Salesforce is a “bad product” the way New York or Miami are “bad cities”. Pristine products and cities look like Brasilia. Perfect and useless. https://twitter.com/sarthakgh/status/1281308538711785472

Lesson 1: that clutter you see is why enterprises pay $300 per user when they can buy clutter-free simplicity for $15.

20x pricing.

Lesson 2: what you don’t see in the product UX is 80% of the product. As someone who helped build the platform, I can tell that you have no idea what it takes to support say packaged app upgrades from third parties without any down time. Or sharing hierarchies.

Lesson 3: Even the invisible platform (80%) is tiny compared to the value derived from integrations built by 1000s of companies. It’s a platform, and a data & API hub.

Lesson 4: The good news for startups is that it does lead room for Zendesk and HubSpot’s of the world to become massive players in CRM.

Each Salesforce strength is also its weakness - if you know how to Jiu-Jitsu.

Lesson 5: Most VCs don’t know anything about product.

Demos are not product.

A product is the sum of all experiences a customer has: including trial, setup, config, upgrade, customization, integrations, APIs, downtime, SLA, support, login, reports, search, and more.

Lesson 6: if I had a million dollars for every VC who thinks Salesforce is the new IBM,....

It’s just not true.

What is true is that you can build a great public CRM company in adjacencies by finding a unique insight and NOT what is wrong with Salesforce.