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In March 1999, Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones become the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon, “Analyze This” ruled the U.S. box office, and salesforce.com got its start in an apartment in San Francisco.
Fifteen years later, we’re taking a look back and asking a few longtime salesforce.com executives to reminisce about what they were up to when our company was born.
“I was in the Navy on a submarine in the Pacific Ocean. The U.S.S. Nevada on my last patrol. The patrol was three and a half months. We had no computers on the submarine. No Internet connection on the submarine. So I could not use Salesforce. I was as far away from Salesforce as you could get.”
“I was in Japan with IBM. I was in my last few months of living in Japan before I came back to the Bay Area in July of 1999 with IBM. That’s when I was like, oh, now I’m in Silicon Valley and I’m looking at all these companies like salesforce.com and all these other startups. So I was a spectator on the side watching all this stuff happen in the market.”
“I was in my last year at telecommunications company NorthPoint Communications, and I was on the verge of leaving there to go to business school at Stanford the next year.”
“In April 1999, I was quitting AT&T to start my own company. Also 1999 was a great time to start a company. It was a boom. I emailed Marc Benioff. And I said, ‘Hey Marc, I’m going to start a company.’ And he said, ‘Hey, I just started this company, salesforce.com, why don’t you guys join that?’ And so my two co-founders and I went to the apartment where the company was. Marc, Frank Dominguez, Dave Moellenhoff, and Parker Harris were there. We saw their demo, and heard their vision, and then we decided sales force automation over the Internet sounds pretty boring. I think we have a better idea; we’re going to do our own thing. I started my own company, which ended up going bankrupt in 2001 in the Dot-Com bust. I ultimately joined salesforce.com in 2004.
“I was at a Dot-Com and when I was laid off from there in 2001, I took about eight months in the interim and worked at an art store in San Francisco while I really honed in on what I wanted to do. I heard about salesforce.com from a friend and mentor of mine. I thought at the time, ‘This is probably a really stupid idea going to another company with Dot-Com in the name. This is probably not the brightest decision of mine.’ But I begged to work here.”
“I was working at a consulting firm, CSC Index, doing systems implementations and strategy by day, and then running our Foundation by night.”
“In early 1999, I was working for Oracle. Earlier in 1998, Marc Benioff and I had a conversation about an idea he had—whether you could build a company with enterprise software that looked like Amazon. I spent a couple weeks with him just brainstorming on this, and then we did some work to see if it was really doable. He met Parker Harris and Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, and got them on board, and started it in March of 1999. And then the summer of 1999 I quit Oracle and came over to salesforce.com.”
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