Salesforce Founded — A SaaS Pioneer Under the 'No Software' Banner

Salesforce was incorporated on 8 March 1999 in San Francisco by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff. They started work on the first version of its customer relationship management (CRM) software in a rented one-bedroom apartment at 1449 Montgomery Street, on Telegraph Hill. The product was sold not as software to install but as a service used through a web browser, and the company made that difference its brand: a "No Software" logo and, at its official launch on 7 February 2000, a theme called "The End of Software". Salesforce went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 23 June 2004.

Selling business software as a service over the web is what is now called SaaS. Salesforce did not invent hosted software, but it built a large company and a loud campaign around the idea at a time when enterprise software meant licences and servers.

The founders

Benioff came from Oracle. Salesforce's own biography of him says he spent 13 years there and became the youngest vice president in the company's history. Oracle sold database software that customers installed and ran on their own machines.

Salesforce's official history dates the start to February 1999, when the founding vision was set down as "A World-Class Internet Company for Sales Force Automation." The four founders worked in the Telegraph Hill apartment under a few rules: do only what is important and necessary, do it "fast, simple, and right the first time", and "No fluff". The company also wrote its first V2MOM — Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles and Measures — a planning format the company says still guides its decisions.

By the end of its first year the company had 40 employees and an 8,000-square-foot office at the Rincon Center.

"No Software"

The marketing was unusually aggressive for enterprise software. Salesforce's blog traces the NO SOFTWARE concept and logo to Benioff's idea in 1999 of making software easier to buy and simpler to use. The company's first mascot, SaaSy, followed, drawn by Bruce Campbell and meant to stand for "The End of Software".

The official launch came on 7 February 2000 at the Regency Theater in San Francisco, an event themed around "The End of Software" with 1,500 attendees and a concert by The B-52s. In March 2000 the company got its first major press coverage, in The Wall Street Journal, after hiring actors to stage a mock protest with anti-software signs outside a conference held by Siebel Systems, a CRM rival.

All of this happened as the dot-com bubble burst. Salesforce's history records that it laid off 20% of its workforce in 2000.

Growth, by Salesforce's own figures

Revenue went from $5.4 million in the fiscal year to January 2001 to $176 million four years later. Salesforce describes itself as the first cloud computing company to pass $1 billion in annual revenue; that is the company's claim.

For Japanese readers the 2001 entry matters: Salesforce's own timeline names Tokyo, alongside Dublin, as one of the two headquarters of its first international expansion.

From an application to a platform

The early product was one application — CRM for sales teams. The later milestones show the company turning it into a platform. The 2003 Dreamforce introduced sForce 2.0, which Salesforce called the industry's first on-demand application service. AppExchange, launched in September 2005, let other developers build applications and offer them to Salesforce customers. Force.com, announced in 2007 and released in 2008, let customers build their own applications on Salesforce's infrastructure.

That shift put Salesforce in the same territory as the infrastructure providers that appeared after it. Amazon S3 in 2006 rented raw storage; Google App Engine in 2008 ran whole applications. In the vocabulary that settled later — see IaaS / PaaS / SaaS — Salesforce started at the top layer and worked down, and its 2010 agreement to buy Heroku added a general-purpose PaaS.

Why the date matters

The model Salesforce campaigned against was software bought as licences and installed on the customer's own servers. Salesforce asked customers to use the software as a service, through a browser, instead. The infrastructure of the cloud — rented storage and compute — came years later; Salesforce is the first entry on this site's cloud timeline because it sold the experience before the infrastructure existed to sell.