's what we've loved doing, automating all these customer touchpoints, sales, service, marketing, analytics, Slack, integrating it all with MuleSoft.

00:38:09 Speaker_00
That's what we do. And then aggregating it all into a big database where we call it data cloud and then federating that data cloud to other data sources. So that's the two steps we've been doing, automate the customer touchpoints, aggregate the data.

00:38:25 Speaker_00
And then step three is the agentic platform on top of that. And when you think about what's happening now that you can go to help.salesforce.com and have your issues resolved with that on the agentic layer, that's amazing.

00:38:38 Speaker_00
And then the fourth layer that will come will be the robotic drone layer, where those robots and drones will then feed off of the platform and all of these capabilities.

00:38:49 Speaker_00
And that vision of the future is something that we've all had in the industry, you know, for years. It's not my magic vision. This is a vision that's been around.

00:38:57 Speaker_00
It's been the fundamentals of computer science that we would move from having, we'd go from this kind of from data to automation. And that is what we're all driving, and we're driving that industry.

00:39:10 Speaker_00
We're going lower cost, easier to use, and more automated constantly. And that's powerful. This is really moving fast.

00:39:21 Speaker_01
You mentioned Einstein briefly. I'll also mention my dog is named Einstein, and I got Einstein swag ones with the socks, and I love them. And that's also an example of you bought Einstein.com very early. That was another domain name that you owned.

00:39:35 Speaker_00
Well, I just thought Einstein would be a great name to talk about artificial intelligence, and it really has been there. You can see him behind me right on my shelf, on my bookshelf. I keep him back there. You see Einstein? My view here is blocked.

00:39:51 Speaker_01
Oh, I'll go grab him. Okay, let's check it out. Here he is. Show and tell segment podcast. Oh, cute. That was a big old Einstein.

00:40:02 Speaker_00
That's a key part of our vision for Salesforce. Our Einstein platform was everything we're doing. We wouldn't get to agent force without getting to good old Einstein here.

00:40:12 Speaker_01
Very cute. As you talk about all this, I imagine many people are thinking, oh shit, we're not going to have. As many people working, what are we going to do with our jobs, AIs, agents?

00:40:22 Speaker_01
I know anything you say could be taken way out of context and just like Mark Benioff says, everyone's not working. But I guess just, I know you've said you're not going to be hiring as many engineers next year.

00:40:31 Speaker_01
I guess anything there to help people understand how the workforce will change in the future.

00:40:35 Speaker_00
Well, I can tell you about like my own company and what I'm telling my own employees, which is that, yeah, we're going to have to rebalance some of our workforce because you can see it in the numbers I just gave you, which is we need less support engineers because we have a robotic support layer, you know, with agent force.

00:40:51 Speaker_00
So that is, you know, very real and we all need to adapt. And at the same time, I'm hiring a lot more account executives and, folks to grow the company. So I just encouraged everybody on the all-hands call to think about that.

00:41:06 Speaker_00
And then I just gave you the idea of health care. The interesting thing about health care, though, is that a lot of the jobs that I think that are going to get created just we don't have people for.

00:41:21 Speaker_00
And I think there's a lot of things that we need help with in the world that we don't have people for. So I think a lot of these jobs will not necessarily

00:41:29 Speaker_00
get replaced and i think that you know i have a i have a home in a small town and in in in this small town and you know it's very much a blue-collar town folks are you know still working in their restaurants driving trucks you know working in the supermarket uh... and uh... you know working on their homes building construction gardening uh... look it's going to be a long time before you know i think

00:41:59 Speaker_00
jobs in the small town where I have a home will ever get, you know, impacted. But in the large town where I have a home, San Francisco, well, then I just gave you an example where I think that jobs will get impacted.

00:42:13 Speaker_00
So it'll be a tale of two cities, literally. And I think you will see different impacts in different places.

00:42:21 Speaker_01
So what I'm hearing there is support people trending down, account executive sales trending up.

00:42:27 Speaker_00
Right now, that is Salesforce in a nutshell.

00:42:31 Speaker_01
That touches on something I wanted to touch on also, which is that a lot of founders today are very product-minded, very product-oriented founders, and they want to build product-first companies, grow product-led, all these things.

00:42:43 Speaker_01
Salesforce, I think very publicly, is very sales-led, very marketing-led. not product led, obviously product is a core part of it and it all works together and all these things.

00:42:52 Speaker_01
But I guess just any advice for founders that are very product oriented and maybe are hesitant to lean into sales.

00:42:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, I would say we're not sales led. Well, I think let's just use agent forces, the example, right? So we're running the year we're running this year. This is our fiscal year 25. Okay. It ends in, um, the end of January next year. And,

00:43:13 Speaker_00
Lenny, this is the year of Data Cloud. This was not supposed to be the year of AgentForce. So it's the year of Data Cloud. I just gave you the pitch. We've automated all the customer touchpoints.

00:43:23 Speaker_00
Now we're adding the Data Cloud to all of our customer implementations. We have 135,000 customers. We've implemented Data Cloud into all of them. They all need to turn it on.

00:43:34 Speaker_00
Our teams need to show our customers how to build data cloud and how it's going to help our customers have a better data structure. They almost combine data and data together. So they need a better data structure, data architectures, data cultures.

00:43:51 Speaker_00
And then we had our breakthrough. And I can tell you the story where all of a sudden I'm like, wow, this agent technology is happening much faster than I thought it was going to. And we are going to market now.

00:44:04 Speaker_00
And by the time we get to Dreamforce, we are going to take this incredible technology. We accelerated it radically because we bought this company called Airkit, which is one of our Ohana It's a great story.

00:44:17 Speaker_00
A great entrepreneur had this company, a fantastic company called Relate IQ that we bought many years ago, about 10 years ago, stayed with us for many years, like six or seven years, wanted to leave, and said, great.

00:44:32 Speaker_00
We gave him the investment to leave, invested in the company through Salesforce Ventures, built this amazing platform. And then we said, now we want to buy it back. And then he came back about a year ago. And then it just accelerated the agent vision.

00:44:46 Speaker_00
And then we delivered agent force production code at the end of October. So all of a sudden, now we are releasing this product. I think it's very important if you're an entrepreneur to realize it's not just about the product. It's not just about sales.

00:45:03 Speaker_00
It's not just about marketing. It's not just about accounting. It's not just about your investors. It's not just about your employees. It's not just about your stakeholders. It's about everything. So you better be ready to be an orchestra leader.

00:45:17 Speaker_00
You can't just be playing the clarinet. And I think that's kind of what you're getting to, which is that there's entrepreneurs who are like, I'm just going to play the clarinet.

00:45:27 Speaker_00
And for those, I don't think they're going to go as far as they could go. You want to be playing the whole symphony. And you want to get everyone running. And that symphony is sales, service, marketing, product.

00:45:39 Speaker_00
Every part of your shareholders, your stakeholders, your customers, you have to be constantly playing the whole symphony. And you have to have a big mind to think about, whoa, I have a lot of stakeholders in my company, not just one stakeholder.

00:45:54 Speaker_00
It's not just about product or technology. And if you're going to narrow cast yourself, you're doing a disservice not just to yourself, but to everybody else as well.

00:46:02 Speaker_01
Speaking of big mind and beginner's mind, we have a recurring segment on this podcast that I call Fail Corner.

00:46:09 Speaker_01
And where it comes from is people come on this podcast, they share all these stories of everything's going great, we're killing it, I've had all these successes, and people get discouraged because they hear just like all the people only succeeding when they often fail.

00:46:21 Speaker_01
And so I try to ask guests to share a story, and let me ask you this, is there a story you could share of when it was a big struggle for you when you're struggling, when something went super wrong? that you work through and learn something from?

00:46:35 Speaker_00
Sure. Well, I mean, I'll just give this example. About two years ago, we went through this huge transformation in our company.

00:46:42 Speaker_00
And there were a lot of crazy things that were happening, but it was a little bit like we're all on this airplane and everything is going really well. And then something seems to be going really wrong.

00:46:52 Speaker_00
And we look up front and the two pilots seem to be missing. And then the one guy with a parachute jumped out of the plane And then we're all like, whoa, what are we going to do?

00:47:03 Speaker_00
And we had to do some really crazy and somewhat destructive things at the moment to basically get the regeneration of the company. And one of those things that we did two years ago was we did architect a layoff.

00:47:16 Speaker_00
And we had never done a scaled layoff before. We had to lay off 10 percent of the company to save the company. And I didn't want to do it. I mean, it's the last thing I want to do as an entrepreneur, which is to kind of adjust our headcount.

00:47:29 Speaker_00
But we were coming out of the pandemic and we had just hired too many people. Now, it turned out that a lot of companies in Silicon Valley all did that same maneuver during the pandemic. Things were so robust in the pandemic that we were over hiring.

00:47:43 Speaker_00
And by the time the pandemic was over, we had too many people. I mean, what did I know? It was my first pandemic. And all of a sudden, my next pandemic, I'll know that there's an economic cycle associated with it and an inflation cycle too. So

00:48:00 Speaker_00
I learned a lot in the pandemic and now we're here. Now all of a sudden we're architecting two years ago, this layoff. And then when we did the layoff, then I'm trying to over communicate. I'm having all employee meetings. It's a complete dumpster fire.

00:48:14 Speaker_00
It's a nightmare. I'm getting bashed in the press on Twitter. Everyone's like shooting at me, you know, it's like, Oh boy. You know, if I had a thick skin, it got a lot thicker during that moment because

00:48:28 Speaker_00
You know, it just is not it's never going to go well, no matter what. And it didn't go well.

00:48:34 Speaker_00
And but we got through it, you know, and like to the point where, you know, you're giving me these accolades, wonderful, you know, on this on this podcast about where we are today financially and from a structural standpoint or now from product innovation standpoint.

00:48:49 Speaker_00
But that's not where we were two years ago. It was clear we had to go through a financial transformation. which included an adjustment of our headcount, and we had to go through a technology and a product and an innovation transformation.

00:49:02 Speaker_00
And those two things were going to require us to do a number of things, and they were going to be painful. And so we all had to go through some of that pain to get the gain that we have now, and that was not easy.

00:49:16 Speaker_00
You know, I was in shock that I was going through this two years ago because I had already been running the company for 23 years. Things were going pretty well. And yes, there were a lot of failures during that period.

00:49:28 Speaker_00
I just didn't expect another massive issue to hit me. But guess what? They're constantly at massive issues coming at you. And there's more coming. And that's the nature. And my friend Michael Dell is probably the best entrepreneur I know.

00:49:42 Speaker_00
You know, he says there is no linear success. So what that means is that stock chart that you just referred to, there's no up and to the right perfect chart, you know, where it's just one line. I don't care who you are. Apple doesn't have one.

00:49:57 Speaker_00
No one has one. And there's going to be changes. It could be economic changes. It could be societal changes. It could be the pandemic. There's no up and to the right.

00:50:08 Speaker_00
And if you think it's only going to be about up and to the right, you're in the wrong business or you have the wrong life. The monastic life is maybe more for you where you're You know, you're just out living in that more of that steady state. Right.

00:50:20 Speaker_00
But if you want more variation where it's not steady state, the entrepreneur life is a rock and roll roller coaster. And you get ready because it's going to be pounding you all the time.

00:50:32 Speaker_01
One of these people they described that jumped out of the airplane, kind of speaking on the rollercoaster ride, is your co-CEO, Brett Taylor. And what's interesting to me is he's also all in on agents.

00:50:42 Speaker_01
And what it makes me think about is, like, there's this meme of what did Ilya see when he left and tried to kick out Sam Altman. I'm curious, just like, what did you guys see about agents being the future that you're both so committed to this?

00:50:54 Speaker_01
So interesting.

00:50:54 Speaker_00
Well, I just think that this idea that agents are one of the most important things that we're all going to work on. And I think everyone is going to go to agents.

00:51:05 Speaker_00
So, you know, I look, I just heard about Google today has agent space, you know, and I what I first I was like, well, I guess they like the agent force name. I love Sundar. He's one of my favorite people in the world.

00:51:19 Speaker_00
You know, we heard Microsoft now has agents or I read Oracle has agents that SAP has agents. Everybody's got agents. And good, that's what we want. We don't want to be the only one.

00:51:30 Speaker_00
If you're the only one and no one else is working on it, you've got a problem actually. You don't want to be the only one. You want to be in a market. You don't want to be one company offering a solution.

00:51:40 Speaker_00
I'm the only one you want to be in a competitive market where people are competing with you and you're selling against somebody else and you're getting better and you're moving forward. It's like the automobile industry.

00:51:54 Speaker_00
You know, one of my favorite people is Toyota. Toyota-san was now the chairman of Toyota, was the CEO of Toyota. His grandfather started Toyota. He says, better, better, better, never best. You know, it's the Japanese motto of Kaizen.

00:52:10 Speaker_00
So we talked about Japanese Shoshin, which means beginner's mind. Now we're learning another Japanese word here, Kaizen. Kaizen is continuous improvement. And you need to be doing continuous improvement.

00:52:24 Speaker_00
And with where we are right now with agents, every software industry is gonna move to agents.

00:52:30 Speaker_00
We have to, just like every software industry, well, at least in CRM, we're automating customer touchpoints, data and managing data and data, building that data infrastructure, agents, it's all related. We're all moving in the same direction.

00:52:46 Speaker_01
I'm just thinking as a founder, you're just like, goddamn, I just got used to AI and everyone's wanting to work on AI at my company. Now we got to freaking figure out agents.

00:52:54 Speaker_00
No, no, no, no, no. That's a mistake. So that's that is the mindset you want. You want that mindset. You want the mindset of, oh, the next thing is coming. I can't wait for the next thing.

00:53:09 Speaker_00
In some ways, you have to be saying, I can't wait for the next failure. I can't wait for the next success. I can't wait for the next innovation. Oh, well, that's innovation overall, right?

00:53:18 Speaker_00
See, we're in an industry where technology is constantly getting lower cost, easier to use, and more automated.

00:53:24 Speaker_00
So if you're doing it for two and a half decades or four decades or four and a half decades now that i've been doing it You know when I started in this industry I started on a computer called the tier s80 model one with 4k of ram you know and

00:53:41 Speaker_00
I, as I was doing a podcast recently, they're like, well, who did you sell your first piece of software to? And I said, well, I sold it to C load magazine and, uh, in Goleta, California. And, um, for $75 for $75. And they said, thank you for them.

00:53:58 Speaker_00
And then they said, oh, that's great. And did you, you know, sell them to send them the disc? And I'm like, no, no. There was no disc. C-load standard for cassette load in basic. That was the command in basic. C-L-O-A-D. Cassette load. Clode.

00:54:13 Speaker_00
That was the command. And so that was the name of their magazine. And then you would get the cassette every month with five or six things that they had bought from people like me.

00:54:24 Speaker_00
I mean, they didn't know they were buying it from a 15-year-old kid in high school, early game high school, California.

00:54:29 Speaker_00
But you know, I had written the how to juggle thing and they bought it for 75 dollars They sent me the one page agreement and I signed it and then I told my parents and they're like What? Huh? You're doing what? Oh, okay. That's nice, honey.

00:54:44 Speaker_00
Great job So they didn't understand nobody knew like it was crazy. It's like it was like 1979 or 1978 So nobody knew I was selling software. I was in high school, you know, I It was just a moment in time.

00:55:01 Speaker_00
But I need to have that mindset all the way along, which is what is the next great thing? What is the next great success? What is the next great failure? And that you're growing, you're evolving, you're learning from that. That that's what you want.

00:55:15 Speaker_00
You want to have that growth mindset, right? You want to embrace that. Does it make sense what I said? I kind of jumped on that one little thought.

00:55:25 Speaker_00
Oh, gee, yeah, I've got this now under control, but now I've got agents, so now what am I going to... It's like, no, that's what you want. And by the way, I want what's after that too, and what's after that, and what's after that.

00:55:37 Speaker_00
That's what's really exciting about the future. It's coming. I want to be, one of our customers said this and people think I said it, it wasn't me. I want to be, you know, I want to get to the future first and welcome our customers there.

00:55:55 Speaker_00
That's what I think is, by the way, that's what I think Elon Musk does so well. Like he is like, I don't know what all the crazy things he's doing to see the future. He's clearly doing some unusual things.

00:56:07 Speaker_00
But then he's like, yeah, we're gonna have robots in the future, and brain machine interfaces, and driving electric cars, and all of these things are gonna be happening in the future, and I'm gonna have 10 companies that are gonna do all of them.

00:56:23 Speaker_00
Wow. He's not only thinking about it, he's doing them each. Amazing.

00:56:27 Speaker_01
Amazing.

00:56:28 Speaker_00
No one like this. Never seen anything like it. Don't understand how it is even possible.

00:56:34 Speaker_01
Same. Mark, I know you have to run. This was incredible. I think this is a beautiful place to end it.

00:56:40 Speaker_00
Oh, Lenny, it was so much fun. I've been looking forward to being on your podcast and talk about entrepreneurship. And thanks for everything you're doing for the industry and for entrepreneurs everywhere.

00:56:49 Speaker_01
Same, Mark Benio.

00:56:49 Speaker_00
We're all so grateful to you.

00:56:52 Speaker_01
Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

00:57:03 Speaker_01
Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at LenniesPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.