Early in Salesforce's history, Steve Jobs advised Mark Benioff to create an app economy. Benioff acquired the 'App Store' domain but ultimately chose the name 'AppExchange' after focus testing. He later gifted the original domain to Jobs, who used it for the iconic iTunes App Store.
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Propel leverages the Salesforce platform to handle foundational infrastructure like uptime and security. This allows their team to focus entirely on the business logic layer, enabling a faster pace of innovation against legacy giants like Oracle and Siemens.
The young Steve Jobs famously vilified IBM in the iconic "1984" ad. However, upon returning to a failing Apple, the older Jobs recognized his own operational weaknesses. He hired a wave of talent from IBM, including Tim Cook, to instill the discipline in logistics, procurement, and manufacturing that he had previously disdained.
By launching the iPhone at Macworld, not CES, Steve Jobs controlled the narrative. He prevented journalists from framing it as just another phone to be compared feature-by-feature against competitors like the Nokia N95, which was superior on paper. This allowed him to define a new category instead of competing in an existing one.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claims large language models (LLMs) are becoming commoditized infrastructure, analogous to disk drives. He believes the idea of a specific model providing a sustainable competitive advantage ('moat') has 'expired,' suggesting long-term value will shift to applications, proprietary data, and distribution.
Sierra VC Shashank Saxena finds Steve Jobs most inspiring not for Apple's initial founding, but for witnessing its dramatic reinvention with the iPod and Mac. This perspective highlights that a leader's ability to execute a successful turnaround can be a more powerful source of inspiration than their original vision alone.
Innovation capital is the credibility needed to win support for unproven ideas. Even top leaders like Salesforce's CEO Mark Benioff consciously build this capital, demonstrating that authority alone is insufficient to drive major innovation initiatives.
As iPhone sales slowed around 2015, Apple's CFO reframed its story for Wall Street. By highlighting high-margin, recurring revenue from the App Store and iCloud, he convinced investors to value Apple like a SaaS company, dramatically increasing its price-to-earnings multiple from ~10x to ~40x.
The ChatGPT App Store launch is being compared to the original Apple App Store. Developers who are early and build useful applications for its 800 million weekly active users have the opportunity to create significant businesses, mirroring the success of early mobile app pioneers who capitalized on first-mover advantage.
The perception that BlackBerry died overnight with the iPhone's launch is wrong. The initial iPhone had few apps. The true "kill shot" was the launch of the App Store years later, which made the platform unbeatable. Disruption is a process, not a single event.
Salesforce embedded its 1-1-1 model (1% equity, product, time) at its founding when the company had no valuable equity, product, or many employees. This strategy of starting small built philanthropy into the company's DNA from day one, allowing it to scale into a massive program without disruptive cultural or financial shocks later on.
