Parker Harris - CTO & Co-Founder at Salesforce

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I'm curious to know how many of you have a leadership pipeline. We know that great leaders grow companies because we talk to them here on the show every day. But what are you doing to create great leaders within yours? If you're a CTO, it is 100% your responsibility to grow and improve your people beyond just their coding abilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) We've built a tool that improves your people in their craft and in leadership. Visit leaderbits.io to learn more. Today, we are talking to Parker Harris, the CTO and co-founder of Salesforce, and we discuss the value of real relationships with your customers, key indicators of a successful acquisition, and how to scale your culture as the company grows. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) This is the Modern CTO podcast. So where are you calling in from today?

(Parker Harris at 00:01:04) I'm in Salesforce Tower right now in San Francisco. Where are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) We're in Florida, but I was actually just out there last week for a whole week, and I got to see the tower. And it's a beautiful tower.

(Parker Harris at 00:01:19) Did you go to the top floor?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) I did not, but I was told to go to the top floor.

(Parker Harris at 00:01:24) You have to come up to the—that's—you can't come to the tower and not go to the top floor. So next time you're here, let us know. We'll take you up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:33) Yeah. I heard there was the most magnificent views up there.

(Parker Harris at 00:01:37) It's great. Yeah. It's such a tall building. It's kind of the view you get really from an airplane, and then because you have the curved glass walls, it feels like an IMAX theater to me, because you can stand and see quite a panorama.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:53) We did go to the planetarium, though, speaking of IMAX-style theaters.

(Parker Harris at 00:01:56) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) That was really cool. You guys had some really cool planetarium and museums and things like that. This is a great city. And I ran the San Francisco Bridge one morning.

(Parker Harris at 00:02:08) Oh, that's hard. You learn how it's not flat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) Yeah. It's definitely not flat. San Francisco itself is not flat.

(Parker Harris at 00:02:18) No. But the bridge looks flat, but if you run it, you're like, up and then back down the other side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) It was pretty freaky for me. It was pretty scary. So I'm out at my hotel and it's in the city area, and I see the bridge in the distance, and I'm like, okay. Well, it's 5 a.m. I go for runs early. And I was like, you know what? I bet you I could just go down to the water and see it a little bit better. And so I go down to an observation area and I can see it. I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. I'm like, I wonder how long to get to it. Probably like forty-five minute run. I've already been on a run for thirty minutes. I was like, I'll see if I can go to it. I can always Uber back. And then I get to it, and I'm like, alright. Well, now I'm here. I gotta run over it.

(Parker Harris at 00:02:55) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:56) But while going over it, when there's these guard rails that are extra high, but then when you get to the center, it's only like a three-foot guard rail. And you can hear the water, and it gets very nerve-wracking.

(Parker Harris at 00:03:10) Well, that's to allow the jumpers to jump.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:15) I told Allison on the trip, I was like, yeah, there's so many jumpers jump, they just ended up painting it red. She goes, is that why it's red?

(Parker Harris at 00:03:23) I have no idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:25) Yeah. But so I'm particularly excited to be talking to you today.

(Parker Harris at 00:03:31) Why?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) And that's because there's this book that I based my entire company on, and I started it last year, and we've grown to 11 people, and it's doing great. And it was this book called Predictable Revenue. You know the book?

(Parker Harris at 00:03:46) I don't know the book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:47) You don't know the book? Come on. Okay. So it's basically—

(Parker Harris at 00:03:55) Who wrote this book?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:57) Aaron Ross.

(Parker Harris at 00:03:58) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:00) And it's basically about how they scaled sales at Salesforce.

(Parker Harris at 00:04:06) Oh. Yeah. Wow. Well, what was interesting is when we started Salesforce, Marc was very clear even before I met him, and the little three-page treatise he had written on the idea. The recurring revenue model was really the most important thing to him, that we retained. And it was really interesting as we got investors. You know, we actually did try to get some venture capital firms to invest, and they said no at the time. I think it was actually a good thing because we had a lot of revenue, but we weren't recognizing all of it upfront. Right? It's a recurring revenue stream. And we weren't public. Now if you're a venture capital firm, what you're gonna want is you're gonna want to show a giant revenue stream and go public and have a big payout. And then, you know, and then move on to your next IPO. And so, but we didn't have the pressure of those types of investors. We had investors that appreciated our goal of this flywheel of recurring revenue that, you know, when we started it, it takes a while to build it up. So, you know, to get the cash flow positive, to get this profitability took a while, and you had to have patience. But that patience paid off because, yes, you know, we're basically earning the revenue this year that will show up next year. And, you know, we already know roughly what our earnings and our revenue will be this year. So it's very predictable and allows us to make adjustments much more easily, you know, to adjust as we see changes in the market, changes in our product lines that we need to account for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:03) That's exciting. So you just had your twenty-year anniversary. Right?

(Parker Harris at 00:06:07) We did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:08) So is it greater than you imagined back in the beginning?

(Parker Harris at 00:06:15) Yeah. Everyone always asks me that question and, you know, it's kind of like the frog in boiling water. You know? Each year, this gets bigger. It gets more amazing. And no, you know, when we started the company, we definitely thought about what we could create in terms of a technology and a product and that it was not something just for small businesses. It was something that would serve, hopefully, one day, all corporations of any size globally wherever they might be. But, you know, we are a very tactics dictate strategy company. That's been our philosophy ever since we started, and I think that's part of our success is that agile iterative model. And so we don't really look—even though we market and we talk about the long-term future, our execution is very near term. You know, our sales rep, just talk about predictable revenue, we have a 12-quarter close every year. Right? Each month is, well, what do we do that month? What do we do the next month? Now the revenue we earn in February, the month of February is worth 12 times what the revenue we'll earn next January. You know? So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:36) Also, help me with that one.

(Parker Harris at 00:07:37) Well, it's recurring revenue. So whatever revenue we earn in February—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:42) Oh, okay. I get what you're saying.

(Parker Harris at 00:07:43) We'll recognize 12 times that. The revenue we earn in January, we're gonna earn only one-twelfth of that. Right? Because of the rateable revenue model. And so, you know, we're super tactical, super iterative. The only time where I really get visibility into our scale—well, lately, you know, I'm in Salesforce Tower right now, and so that's a physical manifestation of scale. But it's really Dreamforce when, you know, we have 150,000 people, you know, 15 plus million online, and the swarms of people and impact we have on our customers, our partners, you know, the nonprofits that show up, the money we raise for nonprofits every year with that conference. And the people who come up to me and say, you know, Parker, you're like, thank you. You know, Salesforce changed my life. Wow. That's, you know, that's quite something. And that's really where I see the visible scale of the company. But, you know, on a day-to-day basis, you know, we really feel—I feel like many days, like, I'm in a start-up. I was just meeting with some of our top architects just now, talking about our future architecture for part of the service and feel similar, you know, in ways to Dave, Frank, and I in the apartment on a whiteboard. And so I think our iterative agile nature has helped us be successful because we—you know, even though we're a pretty large company now, we still move very, very quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:19) No. And I love it. I love that your background was writing code too. I mean, I've been writing code for seventeen years.

(Parker Harris at 00:09:26) Yeah. So, you know, you must have started when you were three.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:29) No. I look young. No. No. I started getting really—my dad would take me to work with him and give me little tasks so he could get work done because he was freelancing on nights and weekends. And so he had me, you know, moving stuff around in memory buffers and doing small tasks at age eight. And then at 13, I got hit by a car, and I was in a wheelchair for a year. And so during that time, I got to spend a lot more time at the computer and get really into programming.

(Parker Harris at 00:09:59) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:00) All the way up through high school. And now I'm 31.

(Parker Harris at 00:10:04) Wow. Awesome. Yeah. What was your programming language?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:07) Just some BASIC.

(Parker Harris at 00:10:08) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:09) Yeah. So I'm only two years away from when you started Salesforce.

(Parker Harris at 00:10:15) That's true. Right? That is true. Yeah. Yeah. Except I had three little children.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:23) I've got two.

(Parker Harris at 00:10:24) Oh, you have two? Alright. Yeah. Congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:26) I look young. I promise you this. I've got a 17 or 18-month-old little girl.

(Parker Harris at 00:10:33) Adorable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:34) She's a little younger there. And then we have a three-week-old little boy.

(Parker Harris at 00:10:38) Wow. Congratulations. Yeah. You got your hands full.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:41) My wife has her hands full. Yeah. Here's picture this morning. You got one sitting on that carpet, and then he's in the little rock and play thing.

(Parker Harris at 00:10:50) Nice. You got someone to help you there taking care of you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:53) Yes. I love when they run up—Aria and Lachlan. So she'll run up to me after I get home from work, and I'm like, this is the best feeling on the planet.

(Parker Harris at 00:11:05) Totally. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:08) So how old are your kids?

(Parker Harris at 00:11:10) I'm about to be an empty nester. So yeah. My kids are very close in age to Salesforce. My daughter is 21, junior in college, and I have twin 18-year-old boys that are about to go to college.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:25) Oh, nice.

(Parker Harris at 00:11:26) Yeah. So when we started Salesforce, I had a 1.5-year-old, and then a year in, I had three under three. So it was good times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:37) It teaches you discipline, persistence. It teaches you a whole lot of great human things.

(Parker Harris at 00:11:44) Yeah. Well, it teaches you the importance of balance, you know, and clearly, Salesforce is a super important part of my life, but also my family is also a key part of my life and making sure that you don't have one take too much from the other.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:03) So speaking of kids, let's go back to when Parker was really young. Right? What was your earliest memory of technology? When did you experience it?

(Parker Harris at 00:12:14) Yeah. So in the early eighties, probably—so I was in eighth grade. So yeah. So that would have been the early eighties. I don't think it was late seventies. So early eighties in eighth grade, my grandfather actually gave me the money to buy an Apple II computer, and my school had two Apple II computers. They had started with cassette tapes for storage. So, you know, we'd push record on the cassette tape recorder and hit save, and it would write to the cassette tape. And that was—that was—I guess that was the first phase of video games, you know, Pong and, you know—or, actually, that was before that, but then early video games is what inspired me. Like, wow. Those are so cool, and I wonder how they work. And so I got this Apple II and subscribed to Nibble magazine, which I don't know if you've heard of that magazine, but I got—a nibble apparently is half a byte. I only know that because I subscribed to the magazine, and there's a lot of sample code in there. And, you know, one year my sister and I typed in a program that I got out of the magazine for creating a banner on a printer, you know, so you could say, Merry Christmas, and, you know, the ASCII characters and blow them up into the large banner. And so I just remember, you know, I wrote a little program. I wrote a program to be—instead of a command-line interface, it was more a menu system for operating the computer. I—you know, early user of CompuServe and had a copy of Locksmith. You know, not that I did anything illegal, but, you know, I might have made a few copies of some software that I needed to use for personal use. So, yeah, I just loved the plasticity of computing that I could take ideas and then make them happen on the screen and make the computer do things, and, you know, the satisfaction of working through hard problems when the bugs happen. And I just fell in love with computing, and that was my entry. You know, a little later than you, but my entry into the love of computers and software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:47) Do you know Steve Case?

(Parker Harris at 00:14:50) I have not met him, but I certainly know of him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53) Yeah. When I was thinking about Salesforce sending out—you know, all your competitors are sending out CDs. Right? And then I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about, you know, AOL was sending out a lot of CDs. Were you just sick of seeing CDs at the supermarket? And you were just, hey, let's do no CDs.

(Parker Harris at 00:15:15) Yeah. Well, actually, it's funny you say that. Our big launch party that we had in 1999, February 1999, pouring down rain. Previously, it was a movie theater, but they had redone it called the Regis Theater on Van Ness here in San Francisco. We did this big launch party, and we had at the bottom of the building, you'd enter. It was a stark white lighting, and we paid actors to—they're in jail, and they were trying to hand you CDs as you walk in. Wouldn't you like some software? So we had lots of early stunts. We paid actors to protest Siebel Conference early on and, you know, basically say, say no to software. Software is bad. And we had a fake news crew that was filming them saying, tell us what you think about software. And some of the attendees actually came in and started talking to the reporter. It was hilarious. So, yeah, you know, our early vision, when I met Marc, you know, I've been doing early cloud as a consultant with my co-founders, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez.

(Parker Harris at 00:16:27) And so we were already in that space and could see the possibilities. And prior to that, we had done Salesforce automation at a company called Metropolis Software. So we had the background in SFA. We had early cloud, and Mark had this business plan saying, "I want to do enterprise software that's as easy as buying a book on Amazon.com, except I want to do it in the Salesforce automation space." I personally met Mark in '98 through a consulting job, had lunch with him, and said, "This is a fantastic idea, and you've met the right team," because not only do we have a clear background in Salesforce automation, but we've done a lot of work in bringing a number of enterprises to the cloud.

(Parker Harris at 00:17:20) We've done some work for a company on the Peninsula that was doing a learning system. Another one was doing debt arbitrage prior to the crash that they were moving to the cloud. And I could totally see the possibility. At first, the three of us could envision very easily the Salesforce automation system, but we also saw the potential. And, you know, as a technologist, so this is about a technologist's view of the world.

(Parker Harris at 00:17:49) The satisfaction of knowing that I actually will be running the system and can see what's wrong and can actually jump in and fix it for my customer, as opposed to the customer calls up and says, "Hey, it's not working," and then they go through that really frustrating conversation. "Well, what's not working? And where is it not working?"

(Parker Harris at 00:18:10) "Well, what are you running it on? And what's your connection to the internet?" On and on and on. Instead, we had the power to deliver customer success to our customers, and I could say, "Well, we're going to take our first CTO, Dave Moellenhoff, my co-founder. Dave, go look at this problem. The customer's having a problem no matter what size."

(Parker Harris at 00:18:31) And you just couldn't do that when you ship software. I couldn't ship Dave to every single customer and say, "Put him on a plane, go look at their implementation, figure out what's wrong." And so it's not that engineers were doing bad things or doing the wrong thing before. It's just the model is flawed to deliver a great service. And so we saw that day one.

(Parker Harris at 00:18:56) When we met Mark, we thought about this idea that, yeah, we can nail this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:02) So you guys got really big, right?

(Parker Harris at 00:19:05) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:05) And a lot of great leaders have come out of Salesforce. So, specifically, I happen to know Andy Sen. He's the CTO and co-founder of AppDirect.

(Parker Harris at 00:19:14) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:14) When we were talking—and they're a pretty big company too—but when we were, he ran a lot of the AppExchange for Salesforce in engineering, like, 2006, 2008.

(Parker Harris at 00:19:28) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:29) But when we were talking, he was crediting so much of his success in agile and learning and project and engineering to his time at Salesforce, which makes me think that you guys turn out quite a few high-quality leaders.

(Parker Harris at 00:19:44) Well, first of all, we try not to lose any of our high-quality leaders.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:49) Well, yeah.

(Parker Harris at 00:19:50) And we actually have a lot of boomerangs, as we call them, that have left and come back. So we definitely prioritize our people first, and making them successful is job one. Yeah, it's not without trial and error. Certainly, we have our share of agility issues of large companies and lots of acquisitions, which is actually why I shifted more to the CTO role in architecture.

(Parker Harris at 00:20:20) But yeah, over the years, as I said earlier in the call, iteration and tactics are super important, and constant improvement is super important. So early on, we were not thinking about agile computing and agile methodologies. When you're five people in an apartment, you're naturally agile. When we went public, we were teeny as an engineering team. We were under 50 people when we went public, you know, of all of engineering.

(Parker Harris at 00:20:56) So we were very agile. But then as we grew, the natural evolution was, "Well, you know, it's this waterfall process." And we had this kind of come-to-Jesus moment where, instead of shipping code every week, every four weeks, every month, every several months, you know, it kept getting longer to one point where we didn't ship code for a year, and we had a crisis. And that was when we had some advisors. Maynard Webb, who's one of our board members, was an advisor, and Lynn Reedy, who worked with him at eBay, Evan Golub, who's a luminary in the industry, now I think at AWS.

(Parker Harris at 00:21:39) We had these incredible people, and they said, "Oh, well, this is what you should do. eBay does this train model. It's massive branching and massive integration with a lot of automation." I was like, "Yeah, awesome. Train model. Sign me up." So I wrote a document. I called it Shinkansen, you know, the Japanese bullet train model. And my engineering team threw up all over it.

(Parker Harris at 00:22:05) They're like, "Nope. That's not going to happen here. It won't work. Great idea. But our use case and what we're doing, it's just not going to work. We can't have everyone creating separate branches and massive integrations. It's going to be a debacle." And that's when I said, "Okay. Well, let's come up with another idea." And two great leaders came to me and said, "All right. Well, this thing called agile, you know, and it's more about iteration." And we were waterfall, so of course, we blamed QE at the end of the line. It's their fault, really, because, you know, they're the ones that have been last step.

(Parker Harris at 00:22:55) And so instead, we said, "All right. Fine. Let's go agile." And they wanted to roll it out more incrementally. And we were probably 150 people by then in engineering.

(Parker Harris at 00:23:05) So bigger, but not huge. And they said, "We don't want to break things, you know, so we're just going to roll out a few teams." And I said, "Nope. We have a crisis here." And I said, "We're rolling it out everywhere all at once."

(Parker Harris at 00:23:22) And, you know, in the spirit of agile, we're going to timebox the next release. We're going to say, "We're going to release whatever the date was." And that's a requirement, is that date and quality is the requirement. I don't care if we ship nothing. We could have zero new features, but we are going to move to this agile model. We're going to move to this fixed date. Had a lot of people getting upset. Product managers, like, "Wait. You can't do that because I can't get my thing out."

(Parker Harris at 00:23:49) But it was a crisis. And so, yeah, we weren't perfect. We learned through the years. But we moved to agile, and it was a miracle. You know, everything changed from that point. And, you know, I also credit my head of engineering, Srini Tallapragada, who we hired later, who has just taken all of our practices and, you know, talk about operational excellence. You know, I handed him the job of running all of engineering, and he just sweeps everything into shape. You know?

(Parker Harris at 00:24:29) The trains go out on time. So we do three major releases a year at incredible scale. And you think about, like, you know, with no regressions in our customer's code, with very few bugs, with very few performance regressions. You think about all the things you have to checkpoint. We're still shipping software, except we're just shipping it to our own data centers.

(Parker Harris at 00:24:58) And we take the upgrade process on for our customers because our customers are living above that in a metadata layer where they're telling us how they want the system to run, the data model, the logic, the user experience. But underneath, we're changing out the engine three times a year, and that's, you know, major surgery. And so the amount of expertise we have is pretty incredible. And that's why people who do leave, which there are very few—and anyone who's listening to this, if you left Salesforce, all of them, you are welcome back anytime. We love to bring you back. But that's why they leave with such incredible expertise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:44) Hey. You guys aren't doing, like, things that are incredibly easy. You're, like, Elon Musk, right? Staring into the abyss and eating glass. Like, it's difficult, unfamiliar stuff, but sounds like you've gotten really good at it.

(Parker Harris at 00:25:56) Well, thank you. Yeah. We've gotten really good, but we still have, you know, a lot more to go. You know, I think right now, where the world is going is more and more to the public cloud providers, more and more to microservices, more and more to DevOps and service ownership. You know, we just had an architecture summit of my top 500 architects. And that, you know, that was a lot of the conversation is, "How do we keep moving the ball forward?"

(Parker Harris at 00:26:28) You know, when I acquire a little teeny company that built something on AWS, small group, small code base, but really interesting people and great technology and great products, they want that experience at Salesforce. And yet I have to take that experience and give it all the attributes of the Salesforce brand, which is around Salesforce security, Salesforce compliance, Salesforce performance, Salesforce quality. And so we have to up-level all these companies as they come in. And yet I need to do that and still provide the agility and the amazing capabilities that they had before they came into the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:16) So you mentioned something earlier about acquisitions and you moving to CTO role. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what caused you to say, "Hey, I need to make this change"?

(Parker Harris at 00:27:27) Well, a couple of things. So over a period of 20 years, we've done 60 acquisitions, of all sizes. So some of those might have been small tuck-ins, as we call them. And some of them might have been major acquisitions like MuleSoft, which is a company we acquired for API management or integration.

(Parker Harris at 00:27:49) We acquired them last year, our biggest acquisition to date. And so that's awesome. You know, we would not be the company we are without having gotten really good at acquisitions and done really every one of those 60 acquisitions. But as you acquire those acquisitions, they come with their own data stores and their own compute layers and their own code bases and their own development methodology. And so, and yet, you know, if you look at our marketing as a company, we talk about the customer success platform and sales and service and marketing, commerce, and, you know, Quip for collaboration and all the aspects of, you know, customer interfaces and the customer 360 and AI, all of that working seamlessly together.

(Parker Harris at 00:28:44) Underneath, you know, we've done a number of acquisitions. So what I recognize is, "Wow. You know, we're running our technology in 70 to 80 different data centers, if you include public cloud regions." So that's a lot of different places.

(Parker Harris at 00:29:03) We have a number of different database technologies, number of different messaging technology. And what I want is to deliver to our customers and continue to improve the technology we have to deliver that customer success platform, that customer 360. And so two years ago, I shifted more towards a CTO, architecture-driven role where I, as a co-founder, can, through really a lot of influence, work across all of our product lines. You know, I have Srini Tallapragada who's running our engineering, and so great. Let's make sure that we're still going to remain number one in Salesforce automation, number one in service, number one in marketing.

(Parker Harris at 00:29:54) But then what I did is I said, "That's great. But across, when you go from sales and service," and everything's more and more cross-channel now, or if you're going from commerce to service or commerce to marketing, I want the experience for our customers to be seamless. And I don't want them to have to do extra work to make that solution work well. And so what I did is I moved to focusing on architecture and driving more long-range planning. So our success is still on tactics, but long-range planning is important if you want to—you know, it takes years sometimes to really move the needle on some of this.

(Parker Harris at 00:30:36) And so I started focusing on that and getting teams across these different units working together and collaborating and getting engineers who really want to ship code and work on their thing to pick their heads up and say, "Oh, okay. Wow. That team over there is doing something fairly similar. How do we start to collaborate? How could we move more to a more shared service model?"

(Parker Harris at 00:31:04) And so we have a number of long-range plans of a lot of different disciplines, you know, from metadata to persistence to messaging, and on and on and on, security. And it's really aligned a lot of the teams, a lot of the architects, and has given us kind of a North Star of where we want to go. But then when we go back to tactics, which is how we operate, it guides that direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:31) So when we're talking about this, you're talking, like, do you, like, sort of standardizing how messaging is done at Salesforce across your teams? Is that what you're talking about?

(Parker Harris at 00:31:41) Well, that's an example. I just met with the team that—so we created in our core product for sales and service and our Lightning offering something called Platform Events. So if you think about message-based architectures or kind of asynchronous, more message-based architectures, they're definitely a better way to scale some types of workloads. So we have a team that built something for some of our clouds for sales and service and our Lightning Platform.

(Parker Harris at 00:32:16) But other clouds like marketing and commerce also really need to consume that same bus because you may want to have an event that needs to be shared between those clouds. So what they're talking about, a long-range plan, is how does this service start to level up and be a global service? And think about it as a messaging service for everyone that everyone can standardize on that, you know, allows metadata-defined messages to be consumed regardless of what data center and what product you're working on, that it's a unifying layer that's really important for part of our future architecture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:00) It's interesting. So the new acquisitions could actually just adapt to that layer.

(Parker Harris at 00:33:04) Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06) Probably get that worked into the acquisition with your amazing acquisition team.

(Parker Harris at 00:33:14) There's definitely a lot of—you know, there's a lot of art to integrating acquisitions, you know. And it's not just technical. It's definitely a major cultural aspect and a people aspect, you know, and giving that acquired team a vision of how, you know, they're bigger and better as part of us. And I think we've gotten quite good at it. Mark really prioritized the focus on doing acquisitions early on.

(Parker Harris at 00:33:41) And even more than me, because I like to make things work, that's my job, is he's okay if a small acquisition early on failed. I would be really upset, like, "Oh, gosh, that wasted some money or it wasted some time." But his point was always, "Well, we need to get good at acquisitions, and it's important that we're not afraid to do them." And I think that's why we've done, you know, 60 acquisitions. It's why, you know, when we do a big one like MuleSoft, it's why we're able to really make it successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:15) Let's run a hypothetical. We'll have fun. I like to have fun. Okay. Let's say that I'm going to do my first acquisition of another technology company, and we have similar customer base, and so I want to acquire them and pull them in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:31) And let's talk about the human side of things so we don't get too technical on the business side of the hypothetical. Human side of things, what should I look for? What advice is, like, after doing all these acquisitions, you have, like, a top three hit list, I'm sure, of where you're gonna start probing. Give me some advice. Like, I'm going to do my first acquisition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:49) Where should I focus some of my energy?

(Parker Harris at 00:34:53) Well, I think first, you need to try to understand their culture. You know, is it a command and control type of culture where it's very hierarchical? Is it a really flat, super collaborative culture? Is it a culture where teams fully own their areas? You know, you talk about autonomy and mastery, or is it a kind of company that is more matrixed?

(Parker Harris at 00:35:20) And then, hopefully, you understand what your culture is like. And you can do that by, you know, just talking to leaders and understanding their personalities. Ask them about their leadership style. Ask them about their org structure, and basically, how they think about building and growing their own company. And then try to figure out, are you similar, or are you really different?

(Parker Harris at 00:35:49) And that doesn't mean you should do the acquisition or not. It's, you know, it's not a disqualifier if the culture is different. But I would say if culture is similar, that bodes really well for your success. And it's not that one culture is better than another. It's just that, you know, people are different.

(Parker Harris at 00:36:10) You know, companies are different depending on, you know, really the founders and how they crafted the original organization and vision. If it is different, then you should definitely think about, well, how are we going to integrate them and, you know, how much are we gonna try to change them? You know, it's kind of like a bad relationship. You say, well, this person is really different than me and, you know, but I can fix them. Usually, that doesn't work out so well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:39) Ask my last few girlfriends. No. Just kidding.

(Parker Harris at 00:36:44) So that's, you know, from a cultural perspective is super important, and we've grown over time to understand that as important. Definitely look at security. We will disqualify companies, you know, because trust is still our number one value, always has been. And so, you know, technically, how are they dealing with cybersecurity? How do they talk about it and think about it as a priority?

(Parker Harris at 00:37:14) And, you know, we always have to uplevel companies when we bring them in, but how much of a problem is that gonna be? And sometimes it can be such a problem that it's deep in the architecture, and it means that it's gonna be very expensive to go fix. You know, in Salesforce, our trust is number one, then customer success, our second value. Well, you know, how does the company you're looking at think about customer success? How do they think about serving their customers?

(Parker Harris at 00:37:47) Are they selling futures and hoping that eventually they will deliver and, you know, customers are frustrated, or are they really focused on making their customers successful and listening? And it's not that, you know, you don't have customer issues. It's how do you deal with them when you do have a customer issue. You know, early on, as we were growing, you know, you get a two person company, three person company complained to us in an email, and Mark would say, we'll get right on it. And we would put our top people on it.

(Parker Harris at 00:38:18) And, you know, if you look at that as a size issue or a money issue that, you know, what they're paying us versus what we're putting on it, we're not making money on that account. It's totally the wrong way to think. It's, you know, make every single customer successful, and they will help you grow your company. They will become the trailblazers is what we call them now, because they'll spread word-of-mouth, they'll talk about your company, and they'll frankly help you sell. Yeah.

(Parker Harris at 00:38:50) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:50) And you have a, is it a Trailblazers event, or you have some sort of a Trailhead that's the software developer conference coming up?

(Parker Harris at 00:38:58) Yeah. It's coming up. Trailhead DX is coming up in May, so I hope this is possible. It's our developer conference, and it's grown every year. I think we're, I think it's growing to about 14 or 15,000 people this year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:13) Wow.

(Parker Harris at 00:39:14) And, you know, it's all types of developers. It's admins. It's hardcore programmers, and they're gonna, it's gonna be here in San Francisco at Moscone Conference Center. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Parker Harris at 00:39:25) So it's kind of like a mini Dreamforce, but just for the geeks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:30) Dude, I'm in. That sounds fantastic. I love that type of stuff.

(Parker Harris at 00:39:36) And you...

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:37) You have all the tracks posted on the...

(Parker Harris at 00:39:39) Yeah. Registrations open. So, okay. Let me let me know if you can make it out. I'd love to host you here, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:46) Oh, yeah. That would be, I'm loving San Francisco even more. You know, it's hard to be in the technology business and not be out in San Francisco. Yeah. Like, I go out there a lot.

(Parker Harris at 00:39:55) Plus it starts to get a little hot in Florida around then, so you might wanna cool off here in San Francisco.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:02) Yeah. The first time I went, it was in the summer. And so I leave here, it's 90 and humid. And I get to San Francisco, and I'm like, it's like 60 degrees. I'm like, what is going on? And people explained to me the effect in the city and the water, and I was like, well, it's very nice. Very much enjoy it.

(Parker Harris at 00:40:20) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:21) So how many people total in technology at Salesforce?

(Parker Harris at 00:40:26) I don't think we review, we publish that number.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:30) Oh, okay. Because you said 500 architects. So, I mean, like, let's say it's over a thousand people in technology.

(Parker Harris at 00:40:35) We have thousands and thousands of people in... Okay. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:40) Yes. So that was just my intro to a question about stress. You have lots of people, lots of moving parts. How do you personally deal with stress?

(Parker Harris at 00:40:51) Yeah. Well, you know, one of the things that, you know, as I said, our people are most important, and we have, in our planning process, which we should probably talk about, our first priority is actually people and their well-being. And so what I've always done is, you know, obviously, food and sleep meets the basics. Like, make sure you're eating right, make sure you're sleeping. Get exercise.

(Parker Harris at 00:41:24) But then, and exercise certainly helps with stress. But, you know, we've had some super stressful times, and I usually try at some point, it's not, you have to let yourself, you have to give yourself permission to be less stressed is what I would say. And you can do that by stepping back and trying to get a little perspective on the situation. And, frankly, I also use humor. I think humor is a great stress reliever that, and some people find it a little dark.

(Parker Harris at 00:41:57) But in the most stressful situations when things are really, really tough, I usually will make a joke out of it, you know, and just laugh about it. And that makes me feel better and usually helps others kind of get a little relief.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:14) No. I love it. And I like that you talked about the basics too because they're always the most boring and everybody knows them, but they're the hardest to do consistently.

(Parker Harris at 00:42:22) And so, yeah. Yeah. And I always tell people, look, we are not running a sprint here. You know, we just had our twentieth birthday. We are running a marathon. You know? As you said, you're a runner. You're here in San Francisco, and he's like, I'm gonna keep going.

(Parker Harris at 00:42:40) We keep going across Golden Gate Bridge. Well, I want all of our engineers to keep going. And so, you know, if we're overstressed in the short term and we feel like this one thing is the most important thing in life and nothing's more important, then how are you gonna get to that next one if you become so stressed that you get burned out, that you need to take a break? And sometimes that happens, and that's okay. And, you know, that's another way to relieve stress.

(Parker Harris at 00:43:07) It's like, okay. You really need to take a break. So I'll, we'll say, you know, we'll tell people to take a break. One of our top engineers at a previous company, we tried to hire him early on. His name was Craig Weisman.

(Parker Harris at 00:43:21) He was our second CTO. And we brought him into the office. He was, and he was really stressed out, and we were trying to hire him. And we said, alright, Mark. We want you to talk to Craig.

(Parker Harris at 00:43:35) We want you to close him. It's really important. So Craig goes into Mark's office, and they're talking. They're talking. We're waiting for him to come out.

(Parker Harris at 00:43:43) We're, like, really excited. Like, Mark is, Mark is a consummate closer. He is gonna close. Craig comes out, and he says, well, Mark told me I need to go to Spain for a month, and I need to spend a lot of money on a great house that, you know, I could live in, and that I just need to go relax. I'm like, what?

(Parker Harris at 00:44:06) You're supposed to come here and help us build Salesforce. What happened? And Mark just read him and said, you know, you're too stressed. You know? You need to leave and go take care of yourself.

(Parker Harris at 00:44:18) And he did. And then he came back and, you know, he's the father of Apex Code, father of Visualforce. You know, he brought some of our coolest and most successful technological advances. And it was worth waiting. And so, you know, your well-being and your ability to deal with stress is super important.

(Parker Harris at 00:44:41) I think, you know, we're never perfect, but we focus a lot on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:46) You know what I like about that story? It tells me a lot about, like, how, you know, I don't know a lot about the Salesforce culture. I've been learning about it on the call here with you. But it tells me a lot about, like, how it aligns with our culture, because what he did was is he did what was right for the person and not what was necessarily in his best immediate interest, but he instead looked at it as what is right for this human right now and then did that thing, and I love that.

(Parker Harris at 00:45:14) Yeah. It kind of relates to the success metric that we have and value. And it's not just about our customers. It's about, we use the word Ohana, which is a Hawaiian term for family. You know?

(Parker Harris at 00:45:27) And our employees, our partners, our customers, you know, our vendors, it's all part of our Ohana. And we do a lot to, you know, really take care of them. Super important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:39) Yeah. I'm getting this new perspective on business. So prior, all of my technology and business experience was just building applications and platforms for VCs or just customers that came through from relationships from VC type people. And so I didn't have, like, corporate company customers. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:02) I just did these, like, projects. And that was cool. But now with this company, we have corporate, like, customers and things like that, and it's so different than I imagined, Parker. It is so, like, you get to know these people. Like, they're in the same boat with you. You have to figure it out together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:17) Like, our success is intrinsically tied together. And then it, it makes it when you have that relationship and you get to experience that and you realize that, wow, I'm just kind of like doing business with friends, my customers. Like, everybody just kind of comes together and it's like, this is who you do life with. This is who you have to spend time with. You love, ups and downs with these people and they're your customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:36) And you're, you know, you're providing some value to them. So it's so different than, I guess, my imagination had set up. But the coolest thing about all of it is, like, as you start getting them and growing them, you can refer people to them. Like, in our sales stuff, we can say, oh, if you're undecided, you know, just talk to one of our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:56) And then we just, they're, like, super excited about it, and they're like, oh, you won't believe, like, this works for us. And I was like, what? Like, that is by far the most useful thing in the world. And so I know it's like, I feel like a child learning to walk. Like, I'm all excited about something that you've lived and breathed for the past twenty years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:13) But I'll tell you what, like, it is much cooler than I thought it would be.

(Parker Harris at 00:47:23) Yeah. Yeah. It's all about those relationships. Exactly. And, you know, back to our customer success value, making the customer successful.

(Parker Harris at 00:47:33) And, you know, this is technology we're talking about. So you can abuse it. You can mess it up. You can have a bad implementation. And but when that happens, it's not about being perfect.

(Parker Harris at 00:47:46) It's about what do you do when there is a problem, and how do you show up? And, you know, are you gonna show up and jump on it and help them and be their trusted partner? Or are you gonna wait for them to really scream about it and, you know, try to hide behind things? And, you know, I think when I shipped software, sometimes you wanted to do that because you're worried you couldn't solve the problem. But in cloud computing, I think we're all empowered to make our customers successful, and it just pays back in riches, like you said.

(Parker Harris at 00:48:19) Like, you know, it's almost even better if you've been through a hardship with a customer and you work through it in the trenches with them. You know, they will work with you for life. You know, they, because they've seen you in the heat of battle working through a problem, being there for them, and then they trust you. And we've had CIOs who I've known for many, many years.

(Parker Harris at 00:48:44) And, you know, sometimes they change companies, and when they change companies, they still have this relationship. And, you know, and then they say, hey. We need to bring Salesforce in. Obviously, selfishly, it helps us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:56) Yeah. No. This is exactly, the customer I had in my mind, he had an issue. We onboarded them. It was two or three weeks into it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:04) He noticed something funky. He called us up. It was, for EST time, it was Friday at, like, 04:50. And he's like, hey. What's going on here?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:11) And we're like, well, that's interesting. Let's take a look at it. We started digging through some logs. And then I was like, this is, like, unacceptable. We have to handle this right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:18) And I realized, like, by the time it hit 07:00 that no one in my team had even flinched. We were all sitting here, like, huddled around the screen. Like, we have to get this right for this person. We just signed them. They're liking the platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:31) And I was cringing inside, like, oh my gosh. We're gonna lose this customer. Like, I can't believe we've deployed 20 customers. We haven't had an issue. And then our biggest client yet has an issue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:40) And it just killed me inside, but we stayed up all night, worked on it the next day, Saturday. I was emailing him, you know, every three or four hours with an update. This is what we found. You know, it's, like, not a threat. We've reduced it to this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:55) We ultimately found out the issue was a QA engineer did something. Yeah. Yeah. It was a QA engineer had done something that we classified as a security event because we didn't know how it got there. And so they were just testing something in production to replicate it that they had seen in staging and we're like, we thought it was a security breach, but it wasn't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:01) So we were, just keep it, like, we were freaking out. But it was, ultimately, the way he felt about us after that, we went out and visited him when I was in San Francisco last week, and he was, like, you know, what you guys did, like, he was, it's just unbelievable how you just dropped everything and I was like, oh, I think we got a fan for life.

(Parker Harris at 00:50:36) Yeah. So important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:38) But for me, there was no other, there's no other possibility. It's my brand. It's the business. It's like no customer should ever have anything but a perfect experience. That's what we shoot for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:47) And right, and it just, it's amazing how like it attaches to you and it's like you can't let this happen, you know?

(Parker Harris at 00:50:53) And so my advice to you, you know, if you think about your company, you said you had what, 10 people? Yeah, 11. Yeah, 11 people?

(Parker Harris at 00:51:01) So it's easy for those 11 people to understand your culture and understand that value. But you know, that's why it's been important for us to write our values down, to talk about them. You know, when we have events and we market to our customers and our partners, we want our employees to go to those events because we're also teaching our employees about what we value and what's important.

(Parker Harris at 00:51:25) And so think about, you know, if you were going to go from 11 to, you know, 10,000 people, which would be pretty cool, how do you then make sure they all share your values, what you just said? And so making sure you write it down, making sure you're communicating transparently as a company, reviewing it openly and transparently regularly. And you know, how do you onboard your employees to teach them not just about your technology and your mission as a company, but your values is super, super important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:02) I'm taking notes, Parker. And then I'll develop lots of relationships with great people like you to help keep me on the right track. But yeah, we have dreams of complete and total domination of the industry, simply because if we're, that's like, by us doing our best work, that's the natural byproduct.

(Parker Harris at 00:52:22) Yeah, exactly, right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:24) Oh man, this is great. So I will definitely, I'm definitely interested in coming out in May. I think it'd be really cool to meet you and experience this culture. I've seen so many write-ups on the culture and style of the events, and so I think it's really cool to see how it translated for the engineering.

(Parker Harris at 00:52:41) Have you been to a Salesforce event?

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:43) No, I haven't.

(Parker Harris at 00:52:44) Oh, well, you're in, you know, if you don't make it out for TrailheaDX, you should definitely make it for Dreamforce or both. Dreamforce is next year. I don't remember when. It's probably September or November. I think it's November next year.

(Parker Harris at 00:53:00) Yeah, it's just before Thanksgiving. So, but the tale is...

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:03) The legend. I know the legend because it like shuts down the city. It's like the biggest thing ever.

(Parker Harris at 00:53:10) And you just get to talk to so many customers. I mean, you would meet and you would develop business too. A lot of customers come to talk to other customers that we have, and they're selling. You know, they're building their business. They're building their relationships. It's just a great time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:30) Yeah, I first learned about it through listening to a YouTube recording of Tony Robbins. He was giving like a speech there at the event, and he was talking about it and talking about the culture and the company and everything. And so through one of his pieces of audio content, I ended up learning about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:50) So I noticed when I was reading, I read some of the Business Insider articles with you, and they had, and I felt like we connected on this, so they had this picture of you. You looked magnetic, intelligent. You're speaking publicly. And it said, Parker Harris is not shy. He is an excellent public speaker. And so I was like, okay, okay. So I started out shy and quiet, but then I sort of, I see it as like we often typecast engineers into that because that's sort of a state you have to be in to think super deeply for extended periods of time. Like you can't be really loud thinking deeply and quietly for extended periods of time. So I see it more as like a caterpillar butterfly thing, where it's like a stage in your existence moving from quiet introvert engineer to, you know, outgoing, dynamic, confident individual. But I also was reading in the article, and you had a great amount of confidence for the quality of your work early on, or at least in your thirties, right? And you said you were the best in the valley. And so that's very attractive to me, right? But were you always very confident and well-spoken, or did you, were you quiet and shy at first?

(Parker Harris at 00:55:02) So I lean more towards an introvert, but I've learned to speak, you know. When our first conference ever was, I think it was All Things Digital. Pretty sure it was Palm Springs. And I mean, this was in 1999. So, you know, we barely had the service at the time, and we had bugs in the service. It was crashing every hour because we had a memory leak that we couldn't find. But you know, we had to be in the show. Marc was on stage, and he wanted me to do the demo. And so I'm like, sure, I'll do the demo. I'll be the quiet guy at the computer, you know, do the demo. So Marc gets up and, you know, we have a guy in the audience restarting the server, you know, right when we got up to make sure we didn't have the memory leak. And Marc starts talking, and I'm like, okay, I'm ready to do a demo. And then he turns to me and is like, "Parker, would you like to say anything?" And I'm like, "Uh, hello, Palm Springs." That's all I could come up with, you know, because I was just tongue-tied. But you know, at Salesforce, public speaking is really important. And so as I said, we had an architecture summit last week, and we had our architects presenting, and we had speaking coaches that worked with them, you know, because we want them to learn to speak.

(Parker Harris at 00:56:30) Now a lot of them are geeks. They're introverts. They don't want to speak. But you should have seen it. They were amazing. And at our Dreamforce events, we're always rotating new speakers in because we want everyone to get up there and have that experience is also incredible to, you know, stand up in front of that many people. We have world, we take Dreamforce on the road, so it comes probably, I don't know if we do one in Florida. Well, we do one in, you know, we do one in Atlanta. We do it in Atlanta.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:59) Oh, I'm going to the mothership, my friend.

(Parker Harris at 00:57:00) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:01) I've got a mothership. If I'm sold on the experience and all these dreams of what I heard it is, like I have to have the actual experience.

(Parker Harris at 00:57:08) Yeah. So, just a long answer. No, I was not comfortable public speaking. You know, my first official Salesforce event was in Sydney that I hosted myself and led. And it's now on the bloopers reel that marketing has because, you know, I was going through and doing a great job, and then I just got stuck on a slide. I'm like, okay, that's not the right slide. So I started to say, "Previous slide, next slide, previous slide, next slide." You know, meanwhile, the marketers are cringing in the back and, you know, saying, "Parker, just keep moving forward." So it was about, it's all about practice. It's not, you know, and I'm nervous every single time. But you know, I've learned to get up there, and I do enjoy it once I get going. But if you look at all the Salesforce events, you know, it's not just me. There are just so many amazing speakers. And you know, marketing for us is part of what's really important to show the future to our customers, to show the future to our partners, to show the future, frankly, to our employees. So when they're writing their software, they know where we want to go. And so we're painting that vision. And so marketing, ever since we started the company, has been key to our success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:29) I love it. I've even hired like sketch artists to sketch like what the next stage of our company will look like and pass it around the office and stuff. Because when someone can see it, they can get there. It's really hard to get there when you, like you can describe it with great words and everything, but when you can see it, what it should look like, you can then take action towards that destination.

(Parker Harris at 00:58:48) Totally agree. Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:49) I get nervous too. I just rewired it. I told myself, or I heard this somewhere, nervousness is just excitement because you're about to change the world.

(Parker Harris at 00:58:58) I like that. Well, and also just knowing that everyone's nervous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:02) Everyone's nervous. Normal.

(Parker Harris at 00:59:03) Yeah. And frankly, and back to the customer success note, reminding yourself that the people, at least for us at our events, are excited to see you. They love you. You know? And so they embrace you as you get up there and just reminding yourself that you're not in, you know, a tough crowd.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:24) Yeah, the crowd is typically very supportive, at least in my experience.

(Parker Harris at 00:59:29) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:29) Yeah, if you're sharing value.

(Parker Harris at 00:59:31) Understand culture though. You know, if you go to Japan and you present, you're not going to get the same reaction you get in the US. They'll be very straight-faced, and you know, they will not be reacting to what you're saying as directly. So you just have to understand that and make sure you don't get surprised.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:50) Okay, I'll make a note. When I go to Japan, I should not expect the same people making posters with my name on it.

(Parker Harris at 00:59:59) Exactly. They're not going to be clapping and jumping up and down enthusiastically quite as much.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:05) They will be inside, though.

(Parker Harris at 01:00:06) They will be inside. It's just a more reserved culture.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:09) I can help. Parker, you're the best, man. I can't say thank you enough. I'm so grateful that you took some time to come hang out, share some of your advice and your experience with the audience. It's just really fantastic.

(Parker Harris at 01:00:22) I really enjoyed it, Joel. This was super fun. Thanks for the opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:31) Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then cc me, [email protected]. If you cc me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout-out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.