The Value of Dreamforce
Inside the Ohana guests share their favorite Dreamforce memories, from both behind the scenes and center stage.
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- Welcome to Inside the O'Hanna.
I'm your host, Dan Darcy,
Chief Customer Officer at Qualified.
And this is our last episode of the season.
So I wanna thank you and everyone who's watched
and listened to Inside the O'Hanna.
So we're gonna do a little bit something different today.
We're gearing up for Dreamforce 23
by looking back at past Dreamforces
with some of the incredible guests
that we've had on this show.
Now we've created a roundup of these Dreamforce stories
and memories that have been shared.
And we hope the excitement rubs off on you
and gets you amped for the coming week.
Now speaking of Dreamforce,
don't miss out on Qualified's pipeline summit live
at the San Francisco MoMA rooftop.
It is going to be so fire
and I want you to mark your calendars
for Wednesday, September 13th from 4 to 7.30 p.m.
I will be there, I hope to see you there.
And I wanna thank you guys all again
for such an incredible time with Inside the O'Hanna
for all the views and listens this season.
And we hope you enjoy this episode.
- Dreamforce definitely has some of my fondest memories
of the ecosystem because there's no other
more energizing place to fill your sales force tank
than Dreamforce.
It's just great energy, great people, great vibes.
Yeah, lots of epic part-out parties.
I feel like somehow I've always ended up missing the concerts
even though the concerts are really great time.
The one thing that stands out in my memory from last year
is surrounding in a bio out of the pink elephant alibi.
And our marketing team made these stencils
of like elephant footprints
and like spray painted pink chalk like leading up to the site.
Like they did it in front of the week,
like they stopped traffic to do another crosswalk.
They did it in front of a police officer
and probably like security for the state redis.
And I'm still amazed that we were able to publish that
about like somebody having a slaviest on the wrist.
- I mean, San Francisco, do whatever you want.
(laughs)
So I want you to tell us about that first Dreamforce
that you spoke about earlier,
that you attended that your boss sent you to, you know,
and why it meant so much to you.
- The aim of that Dreamforce was the social enterprise.
It was right when Chatter came out.
Social media was kind of like a new thing
that businesses were investing in.
The number one thing I remember being surprised by
was like going to Keynote's and thinking it was like,
all right, we're gonna be talking about tech.
And like, I'm here to learn about the platform
and what I need to build up a platform.
And I felt like every five minutes Mark Benioff
was like, "And now here are the black eyed peas
and now here's Soto."
And I've never been in a room with so many celebrities
at the same time in my life.
And I kept wondering, like, what do all these crazy people
have to do with Salesforce?
But yeah, now I've learned that's just part of the process.
- I mean, everyone needs CRM.
Even the black eyed, even Will I Am,
even Will I Am needs CRM.
- Yes.
I mean, my first Dreamforce, it's just like,
you've never seen anything like it.
You're like, this is like, where do I work?
Like, this is like a rock show.
I mean, not just the concert itself,
but the keynotes and the campground and the Expo
and everything is just this massive, massive production.
Like, you've never seen and super fun.
And I just remember this one pivotal moment
at my first Dreamforce where I was like,
"Wow, I'm really lucky to be here at this time."
And it was this, we were launching force.com.
That was right around when I started.
And Ariel Kellman was running marketing
for the platform at the time.
And there was a moment in the keynote
when they brought on like three CIOs.
They kind of came out of the fog
in a really dramatic way and walked on the stage.
And like, the CIOs weren't from any like,
crazy enterprise company, but you know,
they had like the CIO of Kelly services,
the CIO of, I don't know, two other companies.
And they came on, I'm like, wow, like we have arrived.
Like this is like a real moment where like,
you know, the company is really starting to
make a name for itself and get into the enterprise.
And like, literally I know that that was just the start
of many things to come.
And there's milestones that, you know,
I could see the progression over, you know,
keynote says the, as the years went on.
Like I remember when the CEO of PeopleSoft came the next year
and I was like, that was more validation.
And George Lucas was there and then like, you know,
Bill Clinton and Richard Branson and just,
and not even, you know, sometimes it was celebrity guests,
but sometimes it was our customers
and just watching that progression just made you really proud
to be part of Salesforce.
- So honestly, I was a events guy as a product person
in my previous roles and previous company.
So I was averse to go into events.
(laughing)
So I approached it that way the first time I went,
but it's not an event.
It's sort of a cultural event, right?
It's not like a broadcast event from a product company.
- An experience, if you will.
- That's right.
And so that was the big light bulb moment for me.
It's like, wait a minute.
This is not like other tech company events
that you go to where they're just broadcasting you
what they're building.
This is BORMA connecting and so on.
So I enjoyed the four that I attended.
A lot of it was actually customers asking us
in my role about how we solve the problems
that I was responsible for.
And they were very interested to see how we scaled it.
Like how did you apply Salesforce technology
to that problem?
So that was very exciting for me kind of learning
about customers that are going through the same kind
of challenges that we are and be able to share what we do.
I think those were really exciting moments for me.
- There is so many.
Some of them probably are not appropriate
for podcasting right now.
But I love Dreamforce.
Like Dreamforce is that like you're so tired
and you're delirious, but when you're done,
you're like, oh my God, I did this.
And everything from like being in the office on a Sunday
or nine o'clock at night,
having conversations about like which version of Cody the bear
do we put on a slide?
All the way to like dancing on stage at concerts too.
My favorite Dreamforce story is one year.
When I was working on part out,
we had the cast of Silicon Valley at an event.
And that was when Silicon Valley was like the show, right?
But I think it was like a show forever.
But like for like tech people was the show,
like other people watched it.
And we had this event and we did not realize
we were gonna get the amount of interest.
And so we literally had people lining up
like the police were called like to see
the Silicon Valley people.
And we had the cast, you know, these guys that play these,
you know, characters.
And they were like, what's going on?
'Cause we needed to get police to escort us
from one building to the other.
'Cause there were so many people.
They're like, are these people here for us?
I was like, you don't realize in our industry
how much this show means to us.
They're like, dude, we live in LA.
No one even knows who we are.
I'm like, welcome.
Welcome to the Bay Area Tech.
You are rock stars here.
They're like, that's awesome.
- It was the opportunity to speak on the main stage
at Dreamforce and open up the CSG keynote.
But not just once.
But can you explain what CSG stands for?
- Sorry.
Yeah.
- The customer success group.
So the renewal segment that I'm in
is under the customer success group.
And I was able to basically open up the keynote
for the customer success group at Dreamforce
on two different occasions.
In addition to that, I was able to wear a custom suit
each time that I actually made.
- Well, tell me a little bit more.
Like, what did you do on stage?
- You know, so it's interesting.
I think this is, I talk about this synergy
and the ability to kind of bring a passion of mine
and my work life together.
So in the initial year,
we had kind of a Wizard of Oz name and I was essentially Oz.
And I came in and really hyped up the crowd,
you know, it was later in the day
and got the crowd hyped up and ready to go
and really spoke about what we were planning to deliver
and got them excited to be prepared to hear that.
And you know, the second year, it was more of the same.
And it was well received.
In fact, the suit that I wore last year to Dreamforce
went extremely viral.
Mark Benioff retweeted it.
And it got over two million views
across all platforms, including LinkedIn.
- I loved that Dreamforce became bigger
than a technology user conference.
It became an important place to have conversations
around what was happening in the technology industry
over all and what was happening, you know, more broadly.
I loved, I thought it was just so special the year
that we leaned in on, you know,
on women's equality and equal rights.
And we had women's day for the first time.
Of course, Leila and Molly loved that initiative
and that was just amazing to be a part of.
And I think that Salesforce was really at the forefront
of doing so much of those sorts of things.
- Well, there's one that kind of became legend on the team.
So like I said, we worked with these two major companies
in 2009, we launched them, but between, you know,
after that, things really started to scale pretty rapidly.
Just before Dreamforce 2010,
the week before, the Friday before,
we had set up a call between Mark, our CEO,
and Bob Beecham, the CEO of BMC, just a check-in call
because we were gonna have Bob again a year later,
you know, come on stage and talk about how things were going.
This is Friday before, Dreamforce starts on Monday
and Friday afternoon, right after the call,
it's only one on one, it's the two of them one on one.
All of our blackberries at the time start exploding.
And turns out the two CEOs, as was their right,
decided that we were going to expand the relationship
and by the way, rebrand it and announce it Tuesday morning.
And we're reading this and we're like, oh, right.
It was never easy, these are hard negotiations,
a lot of variations.
So we worked through the weekend
and the two memorable moments,
I'll share which I have never shared before in public,
but now it's 10, 11 years, 12 years old.
One of them was a moment on Sunday night
where there's a thread with Mark
and some of the senior most people at Salesforce around brand.
One of the decisions they had made was
that we were gonna rebrand this thing
which used to be called BMC,
a remedy onforce.com.
We're gonna rebrand it to remedy force.
And our legal team just lost it.
They're like, we've protected our brand,
we suit anybody who uses anything force
and there's no way we can allow this,
there's et cetera, et cetera.
And Mark's response to that thread was, just do it.
So that was Sunday night and the rest of us are like,
ooh, okay, I guess we're doing this.
So that was one.
Then the second story or second part of the story was,
this is Monday now and we spent all day locked up in a room.
Turns out Monday was my birthday.
And literally I pulled my second all-nighter at Salesforce
and that's where the Ohana came in.
It was legal.
It was Ron Huddleston who I worked for
who we all miss dearly.
Brad Armstrong from the legal team,
John Moss, head of legal, partner legal,
George Hu getting ready for Dreamforce the next day
on the phone with us at two o'clock in the morning
because we had some terms.
We were still negotiating.
We signed this thing at 610 AM.
We put it on the wire at 615 AM.
This was all in the city in the office.
I came home and I was supposed to be hosting Bob
when he came to Dreamforce.
So at 615 I left, I drove home.
This is pre-uber, pre-any of that.
I drove home with no sleep,
showered, put on a suit and went back to Hosepaw.
And that became a bit of one of those stories of,
you know, we just do what you have to do.
Everybody pulled together and we got it done.
And that's it for now.
Thank you for listening to this season of Inside the Ohana
and a huge thank you to all the incredible guests
that have shared their stories with us.
We can't wait to see you at Dreamforce 23.
And I really want you to make sure
to check out Qualified's Pipeline Summit Live
at the San Francisco MoMA rooftop,
which is taking place from Wednesday, September 13th
from 4 to 7.30 PM.
I'm gonna be there.
I hope to see you there.
And again, thank you.
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