At Salesforce, Stewart was baffled by the breadth and depth of operational inefficiency. He witnessed executives green-lighting high-priced celebrity appearances while making cuts to things like inter-office employee travel. He saw VPs overhiring by thousands of people, then laying off thousands in subsequent quarters. An annual event for tenured and executive staff named Laulima (Hawaiian for “many hands”) cost millions to fly everyone to Hawaii and put them up in fancy hotels.”
And, the usual GTM conflict:
many of the processes and cultural norms around our teams began to inevitably shift toward Salesforce’s expectations.
This was felt most immediately in Sales. Salesforce makes targeted products for business units and sells to leaders of a single function, usually sales or marketing. Slack makes an inherently cross-functional product that needs actual buy-in from an entire executive team to be successful. Salesforce sells dedicated purpose-built databases for managing information; Slack sells an open canvas for any and every department in a company to collaborate more effectively. The resulting DNA of the two go-to-market teams couldn’t have been more different.
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