Salesforce

SF vacant office space tripled to 10M sq ft; rents cut to $20

Shaan cites a CNBC article: sub-leasable San Francisco office space jumped from 3M sq ft in 2019 to 10M in 2021, with ~$200M of real estate impairments (nearly $1B with lease write-downs across Salesforce, Dropbox, Uber, PayPal, Zendesk). Space that cost $90/sq ft is going for $20.

“So like, here's some of the numbers. Um, let me, so there's $200 million of real estate impairments in the past year since COVID It's almost a billion if you add in the lease-related write-downs from large companies like Salesforce, Dropbox, Uber, PayPal, Zendesk, just getting rid of their, their real estate. And so Dropbox itself has $400 million of impaired real estate right now.”

Every big platform with an app store breeds winners

Shaan's broader thesis: any platform that reaches critical mass and opens an app store will spawn winners. Beyond Apple and Google, he points to HubSpot, Salesforce, and Slack as under-discussed platforms where frictionless, revenue-generating products can be built.

“Like, once these platforms reach a critical mass, somebody's going to build something that's frictionless on top of it, that is able to generate revenue. So I think there's, there's money to be made in the unconventional app platforms that you don't really think about first.”

Steal thisBuild on an under-served platform app store (HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack) before it's crowded.

Sam wanted WeWork or LinkedIn to buy The Hustle, then HubSpot cold-emailed

Sam recounts rejecting private-equity and legacy-media suitors because they felt like a culture mismatch, and how he'd long fantasized about a tech company (WeWork, LinkedIn, Salesforce) buying The Hustle. HubSpot reached out unsolicited last fall and the plan clicked.

“And so in my head, I always thought, you know who should buy us? WeWork. I thought WeWork should buy us, like when they— before we found out that they weren't that great. And then I thought, um, LinkedIn should buy us. And then I started thinking, oh, what about like a Salesforce or like companies like this? And then last fall, HubSpot reached out to me and I was like, oh my God, this is finally happening.”

Build an API-first, developer-first Salesforce competitor

Immad has wanted a good Salesforce competitor for 4-5 years. His favorite angle: an API-first, data-first CRM that becomes the single source of truth for customer data scattered across databases, analytics, Stripe, and marketing tools, since Salesforce's API access is gated behind ~$200/seat tiers.

“a Salesforce competitor that was actually good. Every time I say this, like lots of people are like, it's not possible. Salesforce is so like entrenched and all this stuff, which is quite similar to things that people were saying to me when I started Mercury in 2017. But I think everyone hates using Salesforce, right?”

Steal thisBuild a CRM that's API-first and the single source of truth for customer data, instead of locking the API behind a $200/seat upgrade.

Buddy Media: seed at $4M, sold to Salesforce for ~$700-800M

Altucher was an early investor in Buddy Media alongside Peter Thiel, with Mark Pincus also in the seed round at a $4M valuation. Salesforce later acquired it for roughly $700-800M.

“we all were the seed investors at a $4 million valuation that sold to Salesforce for about $700 or $800 million.”

Veeva: the first multi-billion-dollar bet on vertical SaaS

Zak Kukoff explains that a decade ago nobody thought vertical SaaS was investable; the conventional wisdom was to go horizontal. Veeva, a Salesforce-for-pharma, was the first multi-billion-dollar vertical SaaS hit, going straight from Series A to IPO with Emergence as the only institutional Series A lead.

“And Veeva was the first multi-billion-dollar hit in vertical SaaS. It was kind of Salesforce, but just for pharmaceutical companies. And they've done phenomenally well. We were the only institutional investor who led their Series A, and they went straight from Series A to IPO. So a huge, huge outcome there.”

The real innovation at UiPath isn't software, it's the sales channel

Daniel Gross argues founders wrongly attack enterprise incumbents on software quality; like Salesforce, UiPath won via sales machinery and channel/reseller sales, not better code.

“the thing to realize about UiPath that I feel like a lot of people miss in enterprise startups is the innovation here is not the software. The innovation is the sales machinery and the sales channel. And a lot of people, for every sales company, a common meme amongst founders is to look at it and say, "Dude, dude, the software is awful. We're going to make better software." And you forget. Salesforce, the software is just as good as it needs to be.”

Steal thisWhen attacking an enterprise incumbent, copy their distribution and channel sales, not just a cleaner UI.

Buy, don't build: lean on existing tools to scale fast

Boufarhat's core scaling mindset: never build infrastructure that already exists. Use cloud tools, agencies, and platforms (e.g. Salesforce instead of a homegrown CRM) so the team can move immediately rather than reinventing the stack.

“if you have to build your own CRM and not use Salesforce, it would take your company forever to start selling. But we used a lot of things that preexisted. That was the company mindset for this last 9 months. Anything that exists. So if we can use an agency that allows it, that does that for us, all that sort of stuff, let's do it.”

Steal thisDefault to buying or renting any capability that already exists off the shelf so your team starts shipping immediately instead of building infrastructure.