The Value of Trust
In this episode, Dan is joined by Avanish Sahai, who shares his remarkable journey at Salesforce and discusses how he leverages his past experiences to provide guidance to major technology companies.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Inside the Ohana.
I'm Dan Darcy, Chief Customer Officer at Qualified.
And today I'm joined by my great friend, Avanese Sahai.
Avanese, how are you doing?
- Hey Dan, so good to see you my friend.
I'm doing well and delighted to be here.
- Good, good.
Well, happy, happy day.
Let's go.
All right, so I wanna dive right into our first segment,
Ohana Origins.
So, Avanese, how did you discover Salesforce
and really start your journey with Salesforce?
- Well, I actually have a long history with Salesforce.
So I was first a customer from probably 2001 onwards.
I was at early to mid-state startups.
Typically I ran marketing and product and partnerships.
And frankly, for all of those companies,
Salesforce was our CRM.
So I was a customer and then it was an '09
when we had just sold a company called BDNA.
And I got a call from some friends who were at Salesforce
saying, "Hey, there's this interesting role here
"that we think you might be a good candidate for."
And they described it and it was pretty vague,
to be honest.
And then we started chatting and instead of taking six months off,
I took about three weeks off and came on board
to kind of think about this app exchange business.
So that was in June of 2009.
- So give me the details of this app exchange role.
Like what was the job?
What was your first impression about everything?
Obviously it sounds like when it's vague,
it's the typical fake until you make it.
Like there's something here we don't know what it is.
But so that's, I mean, I hate to say that way,
that's kind of what it was, right?
Which was there were about 200 integrations
that were out there.
There's a relatively small but mighty team
that was working on this.
But the question that Mark and George who was the,
then the EVP of marketing alliances
under whom we reported,
the question they were asking was,
can we expose a platform as a service?
We've launched it as force.com.
We think there is something there,
but can we figure out the business model,
the technology model, the pricey model,
to go to market model to attract other companies,
particularly other ISVs, independent software vendors,
to come and build our platform.
And remember, '09, cloud was not quite the term we used, right?
We had software as a service,
and this was visionary.
This was visionary stuff.
Which was, hey, yeah, we got integrations
and that's important and we're gonna continue doing that.
But can we also bring on some startups, of course,
but can we bring on some incumbent companies
that have been around for a while?
And would they build their SaaS offering on our platform?
That was the question.
- Yeah, I mean, that's pretty awesome.
And what a vision back then,
I mean, how were you thinking about it?
Like, I'm sure your head was spinning.
Like, how did you think about bringing on those first customers
or tackling that kind of bigger role?
- Well, being that it was Salesforce,
there was already a pretty strong idea
of what we wanted to do.
And frankly, I think a lot of kudos go to Mark,
to Barca Harris, co-founder,
is George, a bunch of others who were thinking about this
and saying, look, Salesforce for its first,
you know, was 10 years old at the time,
had pretty much sold around IT.
So the hypothesis was,
let's go find a few companies that sell to CIOs,
that have been selling to CIOs,
who may not have a cloud or SaaS offering,
and then entice them, those organizations,
to bring their, whatever product they may have, right,
onto forest.com.
And specifically, there were two very large names,
that were customers of Salesforce,
and the Salesforce automation side by then.
These were BMC and CA.
And these are companies that have been around
for 30 plus years, right?
They were kind of old school,
they ran IT basically,
between the two of them plus IBM and HP,
you had kind of the IT management framework
for any organization.
So the first order of business was,
let's go bring BMC and CA onto the forest.com platform,
'cause then we have a message to CIOs that says,
look, the companies that you use,
you've been using for decades
to manage your IT infrastructure,
also run on forest.com.
And by the way,
that's why you should be working with Salesforce
and Sales Cloud and forest.com, et cetera.
So that was the opening salvo.
In June of 2009.
That's incredible.
I mean, let's pull on that a little bit.
So I mean, I know you've had a lot of success
while at Salesforce.
What would you say,
is your biggest win you've had there
or something that you're really proud of?
Yeah, well, so I think there's two big things, Dan,
and I'll kind of talk about each of those.
So on the one hand, just continuing a bit of that story,
I turn around and ask the question,
okay, what have we discussed with BMC or CA
about building on forest.com?
Oh, nothing yet.
Okay, that's fine.
And then what are our expectations?
And I can't you not?
The expectations coming from the top,
or we want both those organizations,
or by the way, mortal, mortal competitors,
to be announcing their products on forest.com.
We want their CEOs to be on stage with Mark
at Dreamforce,
and we want full contract sign and everything committed.
So of course, naive means like,
so when is Dreamforce?
I'm thinking maybe it's a year away.
It's in November.
So I do the math, I'm like, oh crap,
we got four months to figure this out.
So proud moment one was rallying
an enormous number of people inside Salesforce.
And that's why, when we talk about Ohana,
I mean, I truly touched,
or we myself and the team,
truly touched legal ops, rev ops,
product, platform, marketing.
I mean, name a team and we were trying to get stuff done.
From then on, it opened the doors for us internally
and externally to build a program,
but underlying that the most important part
is build a team that could really take our message
and convince a huge number of both established incumbents
and a bunch of very innovative startups
to come work on the Salesforce platform.
And that was, that's something that I still,
get goosebumps when I think about that.
I mean, I remember obviously I was on stage
at the time when we had both of them come up
because we had to demo their stuff.
So it was a pretty momentous time.
I obviously back then was a lot younger,
didn't realize how groundbreaking it was,
but obviously looking back now,
I mean, this really opened up that cloud
you can build on cloud.
And these traditional on premise companies
are starting to see Salesforce as the leader of cloud
and to your point, it was obviously on demand,
back then or SaaS.
And then you kind of built that whole platform as a service.
That's pretty incredible.
- Yeah, and honestly Dan, one of the things that was,
not necessarily surprising,
but probably one of the challenges of the time.
These companies, they were multi-billion dollar companies.
They didn't feel that urge.
They didn't feel the market shaking under them.
And frankly, there was resistance inside those organizations
because it was not a skill they had.
It was, and it was not by the way,
just a technology change.
This was a complete business model change.
Think about, and this is where again,
because I had a consulting background,
I think was one of the reasons the team
thought I'd be one of the folks who could help frame this,
which was a technology conversation for sure.
But you also thinking differently about your pricing model,
subscription versus large enterprise deals.
I mean, these folks did multi-million dollar deals
out of the gate.
And now you're saying, well,
it's gonna be X dollars per user per month.
They didn't know how to do that.
They did their systems and how to do that, by the way.
Then you talk about customer success and they're like,
huh, what is that?
So it was fascinating to take these lessons
from a relatively young company called Salesforce
and apply that to really transform
the rest of the industry.
And the team we built,
which I'm still super proud of,
took things that were somewhat amorphous
and crossed the board we created something
that was just magical.
- Incredible.
Now, let's take the opposite end of the spectrum.
What was something you struggled with or,
what did you learn?
- Yeah, look, again, I kind of alluded to this,
but one of the things that
was a bit of a rude awakening was,
we've been talking a lot about this,
but if you think about a platform
and if you think about others building
commercial products on your platform,
there's a lot of services, a lot of things
that need to be put in place.
Anywhere from how they build it,
how they test it, how they distribute it,
how they scale it, et cetera.
We had some of that, we didn't have all of that.
- Just kind of making it up as you kind of go along.
- It worked too, we were learning.
- Yeah, it worked great on PowerPoint.
(both laughing)
Right?
And then you kind of said, ah crap,
they're really gonna be putting this on commercial offering
and we need to start transacting and tracking.
So I think some of the lessons were around
how do you fly the plane
while you're still building it somewhat
and fly it with one engine
while you're putting the other engine together?
It was thrilling, it was exhilarating, it was exhausting.
All of those at the same time,
because you're on the receiving end of a lot of
very senior leaders who've kind of committed
somewhat their future and their careers
on the other side of the table to saying,
hey, you folks said we could do this, this and this.
Not quite, when are you gonna make it up?
When is it gonna launch?
When is it gonna be ready?
- Yeah.
- So those were some of the lessons that, again,
it's those of us who've been in the business of software,
we know that that's how things operate.
But it is sometimes challenging
to make sure that you've got all the resources aligned up
to deliver on that.
If you could go back to the Albany,
just starting out at Salesforce,
what advice would you give yourself?
- One, I try to keep my hair,
which has been, you know,
I've lost most of it in those years.
But no, I think part of it was at the time,
honestly, sometimes we didn't know what we didn't know.
And I think going around and asking,
perhaps in deeper questions
and making fewer assumptions about,
oh yeah, I'm sure we can do that.
But then you look under the covers and realize
maybe it's more complex and not as ready as one thought.
So one thing I would definitely do,
and I think it's something I've tried myself to do
and ask any team that I work to do is ask the tough questions.
Don't be, you know, don't gloss over stuff
and kind of go deep, and particularly in stuff like this,
really understand the technology,
understand its capabilities, understand its limitations,
so that you're truthful and you're candid when you need to be.
- I think that's an incredibly valuable lesson
'cause everyone gets it,
like especially with any new innovative technology,
kind of we're learning as we go,
and I think that's right, just asking the hard questions
so that you can communicate that effectively.
I think that's great.
Now, I asked this of all my guests
and I wanna ask you about the meaning of O'Hanna
because it's hard to describe, obviously,
and I feel like everyone describes it a little bit differently,
but what does O'Hanna mean to you?
- Look, I look at it in a few different ways, right?
I think often we think about it
as the internal value and culture and dynamics of Salesforce.
In my role, I have to say,
I thought of the O'Hanna in a much broader way,
which is it's about trust.
It's about who can you trust within your team,
across the organization,
but having responsibility for partners
and helping them think through
about how to build a business,
about how to transform the business,
how to make some bets on us and with us.
To me, the O'Hanna is all that.
And the root of it is what I think has still been
Salesforce's number one value, which is trust.
So how to establish trust-based relationships,
where when you need something,
when you need someone, they're there for you,
and vice versa, you're there for them.
So that to me has been kind of a major takeaway
that it's not transactional,
it's about building long-term trust-based relationships.
- I love that, that's a great example.
I mean, 'cause I think about what we were talking about
earlier, you and I,
and just the amount of trust that we built,
and I feel the same that I can always count on you
and you can count on me if you need something, right?
And I think that's pretty awesome.
So before we get into our next segment,
I just wanna ask you, are there any special
behind the scenes O'Hanna moments
that we would share over drinks
that you wanna share with folks,
like moments of trust or just funny times
that it's just like, this is such a Salesforce story.
- Oh, 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 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 to check in call because we were gonna have Bob again,
a year later, 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 it,
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 most people that sales force around brand.
One of the decisions they had made was
that we were gonna rebrand this,
I think what you used to be called BMC,
of 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 of 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 6.15 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 6.15 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,
we just do what you have to do.
Everybody pulled together, and we got it done.
- I mean, I love that story,
'cause it's like whatever it takes,
that is a true essence of what it was back in the day.
- And to a degree, probably what it is now to some degree,
but what an incredible story.
I'm so glad you brought up Remedyforce,
because I do remember all of that coming down
and being such a huge announcement for us.
So, I mean, kudos to you on pulling that off.
- Oh, again, it was a team effort, Dan.
- I mean, it was a team.
- Everybody, and I mean everybody.
The marketing team, the events team holding off
and saying, "Hey, what are we announcing?
Is there a logo?
Is there, you know, what's the story?"
Et cetera.
And again, it's the kind of stuff that happens literally
in the back room in the middle of the night.
But we would look back at it, you know,
and by the way, it was on both sides, right?
They had to come through as well from the BMC team.
And we built, again, back to the trust.
I still talk to those folks with all friends.
It's about building relationships.
- Yeah, and I remember just from my small piece
was having to create a demo with their product manager
around Remedyforce and working with them
'cause I had to drive the demo
and actually then help write the script
with whoever was gonna actually demo that.
And I think it was George at the time.
But anyway, I love that story.
That's such a great story, Avinise.
- Yeah, no, it's fun.
And again, it sticks, right?
Because it was, again, at the time in the midst of it.
And it was my birthday, right?
So I missed my birthday with my family.
And they're like, seriously?
I'm like, yep, I'm stuck here.
But in hindsight, it was obviously the right thing to do.
And what a joy to get it out of the gate.
- I mean, those are those moments.
I mean, that is definitely a true definition of O'Hanna.
So it's great.
- Yeah.
- All right, so let's get into our next segment,
What's Cooking?
So, Avinise, you're now a board member and advisor
for several tech companies.
I want you to talk about how you got to where you are now
and what your journey's been like, post sales force.
So frankly, since then, Dan, it's been a privilege
to frankly be called by a number of companies
and say, hey, that stuff that you and team did at Salesforce,
can you help us think that through as well?
So I left Salesforce in 2014, went to one of the partners,
which subsequently Salesforce invested in,
called Demandbase.
Then about a year later, our friend Jim Steele called me
to join him and crew at a company in Provo
that they had joined called Hensight Sales,
another early, very early AI platform story
to build their partner ecosystem and their strategy.
That was not a huge success.
And again, a lot of lessons learned.
And then as I was thinking about what's next,
ServiceNow called me.
So like, so hey, this stuff you did at Salesforce,
we want something similar.
So did that for a bunch of years.
During that time, one of the partners we worked
with at Salesforce, which at the time when we did the deal
was a tiny company called HubSpot,
and they had a board opening.
They're like, we want to bring people on the board
who have specific backgrounds and skills.
If we had the former CFO of NetSuite,
we've got the president of Atlassian,
the former head of International for Ebay.
And one of our gaps is this notion
of platforms and ecosystems.
Would you be interested?
I was like, whoa, that is actually really cool.
I'm honored.
So that became kind of the beginning of my next phase,
which was how do you bring those lessons learned,
again, the good, the bad and the ugly
to other organizations.
And then that led to building that out with ServiceNow,
that I got a call from the folks at Google Cloud
with exactly the same.
How do you-- can you help us think about our ecosystem
strategy and recruitment of third parties
to build on our cloud platform?
So all very similar.
And truly, Dan, all of that back to Salesforce.
I think that's where there was tons of learning.
And candidly, I've re-recreted people
as some folks who worked with me at Salesforce
who have now worked with me three times subsequently.
And there's something very special about what that kicked off.
So I mean, the fact that you've had such an incredible,
obviously career post Salesforce 2
and creating kind of these platforms and ecosystems,
what challenges are you seeing in the industry that now?
Like, I'm curious for other companies that are out there
trying to do the same thing.
Look, I think there's a few.
So let's start with the very basic.
It's hard.
This is not an easy journey.
And fleshing that out, hard means
you need to align a whole bunch of folks.
The board needs to be on board.
The product leadership needs to understand
what it means to build a platform.
And by the way, how to perhaps work with competitors.
Because if you're a platform, if you're not really
very open, I'd argue you're not a platform.
Right?
You got to have obviously sales and marketing
working in conjunction.
You got to have this customer success function, which, frankly,
I had never heard of until Salesforce.
Imagine orchestrating that and then saying, oh, by the way,
this is not an overnight success.
It never was.
Never will be.
You got to commit for the long term.
So that one, it's really hard and it's expensive.
The other issue is--
and I say this with no malice--
it's not for everybody.
So as much as we think, hey, this
is how it's going to be successful,
you really need to think from a strategy perspective.
If this, for you as a vendor, providers,
even contemplating this, is the right strategy, right?
Because it may not be.
So sometimes, there's a bit of that shiny object element.
But you also have to put a bit of reality check
or splashical water on it sometimes.
And that's what I do in my advisory roles sometimes,
is ask those questions, which is, are you really committed
to this?
Does it make sense?
And if so, are you willing to play the long game?
So now, let's get into our final segment, the Future
Forecast, because this is what I want to talk about,
how you're thinking about the future.
What do you envision as the future of the Salesforce ecosystem?
Well, that's a tough one.
But I think the industry is going to--
we are still in the beginning phases
of the real digital transformation.
Let's be honest.
I think the pandemic showed how much
we become dependent upon technology.
And whether it's back office, which is customer facing,
which is kind of where Salesforce exists, where it's e-commerce.
I mean, just by way of sheer numbers, right?
Only 20% to 22% of workloads have moved to the cloud so far,
by the way.
So tons of growth still for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure,
et cetera, just at the infrastructure there.
Then I think about the applications on top of that.
And again, the numbers are somewhat all over the place,
but it's probably no more than 30%, 40% of those apps.
They really move to a kind of a modern stack, right?
So there's room to modernize, room to grow.
And then, of course, we have AI.
And it's been fascinating, fascinating
to see how that's evolving.
Just to plug in my friends at HubSpot.
This week, we launched chatspots.ai.
Check it out.
I mean, you're the demo god, Dan.
That thing is mind blowing.
Look, I know you're well connected.
You give advice to a lot of younger aspiring tech leaders
out there.
What's your number one piece of advice for those leaders now?
Well, I think since we're the midst of a questionable economic
period, first and foremost is be patient.
I think there is a tendency to be very quick to react and respond
and be a little bit nervous about how the changes are
going to affect you.
This too shall pass.
And I think having, as long as you
believe in the vision you have, in the product
or service you're building and particularly the team you've
got, hang in there.
That's, I think, job number one.
And by the way, the converse of that
is if you don't really believe in your idea,
then this is a good time to jump off the train.
No harm in that.
And you'll still have to learn a lot.
And just swing again.
It's great.
Exactly.
So before letting you go, I want
to have a little fun with the lightning round.
You ready for this?
Yeah.
Let's do it.
So secret skill that's not on the resume.
You know, I love barbecue week.
And I grew up in Brazil and having a nice good barbecue
with a beer or a drink.
Something that I really love.
What's your favorite meal to cook?
So it's called the cut is bikaiya.
It's a Brazilian cut.
You can actually get it at some of the Hispanic or Latinx
supermarkets here in the Bay Area.
It just melts in your mouth.
I'll have to check that out.
I'll send you a link.
Yeah.
OK, good.
Best way to spend an evening after work.
Always with friends.
Always with small group of friends.
I'm a bit of an introvert, which most people don't believe.
But having three, four, five friends, maybe my--
then along with my wife.
The kids are around.
Nothing better.
Favorite brand of anything?
Ooh, that is a tough one.
And I look around.
I look at my desk here.
I think I've got seven Apple devices around here.
So it's an easy answer.
Maybe it's a bit of a cop out.
But wow, what an amazing transformation and experience.
The fact that you brought up Blackberry's earlier
gave me a twitch because that's all we lived on.
Exactly.
You just won front row seats, tickets to your dream event.
What is it?
Look, I've been privileged to have
been to a lot of my dream events.
But I would love to go back to a soccer World Cup final
or my home country Brazil actually plays and wins again.
I saw the win in '94.
That was a long time ago.
I'm ready for another one.
Wow.
That's awesome.
Amanese, thank you so much for being on the show today.
You've been an incredible guest.
I mean, but before I let you go, is there anything
you want to tell our listeners, where can they find you,
anything else you'd like to share a plug?
Absolutely.
And again, Dan, it's always a pleasure.
It's fun.
These are fun conversations, whether we do it over a beer,
whether we do it in a recording.
So thank you for having me and for letting me
share some of those stories.
The plug is-- I'm in give back mode.
And part of giving back is frankly bringing
some of these lessons of my own and of others who've
been down this journey.
So I actually launched a podcast called the Platform Journey.
And we'll love for those who are interested.
Take a peek.
It's on all the podcasting platforms.
And we'll love for you to listen and frankly give me
any feedback.
You could always find me on LinkedIn.
That's my Platinum of Choice.
So it's a sahai on LinkedIn.
So everyone, check out his podcast, Avanese.
Thank you so much again.
Love the stories that we shared.
And hopefully I'll see you soon.
Thank you, Dan.
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