Salesforce co-founder and Slack CTO Parker Harris — seen at Salesforce’s 25th anniversary event earlier this month — said it’s Salesforce’s “duty as the largest private employer to keep growing here.”
Salesforce Co-Founder and Slack CTO Parker Harris at the 25th anniversary of Salesforce event at Salesforce Tower in San Francisco on Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Salesforce Co-Founder and Slack CTO Parker Harris at the 25th anniversary of Salesforce event at Salesforce Tower in San Francisco on Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Salesforce might have come a long way from when it launched in a San Francisco apartment near Coit Tower 25 years ago, but Parker Harris says he’s as excited today about the possibilities ahead for the company as he was then.
When he co-founded the company with Marc Benioff, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, Harris said, he saw the potential in realizing Benioff’s vision of creating sales software that was as easy to use as Amazon’s webstore. Now, with Salesforce having been even more successful in that mission than he could have imagined, Harris says he’s tantalized by how artificial intelligence could transform the company and its business.
At an event at Salesforce Tower earlier this month marking the company’s 25th anniversary, Harris, the chief technology officer of Salesforce-owned Slack, talked with The Examiner about the company’s origins, the importance of San Francisco on its development and how AI will affect its future. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When you were founding the company in 1999, did you have any inclination that Salesforce would be where it is today?
Of course not. We did have a vision of building something that could serve all companies of all sizes. But we weren’t thinking that far ahead.
So, we had big ambitions, but no one knew that we were going to achieve what we’ve done in 25 years. We just wanted to build a business that we knew made sense, that people were going to pay money for.
What was your first impression of Marc?
We didn’t know who he was. We searched the internet, and there was nothing on him. There was like, one article — he was at Oracle. So, the only thing I knew that I sensed from him is “something good will happen with him.” I felt this inspiration from him and an early bond with him that we could do something great together.
As I understand it, you insisted the company be based here in San Francisco.
We did. We did not want to commute down to the Peninsula. We had done that for many, many years. Commuting was not nearly as hard as it is now, but there weren’t a lot of tech companies here. [The] banking industry was up here, and there were some early dot-coms. But we were all living in San Francisco, and we wanted to be a San Francisco company.
Did you worry about whether you’d be able to find enough tech talent in The City to help you build the company?
No, we didn’t really worry at all, because we knew that there was talent in The City that was already commuting. I saw early inklings, even before Salesforce, of really interesting, small companies with technology people [in The City]. And I think there were a lot of people like me that were commuting that would love to be part of a San Francisco-based technology company.
How has being in San Francisco influenced Salesforce’s direction and how it’s developed?
Our early values and how we led the company match a lot the values of San Francisco, the values of trust, customer success, innovation, quality, sustainability. Those aren’t exactly San Francisco values, but there’s a lot of alignment here. I think if we had started somewhere else, with different leaders, maybe we wouldn’t have had that same original culture.
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Was there some moment at which you really thought, “Wow, this is going to be a big thing?”
I had an inkling in the apartment of “We could build something great.” Then it was every year when we had Dreamforce. As those grew, we could see people using our service. We started to see a community around us. We started to get customers in Australia. We got customers in the UK. We were like “Oh, wow, it’s global.”
And then it was just these key moments of bigger customers. So SunTrust Bank in the Southeast, this big bank, was a big step up for us. ADP was another customer that was a big leap for us in terms of scale. Merrill Lynch private-wealth bankers was another big step. So we kept growing with the size of customers.
But we didn’t always notice the growth. We were kind of the frog in boiling water sitting there, and it’s growing around us.
Going forward, how important is it that you’re here in San Francisco? Do you continue to see the ability to grow the company and find the talent you need here in San Francisco?
I love San Francisco, and I think it’s our duty as the largest private employer to keep growing here, keep investing in the community, keep helping The City become an ever better city. We have our issues; every city does. Investing here is really important.
In terms of growth, we will grow here, but we’re also growing all over the world. We’re growing in different regions of the United States. It is a talent war. We have found amazing talent here, but we’re finding amazing talent in New York City, in Atlanta, in Toronto, in India.
Salesforce co-founder and Slack CTO Parker Harris — seen at Salesforce’s 25th anniversary event earlier this month — said it’s Salesforce’s “duty as the largest private employer to keep growing here.”
Craig Lee/The Examiner
How significant will AI be to the company and its future? And how would you put the AI era in context with the other technology eras you’ve gone through?
The feeling I had in the apartment when we started the company, like “Oh my God, we could really create something amazing” — I have that same feeling now with what’s happening with AI. The impact it will have on us and it’ll have on the world is probably as big or maybe bigger than when we started the company.
The energy we have inside of the company right now feels the same as when we started. And that’s partly what keeps me going — “Wow, there’s so much more to do. There’s so much more we can do.”
But it’s also going to take work. AI is going to change a lot. It may change our service in dramatic ways.
It’s a huge opportunity for us, but it’s an existential risk. What are those startups out there that are reinventing the future with this new, massive technology shift, just like we used the internet to disintermediate the people before us?
This is moving fast. As a technologist, I love that, because it’s fun to be in the game like we are.
I think we’re well positioned because of the customer base we have and the trust they have in us, because of the speed at which we are continuing to innovate. But we have to be better than ever right now.
