Why will Slack+Salesforce work -- and win?

1/ Slack has become primarily an enterprise sale. Strong synergy here with SFDC.

Slack is approaching 100 $1M+ ACV customers
2/ Salesforce hasn't really made small acquisitions work.

But it's gotten really good at pushing market leaders, at scale, to grow even bigger.

The $1b+ deals -- Mulesoft, Tableau, ExactTarget, Demandware -- have all done well post-acquisition

SFDC is good at this
3/ The Communications segment has over the past 5 years overtaken other areas of collaboration to become the most important area of enterprise collaboration

This is worth owning and Slack is #1 and a pure play here
4/ Defensively, Microsoft has not done quite as much with LinkedIn as Salesforce feared

But connecting the #1 customer record with the #1 communications platform is defensible and powerful

LinkedIn owns the employee record but Salesforce owns the customer record
Finally,

5/ Slack seems to culturally enjoy being a one-product company. It's hard to scale rapidly beyond $1B ARR as a one-product company. Twilio, Veeva, etc. all have multiple $1B+ ARR potential products.

It might be easier to do this as part of SFDC.
A bit more from earlier in the year on just how enterprise Slack has become:

saastr.com/5-interesting-…
Salesforce gets to add 1,000,000 developers + a potential $10B+ product that is #1 in communication

That's a good deal

And a rare gem

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More from @jasonlk

26 Nov
Some Holiday catch-up reading: The Top 10 SaaStr Posts on building a great sales team!

#1: "Your First VP Does Not Have To Be a VP of Sales."

Sometimes, the best way to find a great VPS is to hire another great VP first. Here's why: saastr.com/your-first-vp-…
And video here:
#2: "10 Crystal Clear Signs Your VP of Sales Just Isn’t Going to Work Out."

Please read this one if you aren’t sure if your VPS is cutting it: saastr.com/10-crystal-cle…
Read 13 tweets
17 Nov
Digital events are great, but you know what's going to be really hard?

These so-called "hybrid events" everyone is now talking about after we get past Covid. Digital + IRL.

Why so hard? A few thoughts here:
First, expense. A decent digital event is hardly free, even if you don't need a venue. Many SaaS companies are still spending $500k to product a digital event. SaaStr will spend up to $2m on our digital events.

Who is going to pay the >extra< expense to add this to IRL event?
Second, experience. Live streaming at events is nothing new. Yes, it works on Twitch. But WebSummit? Dreamforce? SaaStr?

All have tried it, and abandoned it.

The experience has to be great. Bolting on streaming is not enough.

Again, this is >extra< work.

Who'll do it?
Read 7 tweets
16 Nov
Latest speakers for SaaStrScale.com Dec 8-9:

Howie Liu, Co-Founder and CEO, Airtable

Carl Gold, Chief Data Scientist, Zuora

Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta

Javier Molina, VP of Corporate Sales, MongoDB

Tim Willey, SVP, Commercial Strategy and Operations, ForgeRock
Andrea Webb, SVP Customer Success and Retention, Solarwinds

Pablo Dominguez, Operating Partner, Sales and CS Center of Excellence, Insight Partners

Ellen Kindley, Chief Transformation Officer, Keyfactor

Brooke Treseder, SVP, Revenue Operations, Checkout.com
Sharon Prosser, VP of Global Sales, Zendesk

Astha Malik, VP of Planning and Enablement, Zendesk

Rico Mallozzi, Sr. Director of GTM Ops, Sapphire Ventures

Colleen Kapase, VP of WW Partner & Alliances, Snowflake

Jessica Alexander, Director Cloud Technology & OEM, Crowdstrike
Read 5 tweets
15 Nov
So my first batch of venture investments hit 20x this week

I'd like to say the learnings are novel or different than others

But they aren't

Learnings:

1. All that matters are the winners

The #1 investment is 55% of the returns

The #2 and #3 are each 12%.

So Top 3 = 79%
2. Yes, ownership matters.

Of course 2% of Zoom and Datadog are plenty for all but the largest funds.

But, the winners with the most ownership, have the biggest returns.

Just as you'd expect.
3. Double down on the winners, skip the rest.

You hear this, but then you see it in practice. Do you pro-rata on your Top 3 investments, at any price.

Skip it on the rest after the next round, probably, unless it supports the investment.
Read 8 tweets
14 Nov
Top 10 SaaStr Videos of the Week:

#1: "A Decade of Learnings from @ycombinator @mwseibel"

#2: "Going Upmarket, And How Things Have Changed in a Decade, at @trello , with Founder @michaelpryor"

#3: "A Step by Step Guide to Revenue Growth with @markroberge, Harvard Business School, ex-CRO @HubSpot"

Read 11 tweets
13 Sep
So "SaaStr Inc" revenue run rate fell to $0 in March+April with Covid ... and now is at a $3.2m run-rate, with a goal of $21m in 2021.

That's a big tilt, and a lot of change

The stakes weren't that high, but it was a second life learning on "tilting"

Here's what I learned:
1. Folks process change at different rates. Co-founders can process change the fastest. Some folks though need 10x-20x longer.

You need to >explain< rapid change many, many more times than you think.
2. Some good folks just won't go on that next journey with you. Some folks just won't want to go through the "tilt" and change. They didn't sign up for the new journey.
Read 7 tweets

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