After celebrating our 5 year anniversary a few months ago I took some time to reflect on what we achieved, how we got to where we are and where are we going? I think I do that about once a week if not more often and I often think that a the job of a business owner is to constantly question him/herself and make decisions based on those answers.
Although I do not read biographies of those that are successful, I took some time to read a little more on Marc Benioff’s, one of the creators of salesforce.com. salesforce.com has become the reference for any business company wishing to offer their application as a cloud based app.
Benioff came from Oracle who have a product that 10 years ago was the most successful CRM system across all industries. Today, you would be hard pressed to find someone who speaks highly of Siebel and does not praise salesforce.com as the savior of CRM.
What intrigued me was the philosophy behind salesforce.com which at the same time that Siebel was just about to reach its peak, Benioff quit Oracle to start salesforce.com with the following goals and approach:
Marc Benioff – Startup vision statement
Several things interested me in this vision statement, mainly that his obstacles were the developers, that despite that he wanted a prototype that is state of the art and a high quality functional system, and that once they are all rich they can exit or be acquired.
All the other stuff, in my modest opinion, is stuff that you see in every other company’s visions such as time to market, value added, partnerships, partnerships, partnerships!
It is not surprising a company that touts “No Software” as their main logo has built themselves a fairly large and complex technical software platform but I think in today’s marketing, customers take this irony lightly as it is understood that it is software, it’s just not salesforce.com’s focus when delivering something to the customer. It is also for this reason that seeing “Developers” as an obstacle is not surprising.
So I ask myself (perhaps for the 3rd time this week alone) if my values are just wrong because I do believe in developers, although I prefer to call them software engineers, and I do believe in prototypes, but I would prefer to have a state of the art final product.
And finally, I will gladly tell anyone that I do not care about an exit plan nor do I put that in my business plan.
But I can’t deny the success of salesforce.com and although the success is a commercial one rather than a technical one I wonder if the day’s of quality, exciting, easy software are counted. I hope not and I see a lot of companies which have slightly different priorities than salesforce.com (at least at face value).
Company’s such as Evernote where their CEO, Phil Libin, challenges the “best product does not always win” syndrome (see keynote speech here).
Company’s such as 37signals, the company behind Basecamp where the founders detail what will make them successful. Their book, which outlines their vision and company culture goes far beyond any simplistic bullet point vision statements such as “Don’t do evil” (Google) or “World-class organization” (salesforce.com) or even “We are constantly focusing on innovating” (Apple).
However, the above companies are huge and their success is well established but CEO’s don’t lead the company, the company leads them. It is the reason why they can (and often are) replaced.
Start-up and small companies don’t have this luxury and they do need to detail what works and what doesn’t constantly. Mistakes can’t be repeated, successes must be – and often. What you believe in is the only thing that matters.
I believe the product is software and its our job, through innovative ways, to make it fast, easy to use, fun to use and a good quality product that our customers will love to use and use it frequently. If we believe in that, and we deliver it, success will follow-up inevitably. And that is why I think Benioff’s all premise of “No software” and developers being the block is a bunch of poop, and by the same token I praise and respect him for bringing a very large application (aka software) to the cloud and pushing the business world forward into a new era where we don’t have to wait for technology but technology comes to us.
So what is your vision?