saved
Salesforce – Part Two
Hraness wrote this summary from a saved copy of the source. Quotations are taken word for word from the source.
gist
Johnny Rodgers recounts Slack's early years inside Salesforce, as culture clashes, a mismatched sales machine and leadership exits wore it down. Starting with a fall 2021 office visit where he couldn't get a keyboard, he contrasts Slack's channel-first, courtesy-driven habits with Salesforce's tickets, email, Trailhead quizzes and Ohana branding. Huddles and Clips launched in mid-2021 to praise from Benioff, who didn't use Slack. Stewart Butterfield left in late 2022, a day after co-CEO Bret Taylor's surprise exit.
ideas
- Scale turned help into tickets. At Slack you asked in a channel and a person helped; at 80,000-person Salesforce you filed a ticket, got automated replies, took mandatory Trailhead quizzes and went back to internal email.
- Butterfield found Salesforce operationally wasteful. He saw celebrity spokespeople funded while inter-office travel was cut, VPs overhiring then laying off thousands, and a multimillion-dollar Laulima trip to Hawaii, and his feedback to Taylor and Benioff went nowhere.
- The sales cultures could not mesh. Salesforce reps sold vertical products to one function and were not paid on Slack, so they avoided it; Slack had sold cross-functional transformation through internal champions without pushing seats.
- Remote work produced Slack's last big launches. Audio-first Huddles replaced hallway chats and async video Clips replaced 30-minute meetings; both were refined by internal dogfooding before shipping in mid-2021.
- Leadership exits ended the integration story. Butterfield's departure, after a Davos panel with will.i.am, was planned for December 1, 2022, but Taylor resigned the day before, apparently after being denied the sole CEO role.
quotes
“And unless there is some element of that, then it’s not integration in any sense. It’s just elimination.”
“If you needed help at Slack, you asked in a channel and a human would help.”
“They didn’t understand the product. So they sold the products they understood and were easier to sell vertically.”
“Ours was a small town. Theirs was a sprawling city.”